An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
Earliest reference in Readers Digest (May 1979)
The surest indication of a mediocre mind is its belief that everything can be explained.
If you want to know what a man's character is really like, don't ask him to tell you his creed or his code (for everyone has a prettified public version of these), but ask him to tell you the living person he most admires - for hero worship is the truest index of a man's private nature.
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape-hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.
An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice -- that is, until we have stopped saying, "It got lost," and say, "I lost it."
The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.
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