Yiddish is essentially a Slavic language where most of the words just happen to be German.
John Cowan
Yiddish is essentially bad German mixed with worse Hebrew and execrable Russian.
John Cowan
Far duller than a serpent's tooth it is to spend a quiet youth.
Anonymous
The glad man is he who does not lose his child's heart.
Confucius
It is mainly young people who make the world go round. In their ignorance, and heedlessness, and ridiculous over-confidence, they push forward in enterprises that the calm, wise, worldly, old farts know for sure will all end in tears. And lo and behold! Once in a while the old farts are proved wrong, and that absurd enterprise opens up a complete new chapter in human history. Take away that first, fine, careless rapture of youth, or suffocate it under the negativity and cynicism that will permeate a world full of sesquicentenarian old farts, and history will stop.
John Derbyshire
[W]hen I was young and insufferable, [. . .] my pretension, self-regard and overclocked sense of personal misery was unbearable to anyone who'd spent a few days in the adult world and taken notes.
James Lileks
The sad & erroneous lesson you learn from young geekhood is that human friendship is never as good as the relationships you have with your books, comics, movies, and various extruded plastic figurines. People disappoint in strange ways. They don't get it the way you get it, or they get it too much. (I was warned off the Lord of the Rings by a childhood friend whose entire persona screamed GIRL POISON, and I ever after associated Hobbitophilia with a nerdy dateless future. Of course, he married ten years before I did.)
James Lileks
When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of algebra.
