Weekend Words: Fifteen
All best wishes for 2015.
All best wishes for 2015.
“A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There’s nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I’ve done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom — it’s gone.”
—Edward R. Murrow, News Summaries, December 31, 1955
“Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring.”
—Emily Brontë, “Remembrance”
“The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.”
—Lenny Bruce
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up, because by that time I was too famous.”
—Robert Benchley
“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
“A statesman is a politician who’s been dead for fifteen years.”
—Harry S Truman
“Heck by the time a man scratches his behind, clears his throat, and tells me how smart he is, we’ve already wasted fifteen minutes.”
—Lyndon B. Johnson
“To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”
—Bernard Baruch
“I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.”
—Mario Cuomo
