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Anonymous Wisdom & Quotes

Anonymous Wisdom and Quotes are those whose authors are unknown and don't know who first said. This page is dedicated to those but does not include proverbs.

  • Don't sell America short.


- slogan ca. 1925 - 1929

  • Am I not a man and a brother?


- inscription on the seal of the Antislavery Society of London, c 1770

  • Ars longa, vita brevis.


(Art is long, life is short.)

  • A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends.


- British pacifist slogan

  • To play billiards is a sign of misspent youth.

Black is beautiful.

- slogan ca. 1967

  • To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
  • Garbage in, garbage out.
  • Better red than dead.


- slogan of the British ban-the-bomb movement, based on comments by Bertrand Russell

  • He that fights and runs away

  • May live to fight another day.

- in Musarium Deliciae, 17th century

  • There's no such thing as a free lunch.
  • Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant.

  • Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.

- gladiators' salute, quoted in Suetonius, Life of Glaudius

  • Sic transit Gloria mundi.


(So passes away the glory of this world.)
- used in papal coronations

  • God is not dead but alive and well and working on a much less ambitious project.


- Graffito

  • Hard cases make bad law.
  • If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it.

Gnothi seauton.

  • (Know thyself.)

- inscription at the temple of Apollo at Delphi

  • Qui s'excuse, s'accuse. ( Who excuses himself, accuses himself.)
  • Festina lente. (Hasten slowly.)
  • Loose lips sink ships.


- World War II poster

  • If anything can go wrong, it will.


- Murphy's Law

  • Enough research will tend to support your theory.


- quoted in A Bloch, Murphy's Law, and titled 'Murphy's Law of Research'

  • The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings.
  • I am all that has been, and that is, and that shall remain, and no one unworthy has ever unravelled, loosened, or even touched the surface of my woven veil.


- carving on an ancient stature of Pallas Athens, cited in Plutarch's Lives

  • The Pilgrim Fathers landed on the shores of America and fell upon their knees. Then they fell upon the aborigines.


- cited in H L Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations