Listers, the following quotes were submitted to SPL based on the merit of the quotes and not necessarily the merit or virtue of the author.1

“‘How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’”
“‘As he ever has judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, 1954

Mark Twain

“Tell you, you corn-stalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It’s the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I have ever heard of a man’s having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You turnip! Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it… Who edit the agricultural papers, you—yam? Men, as a general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-colored novel line, sensation-drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse. You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger noise he makes and the higher salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish world.”
Mark Twain, “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper,” 1870

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Greek Interpreter” (from The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries), 1893

“Here I have for once in my life acted sincerely and, well, you all look upon me as a madman.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

“‘The proverb says, that he who does good to him that does not deserve it, is always ill rewarded. I did think… that it was false, because nothing is more contrary to reason, and the rights of society: yet I find it too cruelly true.”
“The History of the Fisherman” in Arabian Nights

“You couldn’t win an argument with Fauna because she would agree with you and then go right on as she had planned.”
John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday, 1954

  1. St. Peter’s List thanks Kara Schmidt for submitting these quotes [↩]