User:UDScott

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After cultivating an extreme movie-quote hobby, I stumbled upon this site after perusing one of its sister projects, Wikipedia. Since then, I have become quite hooked on the idea of ensuring that my favorite (or even not-so-favorite) films would have their best lines captured for posterity. I am now an administrator and bureaucrat here on Wikiquote.

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I'm a transplanted New Jersey-ian (or is it New Jersey-ite?) who has a ravenous hunger for movies and books (I rarely go through a day without one or the other). My tastes are quite diverse and range from absolute classics to thrillers to horror to comedy (both obvious and more sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek). I also particularly like Films noir and Neo-noir films. If pressed, I would list my favorite films as Three Days of the Condor, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, Chinatown, Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, La La Land, In Bruges, Blood Simple (and frankly I'd watch anything by the Coen brothers), The Godfather, Hoosiers, Donnie Darko, It's a Wonderful Life, Goodfellas, The Seven Samurai, The Man in the Moon, The Third Man, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Nobody's Fool, Absence of Malice, anything by Alfred Hitchcock (especially Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, North by Northwest and Rope), and maybe Halloween (There. How's that for diverse?). As for TV, as with many WQ people, I am a devout Buffy fan. I would also include among my favorites Midnight Mass, The Handmaid's Tale, The Leftovers, Stranger Things, Shameless, Homeland, Alias, Lost, Friday Night Lights, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, Cheers, Homicide: Life on the Street, My So-Called Life, How I Met Your Mother, The West Wing, The Wire, The Shield, True Blood, Breaking Bad, Chuck, Mad Men, Damages, Fringe, Rescue Me, The Wonder Years, Justified, Sons of Anarchy, and The Twilight Zone. My favorite authors would include Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ray Bradbury, T. S. Eliot, Neil Gaiman (love, love, love American Gods), George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton.

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And: I am HUGE fan of Dinosaur Comics! It ROCKS!

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While my interests in Wikiquote primarily focus on films and a few of my favorite TV shows, you never know where I'll pop up. I especially like to rescue pages marked for deletion (if rescue is warranted) and to expand pages that are languishing.

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• {{quotation limit|type=tv|length= }}
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• To split into two columns: {{col-begin}}{{col-2}}{{col-2}}{{col-end}}
• Promoting users (for Bots, Admins, etc.)

• I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'
  • George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Pt. I, Act I (1921)

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
  • George Bernard Shaw, Revolutionist's Handbook

• A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
  • Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)

• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, Chapter III: "On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small" (1905)

• The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition — and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation — and to the subtle but invincible, conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity — the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
  • Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Preface (1897)

• A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
  • G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Part II: On the Man Called Christ, Ch. 6: The Five Deaths of the Faith (1925)

• All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
  • Albert Einstein, "Moral Decay" (1937); Later published in Out of My Later Years (1950)

• Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
  • Albert Einstein, Letter to Morris Raphael Cohen, professor emeritus of philosophy at the College of the City of New York, defending the appointment of Bertrand Russell to a teaching position (19 March 1940)

• The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when contemplating the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of the mystery every day. The important thing is not to stop questioning; never lose a holy curiosity.
  • Albert Einstein, Statement to William Miller, as quoted in LIFE magazine (2 May 1955)

• The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
  • Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)

• Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance, from Essays: First Series (1841)

• This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
  • John Steinbeck, East of Eden, Part 1, Ch. 13

• Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
  • Bertrand Russell, "The Science to Save Us from Science," The New York Times Magazine (March 19, 1950)

• Do I dare
  Disturb the universe?
  In a minute there is time
  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
  • T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

• This is the way the world ends
  Not with a bang but a whimper.
  • T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men (1925)

• His tired gaze - from passing endless bars -
  has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds.
  To him there seem to be a thousand bars,
  and out beyond these bars exists no world.

  His supple gait, the smoothness of strong strides
  that gently turn in ever smaller circles
  perform a dance of strength, centered deep within
  a will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable.

  But sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part,
  the pupils of his eyes dilate as images
  of past encounters enter while through his limbs
  a tension strains in silence
  only to cease to be, to die within his heart.

  • Rainer Maria Rilke, The Panther (1907), translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

• Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
  What I was walling in or walling out,
  And to whom I was like to give offence.
  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
  That wants it down.
  • Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1915)

• Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
  I took the one less traveled by,
  And that has made all the difference.
  • Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (1916)

• I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
  • Patrick Henry, Speech in Virginia Convention, Richmond (March 23, 1775)

• Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
  • Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, from Different Seasons (1982)

• I met a traveller from an antique land
  Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
  Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
  And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
  And on the pedestal these words appear:
  "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
  Nothing beside remains: round the decay
  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandius (1818)

• Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.
  • James Russell Lowell, On Democracy (October 6, 1884)

• Life and death, union and separation, follow hard upon one another. Nothing is steadfast but the will, nothing endures but one’s achieve­ments. These alone count in life.
  • Yoshida Shoin, Yoshida Shoin Zenshu, Vol. II

• No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.
  • Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865)

• He is truly a man who will not permit himself to be unduly elated when fortune’s breeze is favorable, or cast down when it is adverse.
  • Titus Livius (Livy), Histories, Book XLV, sec. 8

• A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
  • Desmond Tutu, Address at his enthronement as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town (7 September 1986)

• Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza
  fesse creando, e a la sua bontate
  più conformato, e quel ch'e' più apprezza,
  fu de la volontà la libertate;
  di che le creature intelligenti,
  e tutte e sole, fuore e son dotate.
  • The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation,
    and the most conformable to His goodness,
    and that which He prizes the most,
    was the freedom of will,
    with which the creatures with intelligence,
    they all and they alone, were and are endowed.
  • Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto V, lines 19-24

• Do... or do not. There is no try.
  • Yoda, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

• Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
  • Neil Gaiman, American Gods, ch. 3 (2001)

• There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.
  • Neil Gaiman, American Gods, ch. 9 (2001)

• Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow.
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson, Marina Leight (May 21, 2009). Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger. Retrieved on December 7, 2010.