Well, you know…We all want to change the world, to quote John Lennon. The uprisings in the Middle East recently tend to strike a chord for many in America, probably because somewhere deep inside, we have an image of the country being created overnight by brave rebels. It usually doesn’t work that way though…

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
-Oscar Wilde

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.
-John Fitzgerald

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
-G. K. Chesterton

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder
-George Bernard Shaw

Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly.
-Mao Tse-Tung

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they’ve never had to present a working model
-Charles F. Kettering

In northern latitudes, at certain times of year, the idea of getting out of bed can seem like a joke. These might help..

Believe me, you have to get up early if you want to get out of bed!
-Groucho Marx

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
-Laurence J. Peter

I discovered my wife in bed with another man, and I was crushed. So I said, “Get off me, you two!”
-Emo Philips

The management said recently that we’ve been too generous with the quotes. So here are just two. Same price as usual.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
-Thomas Edison

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.
-Henry Ford

It was George Washington that said “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter“. Presumably, he copped the line from his mom, because he also said “I attribute my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education which I received from my mother“. Presidents, if they do nothing else in the four years they are in office, are kind of obligated to say a quotable thing or two. Some presidents are veritable quote factories, while others are scarcely remembered for saying anything. Some even use that as a basic strategy, and ironically get quoted for it:

If you don’t say anything, you won’t be called on to repeat it.
-Calvin Coolidge

Our current president has had one particularly stellar line:

Cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom.
-Barack Obama

And if we go back through the last few presidents, most would agree that things that George W Bush said would belong in collections of gaffes, not collections of quotes.

So moving to Clinton, we find a couple of goodies:

Being president is like running a cemetery: you’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody’s listening.
-William J. Clinton

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
-William J. Clinton

And unlike Washington, the honoree of Presidents Day, who was fond of hemp, Clinton wanted little to do with it:

I tried marijuana once. I did not inhale.
-William J. Clinton

And if you ask if that is a truthful statement, ol’ Slick Willie might reply

It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘is’ is.
-William J. Clinton

George H. W. Bush is probably most remembered for…

Read. My. Lips.
No. New. Taxes.
-George H. W. Bush

And Ronald Reagan?

It’s interesting that Reagan is regularly quoted by conservative pundits for his “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you’” line, because it wasn’t his line. He was probably a little more honest when he said:

How can a president not be an actor?
-Ronald Reagan

Something another president said a little more eloquently:

I feel incompetent to perform duties…which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me.
-Andrew Johnson

You may already know that a lot of familiar sayings originated with the mid-twentieth century presidents:

Speak softly and carry a big stick.
-Theodore Roosevelt

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
-Harry S. Truman

The buck stops here.
-Harry S. Truman

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

In war there is no substitute for victory.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Tricky Dick

We think we’ll wrap it up with one of our more interesting presidents, who was more often quoted for the bizarre statements he made than the inspiring or clever ones:

People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.
-Richard Nixon

When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
-Richard M. Nixon

And we couldn’t agree more with his successor:

Our Long national nightmare is over.
-Gerald Ford

You may be disturbed to learn what kinds of things live in and on you. You’d be even more disturbed if you saw little pictures of them with chapter-long descriptions, as in the book Furtive Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures Who Live on You. Here are just a few of the tenants of the housing project you call your body:

At least 500 species of bacteria, weighing about 3.3 pounds, live inside the human gut.

There are little arthropods called Demodex mites that live in the follicles of your eyelashes.

Without regular brushing, you likely have a film of bacteria 300 to 500 cells thick on the surface of your teeth called Streptococcus sanguis.

So maybe it’s a good thing that your mouth produces almost two pints of saliva every day.

Bone-us fact (this explains a lot):

The human head contains 22 bones.

…then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.

Steven Wright has probably created more one-liners and paradox jokes than vaudeville and Stephen Hawking combined. Here are a few:

What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?

There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn’t live there?

What’s another word for Thesaurus?

Officer, I know I was going faster than 55MPH, but I wasn’t going to be on the road an hour.

An old friend of mine who was a career military guy was fond of saying “Did you miss me? Try leading a little next time“. I was never sure if people didn’t laugh because they didn’t get it, or thought it was in poor taste. Anyway, we missed a day yesterday, so today’s quotes are all about absence.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
-Thomas Haynes Bayly (maybe)

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
-Henry Kissinger

The absence of war is not peace.
-Harry S Truman

Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.
-Benjamin Franklin

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
-Dr. Carl Sagan

We usually try to share some motivators on Monday, but having Valentine’s Day fall on Monday is probably some kind of motivator all its own. I mean, if you hate your job, but have a crush on someone you work with who doesn’t know you exist, a day like today might finally motivate you to at least say “hi”, or on the other hand, motivate you to finally get a new job because you can’t stand the pain. On the other hand, if you own a flower shop, and your significant other owns a chocolate shop, what a great way to start the week! For many of us, Valentine’s Day lost its charm after about second grade, when the mandatory delivery of multiple Valentine cards ended. But somehow, many manage to keep the love alive. As you can imagine, there are probably more quotes about love than just about any other topic, so we had a hard time whittling it down….

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
-Ingrid Bergman

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
-Dr. Seuss

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
-Albert Einstein

He who cannot love must learn to flatter.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?
-Oscar Wilde

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato

Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love, though I’d stepped in it a few times.
-Rita Rudner

The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.
-William Somerset Maugham quotes

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
-Robert Heinlein

The other day I was talking to a friend who doesn’t believe in climate change, and I said “Well NASA scientists say…” and related some facts that are presented on NASA’s climate change website, concluding with the joke “and they’re rocket scientists“, to which he replied that he had worked with NASA, and that NASA scientists “fell into three tranches: crazy smart & ambitious 1%, pretty smart but mostly political 15%, and simply political 84%“. To which I replied “yeah, and 77.3% of all statistics mentioned in casual conversation are inaccurate“. I enjoy a good debate, even when no actual facts are involved. In any case, this all got me thinking about rockets, so today, we’re rolling out the rocket science.

The first rocket was probably made by the Chinese around 1000 A.D

The first liquid fuel rocket – which made modern amenities like centennial trips to the moon and the ability to send nuclear bombs all the way around the world – was launched by Robert Goddard on March 16, 1926

The space shuttle Endeavour cost about $386 a pound to build, not including historic R&D expenses, which would make it more like $32,000 a pound.

The most people ever in space at the same time was thirteen. Seven were in Endeavor, three in Mir and three in Soyuz.

Because dust doesn’t settle in zero-gravity, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station may sneeze as often as 100 times a day.

The first man made object to leave our solar system was Pioneer 10. Launched on March 2, 1972, and passed Pluto’s orbit on June 13, 1983. It is now 7 Billion miles away.

To drive 7 Billion miles at 55 miles per hour  would take 14,528 years.

If you’re a regular morning visitor, you may have noticed we weren’t here with some new quotes this morning. That’s because the company that hosts our site was having a bit of a catastrophe. They were pretty gracious about things, as one would hope a host would be. So today’s quotes are of course about… hosting! And thanks to our current host’s manners, we won’t be looking for the other kind of hosting quotes. See how manners can pay off? This first quote is specifically in honor of a2hosting:

A host is like a general: calamities often reveal his genius.
-Horace

It’s interesting how the word “host” is often used in conjunction with some kind of hostility…

There can be no defence like elaborate courtesy.
-E.V. Lucas

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.
-James Lovelock

And how much deceit can be involved in the whole affair:

Politeness is the art of choosing among one’s real thoughts.
-Abel Stevens

I don’t think you want too much sincerity in society.
It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson