December 31, 2009

Things friends don’t let friends do...


THE ORIGINAL FAMOUS QUOTE
“Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”
 
     Ad slogan created by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America 
     First used shortly before New Year’s Eve in 1982

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SOME VARIATIONS TO KEEP IN MIND
FOR THE NEW YEAR...

“Friends don’t let friends watch Friends.”
     Les Roberts, The Best-Kept Secret (2000)

“Friends don’t let friends drive naked.” 
     Will Hobbs, Jackie’s Wild Seattle (2004)

“Friends don’t let friends wear polyester.”
     April Sinclair, Ain’t Gonna Be Same Fool (1997)

“Friends don’t let friends take home ugly men.”
     Ray Foley, Beer Is the Answer...I Don’t Remember the Question (2007)

“Friends don’t let friends wear ugly shoes.”
     Naomi Judd, Naomi’s Guide to Aging Gratefully (2008)

“Friends don’t let friends sing in public when they cannot even sing in private.”
     Tim Delaney, Shameful Behaviors (2008)

“Friends don’t let friends wear their iPods on their belts.”
     Mac Life Magazine, August 2008

“Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink & Tweet.”
     Perez Hilton, blog post about celebrities who tweet drunk

“Friends don’t let friends drink and dial.”
     Dave Singleton, Behind Every Great Woman Is a Fabulous Gay Man (2005)

“Friends don’t let friends wear Speedos. These should only – only! – be worn
by the likes of Ryk Neethling and other Olympic swimmers.”
     Dennis Cavernelis, 293 Things Every South African Man Should Know (2006)

“Friends don’t let friends date other friends’ boyfriends.”
     Randi Reisfeld, Extreme Sisterhood (1999)

“Friends don’t let friends wear fanny packs.”
     Cathy Hamilton, Dieting and Other Weighty Issues (2001)

“Friends don’t let friends forget where they came from.”
     Bill O’Reilly, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (2008)

“Friends don’t let friends wear puffed sleeves.”
     Carol McCormick, The Missing Piece (2003)

“Friends don’t let friends drink chardonnay.”
     Michele Anna Jordan, The Good Cook’s Book of Days (1995)

“Friends Don’t Let Friends Reanimate.”
     T-shirt slogan, BuyZombie.com

HAPPY NEW YEAR!


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December 28, 2009

Which should never be brought to mind? Drinking, abstinence or Sarah Palin?


FAMOUS NEW YEAR’S QUOTE:

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.”
       Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796)
       His poem “Auld Lang Syne” (1788) 
       Popularized by Guy Lombardo's musical version


ABSTINENCE COUNTERQUOTE:

“Let drinking customs be forgot
And never brought to mind.
Come, moderate drinkers, topers, sots,
And leave your cups behind.”

       Quoted by Henry Lee
       In his book How Dry We Were: Prohibition Revisited (1963)


ODDLY ANTI-ABSTINENCE QUOTE:

“Can abstinence be now forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Can abstinence be now forgot,
And mercy to mankind.”
       The Standard Book of Song for Temperance Meetings (1883)
       Edited by Thomas Bowick


NEW YEAR’S WISH QUOTE:

“Should Sarah Palin be forgot
and never brought to mind...?
Lord, please let it be so...” 
       Comment posted by “NoonCat”
       On the Inside Dope blog

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on my quotations Facebook group.

December 23, 2009

Deck the halls with Buddy Holly – and Lady Gaga Gaga Ga, Ga Gaga Ga…


FAMOUS CHRISTMAS QUOTE:

“Deck the halls with boughs of holly, 
     Fa la la la la, la la la la.
‘Tis the season to be jolly
     Fa la la la la la, la la la.” 
         Traditional Christmas song “Deck the Halls”
         Original writer unknown

CHRI$TMA$ COUNTERQUOTE:

“Deck the halls with advertising,
     Fa la la la la, la la la la.
‘Tis the time for merchandising,
     Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Profit never needs a reason,
     Fa la la la la la la la la.
Get the money, it’s the season,
     Fa la la la la la, la la la.”
 
         Stan Freberg (b. 1926) 
         American comic genius
         His satiric song “Green Chri$tma$” (1958)

ORDINARY GENTLEMAN’S QUOTE:

“So, ‘tis the season where we annually get into the inimitable argument over whether people should be saying, ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’…It’s time for the War on Christmas/Pluralism — depending on your point of view.”
       Blogger Scott H. Payne
       On The League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog, Dec. 17, 2009

LADY GAGA QUOTE:

“Light me up, put me on top
Let’s fa la la la la, la la la la.”

       Outré musician Lady Gaga
       Her XXXmas song “Christmas Tree” (2008)

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on my quotations Facebook group.

December 21, 2009

“The evil that men do” makes headlines – and annoys women


FAMOUS QUOTE:

“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”

       William Shakespeare (1564-1616) 
       Mark Antony’s famous funeral oration for Caesar in Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2


TOUCHY TIGER WOODS QUOTE:

“There is a famous quote by Julius Caesar which states, ‘The evil men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’ Tiger Woods cheated on his wife. His career is over. And golf is still boring.”
       Author and blogger Robin Westmiller
       In her column on Examiner.com, Dec. 20, 2009
       Misattributing (and misusing?) Shakespeare’s quote


TOUCHÉ COUNTERQUOTE:

“Yet with all the genderless demands the once fair sex insists upon one they have chosen to ignore is protesting the saying, ‘The evil that men do.’ I guess the ladies feel they do no evil, or at least they are not about to admit to it.”
       Columnist Norm Cukras
       In his column in the Highlands Today, Dec. 18, 2009


ACCLAIMED CRITIC’S QUOTE:

“The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.”
       Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984)
       American drama critic and author
       In his book Once Around the Sun (1951)


ACCLAIMED HIPSTER'S QUOTE:

“The bad jazz that a cat blows,
Wails long after he’s cut out.
The groovy is often stashed with their frames.”

       Lord Buckley (1906-1960)
       The legendary hipster performer
       His version of “Marc Antony’s Funeral Oration”

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on my quotations Facebook group.

December 18, 2009

“A specter is haunting Europe” – it’s Hugo Chavez at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference!


FAMOUS QUOTE:

“A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.”
       Karl Marx (1818-1883)
       Opening words of The Communist Manifesto (1848) 
       Sometimes translated as "A ghost is haunting Europe…” and "specter" is often spelled the British way, as "spectre"


HUGO CHAVEZ QUOTE:

“To paraphrase Karl Marx, the great Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the streets of Copenhagen...Capitalism is the specter, almost nobody wants to mention it...Socialism, the other specter Karl Marx spoke about, which walks here too, rather it is like a counter-specter. Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path to save the planet, I don’t have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell, to the destruction of the world.”
       Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez 
       At the U.N. Climate Change Conference, Dec. 16, 2009


CHAVEZ COUNTERQUOTE #1:

“Hugo Chavez , who paraphrased Marx in assigning blame for climate change...That's from the leader of a country whose economy is based largely on the export of particularly dirty oil. Awkward.”
       Newspaper columnist Stephen Stromberg
       Washington Post, Dec. 17, 2009


CHAVEZ COUNTERQUOTE #2:

“When he [Chavez] said there was a ‘silent and terrible ghost in the room’ and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening...It's especially ironic that Chavez would berate free-market nations for causing catastrophic climate change when he helps fund his own Bolivarian Revolution by selling his country’s oil and natural gas to the United States.”
       Newspaper columnist Paul Thornton
       Los Angeles Times, Dec. 17, 2009

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on my quotations Facebook group.

December 16, 2009

The continuation of war by other means...


FAMOUS PRUSSIAN QUOTE:

“War is...the continuation of politics by other means.”
       Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
       Prussian general and military theorist
       The usual paraphrase of a remark he made in On War (1833) 
       (Sometimes given as “…the continuation of state policy…”)


GERMAN COUNTERQUOTE:

“War is not the continuation of policy. It is the breakdown of policy.” 
       Hans von Seeckt (1866-1936)
       German military officer
       In his book Thoughts of a Soldier (1929)


CHINESE QUOTE:

“All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.”
       Chou (or Zhou) En-lai (1898-1976)
       The first Premier of the People's Republic of China
       Quoted in the Saturday Evening Post, March 27, 1954


IRAQ QUOTE:

“Terrorism in Iraq has become the continuation of politics by other means.”
       Journalist Rod Nordland 
       Blog post on New York Times website, Nov. 22, 2009


AFGHANISTAN QUOTE:

“One of Clausewitz’s most famous maxims was that war was ‘merely the continuation of politics by other means.’ Scholars still debate what he meant by that. All we know for sure is what he did not mean, that leaders should play politics with their wars. Washington, D.C., is a very un-Clausewitzian place. Politicians want to treat the war in Afghanistan as just another political debate.’”
       Dr. James Jay Carafano
       Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies
       Op-ed published on Examiner.com, Nov. 30, 2009


ISRAELI QUOTE:

“To paraphrase Karl von Clausewitz, law is used as the continuation of war by other means.”
       Editorial, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 15, 2009


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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on my quotations Facebook group.

December 11, 2009

“Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”

 William Shakespeare-8x6[1]

FAMOUS LIFE BASHING QUOTE:

“Life’s but a walking shadow...a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

       William Shakespeare
       Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 
       These words are spoken by the Macbeth near the end of The Bard’s play about him, first performed around 1606. He says the lines after being told that his wife is dead. Soon after, so is Macbeth.
       The phrase “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” became a common way of saying that something, or some person, is loud or attention-getting but essentially meaningless or irrelevant.

Al Gore-8x6

“CLIMATEGATE” BASHING QUOTE

“To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing...The noise machine built by the climate deniers often seizes on what they can blow out of proportion, so they’ve thought this is a bigger deal than it is.”
       Former Vice President Al Gore
       Commenting on the hacked “Climategate” emails, which purportedly proved that some scientists were distorting weather data to try to validate and increase concerns about the human role in global warming.  
       In and interview on Slate.com, December 8, 2009

 Transformers Revenge of the Fallen poster-8x6[1]

MOVIE BASHING QUOTE:

“This film is a relentless pyrotechnical assault on the senses, the sound and fury signifying nothing more than a 150-minute commercial for Hasbro toys.” 
       Marc Lee
       UK movie critic
      
In his review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen


SPORTSWRITER BASHING QUOTE:

“[Sportswriter] Bill Simmons...really had no defined angle after all, just a bunch of shards of sound and fury, signifying sports fans’ appetite for brainless nothingness from their sportswriting rather than something substantive and challenging.”
       Sportswriter Andy Hutchins
      
In his column on the Sporting Blog, Nov. 21, 2009


DICTIONARY BASHING QUOTE:

“While I applaud Merriam-Webster for correctly identifying the sound and fury signifying nothing from the far right as the dominant characteristic of 2009, I believe they picked the wrong word to truly embody the movement.”
       Journalist Howard Megdal 
      
Commenting on Merriam-Webster’s selection of “admonish” as Word of the Year
       (“Admonish" shot to the top of the list three days after Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during a speech made by President Obama, and it remained among our top lookups for weeks,” explained Peter A. Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's Editor at Large.)

NOTE: For some other uses and variations of “full of sound and fury…” see the QuoteCounterquote.com post at this link.

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on my quotations Facebook group.

Related reading and viewing…

December 10, 2009

"A house divided against itself cannot stand...half smart and half stupid."


In addition to doing quotation-related posts on this blog and on my www.ThisDayinQuotes.com blog, I sometimes turn a set of quotes and counterquotes into short videos that I post on YouTube.

My latest quote video has some variations on the famous quotation by Abraham Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

The counterquotes I used included:

“A cultural system divided against itself cannot behave in a rational manner.” — A counterquote by American anthropologist Leslie Alvin White (1900-1975);

“A house divided against itself cannot stand, but it’s worth squat in this market anyway.” — A quip made by Stephen Colbert on his Colbert Report TV show, on January 13, 2009; and,

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half smart and half stupid.” — A political observation made by Keith Olbermann on his MSNBC TV show, Countdown, on September 10, 2009.

As I often do, I posted a link to my video on Reddit.com, using Olbermann’s quote as the heading.

This morning, I received an email saying Reddit.com is offering a t-shirt for sale that features my post’s headline.

I suspect other Reddit.com fans get similar emails about their posts, but it did give me a chuckle to start my day.

And, I think Olbermann’s remark makes a good t-shirt slogan in these politically divided times. So, of course, I had to get one for myself (and one for Mom). Thanks, Keith. Thanks, Reddit.

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December 2, 2009

Afghanistan “Heart and Minds” — The Déjà Vu Edition


FAMOUS PRESIDENTIAL QUOTE:

“We must be ready to fight in Vietnam, but the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds of the people who actually live out there.” 
       U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson 
       His oft-cited “Hearts and Minds” speech, May 4, 1965


GENERAL PETRAEUS QUOTE:

“Make no mistake: Insurgents are constantly targeting these areas of success. They bomb new roads and throw acid on girls who go to school. But if we stick by the Afghan people, we will win over their hearts and minds.”
       Army Gen. David Petraeus
       Quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune, November 29, 2009


A ROYAL QUOTE:

“The Prince of Wales has paid tribute to 1st Battalion Welsh Guards who fought in Afghanistan, calling them ‘an immense credit to this nation’... ‘This work is absolutely vital in terms of winning over hearts and minds as far as the local population is concerned and I’m absolutely convinced you've done so much of that.’”
       Remark by Great Britain’s Prince Charles 
       BBC, December 1, 2009


A FATHER’S QUOTE:

“General McChrystal is too enamored with ‘hearts and minds’; hearts and minds is not a strategy. To be clear: I don’t say this solely because my son was killed implementing this idea... If we're not bringing our entire force to bear against the enemy, then what sort of protection are we providing?”
       John Bernard 
       Father of slain soldier Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard
       Op-ed in Newsweek magazine, November 30, 2009  


A REALITY CHECK QUOTE:

“The notion seems to be that we must win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population, but the very presence of an occupation army whose history, culture and traditions are literally and figuratively on the other side of the world puts that goal out of reach.”
       Nick Mills 
       Associate Professor of Journalism, Boston University 
       Commentary on The HuffingtonPost.com, December 2, 2009

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