Twiddly Quotes

#1. Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.

Terry Pratchett

#2. The best-armed and best-trained divisions of the Syrian army are Alawite.

Elliott Abrams

#3. The love to Wisdom is getting closer to the own bright path.

Confucius

#4. But now that the guerrilla fighting is over, the Spaniards are again men without a country or families or homes or work, though everyone appreciates very much what they did.

Martha Gellhorn

#5. In April 1968, a test launch with an unmanned Apollo 6 capsule aboard suffered from a "pogo effect." Unnerved NASA engineers watched as their thirty-six-stories-tall rocket bounced across the pad for half a minute before finally achieving liftoff.

James Clay Moltz

#6. Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

Karl Kraus

#7. This is a horrible idea," I say with a smile. "Go.

Emily Skrutskie

#8. I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#9. The moment when you are most repelled by a child's behavior, that is your warning light to draw the very closest to that child.

Ann Voskamp

#10. The idiot had shot their own dog. That's what happened when the destructive potential of a man's weapons exceeded his intelligence.

Ilona Andrews

#11. I think people hear the warmth in my voice and the friendliness, and they think: 'Oh, she must be a very nice person'.

Natalie Cole

#12. Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

Richard Rorty

#13. The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

Eric Hoffer

#14. On June 10, the worst storm in the series swept across the middle of the Indian Ocean and Wild Eyes was directly in its path.

Abby Sunderland

#15. Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority.

Mike Lofgren