The Quotations Archive currently contains 1744 quotations.

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Marriage is a great institution, but who wants to live in an institution?

-- Marx Groucho, the film "Animal Crackers"

From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea--written in red on every beachhead form Australia to Tokyo--There is no substitute for victory!

-- General Douglas MacArthur

I shall return.

-- General Douglas MacArthur

Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.

-- General Douglas MacArthur

There is nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

-- Ross MacDonald

The best way to get husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they are too old to do it.

-- Shirley MacLaine

I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.

-- Doug MacLeod

The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist.

-- Aaron Machado

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.

-- Antonio Machado

War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier, if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

Politics have no relation to morals.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Sex is hardly ever just about sex.

-- Shirley Maclaine

The closest I've ever come to saying "no" is "Not now, we're landing."

-- Sam Malone, character played by Ted Danson on Cheers, U.S. television show, in respsonse to Diane telling him to say "no" to her friend's alleged sexual advances.

People may or may not say what they mean ... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

-- David Mamet

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

-- Nelson Mandela, A Long Walk to Freedom

In a novel, the hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for the finish. In a movie, that is not allowed. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun and as he wants cheating, stealing, getting rich, and whipping servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.

-- Herman Mankiewicz

Many a man has finally succeeded only because he has failed after repeated efforts. If he had never met defeat he would never have known any great victory.

-- Orison Swett Marden

Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.

-- Orison Swett Marden

A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.

-- Michael Garrett Marino

He who awaits much can expect little.

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment.

-- Ralph Marston

Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality.

-- Ralph Marston

I belong to Bridegrooms Anonymous. Whenever I feel like getting married, they send over a lady in a housecoat and hair curlers to burn my toast for me.

-- Dick Martin

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

-- Judith Martin, "Miss Manners" columnist and author

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

-- Groucho Marx

I find television very educating. Every time sombody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

-- Groucho Marx

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

-- Groucho Marx

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.

-- Groucho Marx

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

-- Groucho Marx

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.

-- Groucho Marx

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

-- Groucho Marx

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.

-- Groucho Marx

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

-- Groucho Marx

We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife.

-- Groucho Marx

Whoever called it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.

-- Groucho Marx

Wives are people who feel they don't dance enough.

-- Groucho Marx

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

-- Karl Marx

Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

-- Karl Marx, dying words to his housekeeper

We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.

-- Abraham Maslow

Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.

-- Jackie Mason

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Perfection is what American women expect to find in their husbands... but English women only hope to find in their butlers.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

-- André Maurois

It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.

-- Eugene McCarthy

There's a way of transferring funds that is even faster than electronic banking. It's called marriage.

-- James Holt McGavran

Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.

-- Phyllis McGinley

No other success can compensate for failure in the home.

-- David O. McKay, Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Advice to parents at General Conference of he LDS Church, April, 1964

I'm for abolishing and doing away with redundancy.

-- J. Curtis McKay, Wisconsin State Elections Board

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

-- Mignon McLaughlin

I owe the government $3400 in taxes. So I sent them two hammers and a toilet seat.

-- Michael McShane

A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal.

-- George H. Mead

Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.

-- Margaret Mead

A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age.

-- Meat Loaf, from the song "Wasted Youth" on the album Bat Out of Hell II

Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart, don't know how to laugh either.

-- Golda Meir

Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?

-- Michael Meissner

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

-- H. L. Mencken

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

-- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.

-- H. L. Mencken

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

-- H. L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

-- H. L. Mencken

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

-- H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

-- H. L. Mencken

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

-- H. L. Mencken

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

-- H. L. Mencken

Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.

-- H. L. Mencken

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

-- H. L. Mencken

Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.

-- H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

-- H. L. Mencken

Man is a natural polygamist. He always has one woman leading him by the nose and another hanging on to his coattails.

-- H. L. Mencken

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

-- H. L. Mencken

Men have a much better time of it than women: for one thing they marry later, for another thing they die earlier.

-- H. L. Mencken

Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

-- H. L. Mencken

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

-- H. L. Mencken

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right.

-- H. L. Mencken

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

-- H. L. Mencken

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are giving evidence at an inquest.

-- H. L. Mencken

Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.

-- Dr. Karl Menninger

Children should be like waffles--you should be able to throw the first one away.

-- Mary Alice Messenger

There is intelligent life on earth, but I will go back home on Monday.

-- Davorin Mestric

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.

-- John Stuart Mill

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

-- John Stuart Mill

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

-- John Stuart Mill

The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

-- John Stuart Mill

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

-- John Stuart Mill

In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately, Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer, you're linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to.

-- Dennis Miller, "Saturday Night Live," U.S. television show

Even if it doesn't work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.

-- Henry Miller

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

-- Henry Miller

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

-- Olin Miller

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

-- A. A. Milne

Life is like a movie--since there aren't any commercial breaks, you have to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of it.

-- Nick Mirov

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

-- Nancy Mitford

I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.

-- Wilson Mizner

When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.

-- Wilson Mizner

Intelligence has nothing to do with politics.

-- Londo Molari

A lover tries to stand in well with the pet dog of the house.

-- Moliere

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

-- Michel de Montaigne

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

-- Michel de Montaigne

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out.

-- Michel de Montaigne

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

-- Michel de Montaigne

There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.

-- Michel de Montaigne

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

-- Michel de Montaigne

Author: A fool, who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting the generations to come.

-- Montesquieu

Age does not protect you from love but love to some extent protects you from age.

-- Jeanne Moreau

What I have to say is far more important than how long my eyelashes are.

-- Alanis Morissette, singer, 1995

If a relationship is to evolve, it must go through a series of endings.

-- Lisa Moriyama

A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.

-- Christopher Morley

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

-- Christopher Morley

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

-- Christopher Morley

And life is what we make it. Always has been, always will be.

-- Grandma Moses

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

-- Mother Teresa

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

-- Mother Teresa

The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.

-- Mother Teresa

We can do no great things; only small things with great love.

-- Mother Teresa

Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House -- as Brutus loved Caesar.

-- Bill Moyers

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

-- Martin Mull

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

-- Iris Murdoch

Give the people not hell, but hope and courage.

-- John Murray