1960s

Sure, we were young. We were arrogant. We were ridiculous. There were excesses. We were brash. We were foolish. We had factional fights. But we were right. - Abbie Hoffman

The accused have never denied the charge of misusing the funds of the student union. Indeed, they openly admit to having made the union pay some $1500 for the printing and distribution of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature inspired by Internationale Situationniste. These publications express ideas and aspirations which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of a student union. One has only to read what the accused have written, for it is obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with "unlicensed pleasure" as its only goal. In view of their basically anarchist character, these theories and propaganda are eminently noxious. Their wide diffusion in both student circles and among the general public, by the local, national and foreign press, are a threat to the morality, the studies, the reputation and thus the very future of the students of the University of Strasbourg. - 1966 judgment in the case of students at the University of Strasbourg, members of the avant garde of what would become known around the world as the youth movement of the 1960s.

A

Ability

Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs that somebody else hits - Casey Stengel

Abnormal

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. - Psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, who lived through four concentration camps in World War II

Absentmindedness

I must be getting absent minded. Whenever I complain that things aren't what they used to be, I always forget to include myself - George Burns

Absurd

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world - Albert Camus

Accuacy

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. - Voltaire

Action

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. - Ursula K. LeGuin

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. -- Edmund Burke

What you do is of little significance. But it is very important that you do it - Gandhi

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne, 1910

Activism

Activism is my rent for living on this planet - Alice Walker

Adams, Douglas

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. ~~

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry.

There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are `Why are people born?' `Why do they die?' `Why do they spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?'"

`In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were REAL men, women were REAL women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small furry creatures from Aplha Centauri.'

You know,' said Arthur, `it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die from asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.' `Why, what did she tell you?' `I don't know, I didn't listen.' MORE QUOTES

Adulthood

I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood. - Umberto Eco

Advertising

Few people at the beginning of the 19th century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted - John Kenneth Galbraith

Advice

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own -- Nelson Algren

Depends on whether you're pouring or drinking -- Bill Cosby's grandmother when the young Cosby, fresh from college, attempted to stump her with a question about whether the glass was half empty or half full.

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never any use to oneself. -- Oscar Wilde

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it. What another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - thus make yourself indispensable - André Gide

Aflluent Society

The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air conditioned power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into a country that has long been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. . . They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?' - John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 1958

Age

At seventy, men are just beginning to grow liberal again, after a decade or two of conservatism. Their usefulness to the state is likely to improve after the span of life when the Bible allows them to complete. The men of eighty whom we know are on the whole a more radical, rip snorting lot than the men of seventy. They hold life cheaply, and hence are able to entertain generous thoughts about the state. It is in his fifty-to-seventy phase that a man pulls in his ears, lashes down his principles, and gets ready for dirty weather. Octogenarians have a more devil-may-care tactic: they are sometimes quite willing to crowd on some sail and see if they can't get a burst of speed out of the old hooker yet.

A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle-aged, except in rare cases, run to shelter: they ensure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood - a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy. - EB White, 1937

f you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age. - George Burns

If I'd known I was gonna live this long I'd have taken better care of myself. - Eubie Blake at age 100

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going. - JD Priestly

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - Dylan Thomas

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. - George Bernard Shaw

Fortunately, we don't need to know how bad an age is. There is something we can always be doing without reference to how good or bad the age is. -- Robert Frost

When you are young you get blamed for crimes you never committed, and when you are old you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out. -- I.F. Stone

What shall I do with this absurdity --
O heart, O trouble heart -- this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible...
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack...
-- Yeats

As life runs on,
The road grows strange
With faces new,
And near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath everyone a friends -- James Russell Lowell

Old age is an island surrounded by death - Juan Montalvo

It's time to be old, to take in sail - RW Emerson

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were? - Satchel Paige

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young - Oscar Wilde

The years between 50 & 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things & yet are not decrepit enough to turn them down. - TS Eliot

Thoughts on being 71

It's better now, death is closer,
I no longer have to look for it,
no longer have to challenge
it, taunt it, play with it.
it's right here with me
like a pet cat or a wall calendar

I've had a good run.
I can toss it in without regret.

odd, though, I feel no different
then I did at 35 or 47 or 62:
I am only truly conscious of my
age when I look into a
mirror:
ridiculous
baleful eyes, grinning
stupid mouth.

it's nice my friend, the
lightning flashes about
me,
I've washed up on the golden
shore.
everything here is miracle,
a hard miracle,
as was what
preceded
this

- Charles Bukowski

To an old man any place that's warm is homeland - Maxim Gorky

Agitation

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters." -- Frederick Douglass

Tell a man whose house is on fire to give moderate alarm; tel1 him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen. -- William Lloyd Garrison

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast. - Miguel de Unamuno

Agreement

Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong — Oscar Wilde

One heart, many minds -- Civil rights movement saying

If you don't disagree with me, how will I know I'm right? -- Samuel Goldwyn

Alcohol

The right of liberty and pursuing happiness secured by the [Indiana] constitution, embraces the right, in each compos mentis individual, of selecting what he will eat and drink, in short, his beverages, so far as he may be capable of producing them, or they may be within his reach, and that the legislature cannot take away that right by direct enactment. If the constitution does not secure this right to the people, it secures nothing of value.

If the people are subject to be controlled by the legislature in the matter of their beverages, so they are as to their articles of dress, and in their hours of sleeping and waking. And if the people are incompetent to select their own beverages, they are also incompetent to determine anything in relation to their living, and should be placed at once in a state of pupilage to a set of government sumptuary officers; eulogies upon the dignity of human nature should cease; and the doctrine of the competency of the people for self-government be declared a deluding rhetorical flourish.

If the government can prohibit any practice it pleases, it can prohibit the drinking of cold water. Can it do that? If not, why not? If we are right in this, that the constitution restrains the legislature from passing a law regulating the diet of the people, a sumptuary law, (for that under consideration is such, no matter whether its object be morals or economy, or both,) then the legislature cannot prohibit the manufacture and sale, for use as a beverage, of ale, porter, beer, &c., and cannot declare those manufactured, kept and sold for that purpose, a nuisance, if such is the use to which those articles are put by the people....

We think the constitution furnishes the protection [in this case]. If it does not in this particular, it does, as we have said, as to nothing of any importance, and tea, coffee, tobacco, corn-bread, ham and eggs, may next be placed under the ban. The very extent to which a concession of the power in this case would carry its exercise, shows it cannot exist. - Decision in Herman v. State, 8 Ind. 545 (1855)

Alienation

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total... Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complication social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his own creations, and has lost ownership of himself. --Erich Fromm

Aliens

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian. - Robert Orben

Alcohol

I drink to make other people interesting - George Jean Nathan

Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man

- A. E. Housman

Aliens

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian. - Robert Orben

Allegiance

You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race. -- Woodrow Wilson speaking to a group of newly naturalized citizens

Allen, Woody

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying

"That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?" . . ."Yes, it is." . . . "What does it say to you?" . . "It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos."

"What are you doing Saturday night?" . . . "Committing suicide." . . ."What about Friday night?"

Ambition

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind -- Joseph Conrad

America

The Americans who are the most efficient people on earth. . . have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication - Somerset Maugham

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. - John Quincy Adams

The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. . . . They unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. - Alexis de Tocqueville

You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. -- Herman Melville

Only in America -- Yogi Berra upon hearing that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish

It's an America which no longer exists except in Greyhound bus terminals, except in small dusty towns seen from the window of a speeding car -- Alan Ginsberg

Don't you get the idea I'm one of these goddamn radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system -- Al Capone

In America there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is. - Gertrude Stein

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong -- G.K. Chesterton

There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive's new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land - Mark Twain

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting for
a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Americans keep telling us how successful their system is - then they remind us not to stray too far from our hotel at night. - A European official during the G-8 economic summit in Denver, 1997

Amnesia

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. - Steven Wright

Amorality

AMORALITY: A quality admired and rewarded in modern organizations, where it is referred to through metaphors such as professionalism and efficiency . . . Immorality is doing wrong of our own volition. Amorality is doing it because a structure or an organization expects us to do it. Amorality is thus worse than immorality because it involves denying our responsibility and therefore our existence as anything more than an animal - John Ralston Saul, "The Doubter's Companion."

Anarchism

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. - George Bernard Shaw

If I rule out violent anarchism, there remains pacifist, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, moral, and anti-democratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves. - Jacques Ellul

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, & county commissioners." - Edward Abbey

Anger

It is easy to fly into a passion-- anybody can do that. But to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way -- that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it. -- Aristotle

Answers

There ain't no answer. there ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. -- Gertrude Stein

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. - James Thurber

Anxiety

Anxiety is the interest paid on trouble before it is due - William R. Inge

Appeasement

Appeasement' is the policy of feeding your friends to a crocodile, one at a time, in hopes that the crocodile will eat you last. -- F D Roosevelt

Architect

A doctor can bury his mistakes. An architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. -- F. L. Wright

Aristocracy

The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar . . . I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies - Thomas Jefferson

Arnold,Matthew

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I can only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

- Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

Art

PAINTING: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critics - Ambrose Bierce

Art is either plagiarism or revolution - Paul Guaguin

Art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others - Albert Camus

Art is by nature somewhat destructive. Every artist while seeking to add to the sum of art, attempts to take away your memory and appreciation of what went before, saying, "Look at me, I am new." - Lou Stovall

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. - Kurt Vonnegut

Anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason - Margaret Anderson

Artist

The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes and he annexes everything. -- Oscar Wilde

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why - William Faulkner

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that others are behind the time. - Martha Graham

Aspen Institute

A supermarket of conventional wisdom for middle-level executives - John Ralston Saul

Ass-kissing

Just remember, the toe you step on today may be connected to the ass you're kissing tomorrow - Former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci

Atom
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms - Muriel Rukeyser

Atom bomb

The best defense against the atom bomb is not to be there when it goes off - British Army Journal 1949

And we will all bake together when we bake
There'll be nobody present at the wake
With complete participation in that grand incineration
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak

Oh we will all char together when we char
And let there be no moaning of the bar
Just sing out a Te Deum when you see that ICBM
And the party will be "come as you are"

Oh we will all burn together when we burn
There'll be no need to stand and wait your turn
When it's time for the fallout
And Saint Peter calls us all out
We'll just drop our agendas and adjourn

- Tom Lehrer

Automation

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom. - Cyril Parkinson

Average

Never try to walk across a river because it has an average depth of four feet. -- Martin Friedman

Augustine, Saint

Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty. - Saint Augustine

Authoritarian

It stands to reason that self-righteous, inflexible, single-minded, authoritarian true believers are politically organized. Open-minded, flexible, complex, ambiguous, anti-authoritarian people would just as soon be left to mind their own fucking business. - R.U. Sirius in 'How To Mutate and Take Over The World'

Authority

Everybody's an authority in a free land - Hüsker Dü

Awards

You should have done nothing to deserve it. -- Editor of Le Canard firing a staffer who had just won the Legion d'Honneur explaining that he had not sought the honor.

I've not won different awards - many, many times - so luckily I've practiced that whenever you are nominated for anything, you enter into this marvelous, fantabulous bubble called the bubble of nomination. The minute the envelope is opened and your name isn't called out, the bubble bursts. And no one calls you up the next day to say, 'So sorry you didn't win,' or 'You looked gorgeous - nothing. If you win, you get about another 24 hours in that lovely bubble and then - pop - you are slightly wet all over from the bubble and realize that you have to get on with real life. - Helen Mirren

B

Baby

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on - Carl Sandburg

Banker

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. - Mark Twain

Banks

I sincerely believe. . . that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies - Thomas Jefferson

Baseball

Baseball is different from other games. Its strength is inherent, metaphysical. Why? First, because the game has a singular and distinctive relationship to time. Only baseball, among all games, can be called a "pastime." For baseball is above or outside time. Football, basketball, hockey, soccer games are arbitrarily divided into measured quarters, halves, or periods. They are controlled, even dominated by time. Not so baseball, which either ignores time or dominates it. An inning theoretically can go on forever. The same is true of the game. Interruptions are generally limited to acts of God, such as darkness or rain, or to cultural, religious and quasi-natural occurrences such as curfew or midnight. . .Baseball is also played in a unique spatial frame. Other games are restricted to limited, defined areas, rectangular or near rectangular, floors or rinks. Not so baseball. Baseball is played within the lines of a projection from home plate, starting from the point of a 90 degrees and extending to infinity. Were it not for the intervention of fences, buildings, mountains, and other obstacles in space, a baseball traveling within the ultimate projection of the first and third baselines could be fair and fully and infinitely in play. Baseballs never absolutely go out of bounds. They are either fair or foul; and even foul balls are, within limits, playable and part of the game. Baseball is distinguished from other games, too in the way in which it is controlled by umpires. An umpire is very different from a referee, a field judge, or a linesman. One occasionally hears the cry "fire the referee" but seldom the cry "kill the referee." That cry is reserved for umpires. Umpires have to be dealt with absolutely, for their power is absolute. Referees are men called or appointed. Umpires, by contrast, seem to exist in their own right and exercise undelegated power which is not to be reviewed and from which there is no appeal. - Eugene McCarthy, Forward to Lawrence Frank's "Playing Hardball: The Dynamics of Baseball Folk Speech (1984)

It breaks your heart.

It is designed to break your heart.

The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops . . . . and summer is gone. - A. Bartlett Giamatti on baseball in "The Green Fields of the Mind"

Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical - Yogi Berra

Throwing a fastball to Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster. - Curt Simmons, pitcher

Let there be joy in baseball again, like in the days when Babe Ruth chased an enemy sportswriter down the streets of Boston and ended up getting drunk with him on the waterfront and came back the next day munching on hotdogs and boomed homeruns to the glory of God. - - Jack Kerouac

Baseball is the ideal forum for teachiing the art of failure; the very best fail to get a hit seven out of ten times. -- Sam Dunn

Beat generation

We were a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters, suddenly rising and roaming America: serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere. It never meant 'juvenile delinquents.' 'Beat,' doesn't mean tired or bushed, so much as it means beato the Italian for beatific, to be in a state of beatitude, like Saint Francis: trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart - the subterranean heroes who were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the derangement of the senses, talking strange, being poor and glad." - Jack Kerouac

I meant beaten. The world against me.- Jack Kerouac

Woe onto those who spit on the Beat Generation. The wind'll blow it back. - Jack Kerouac, whose birthday it is.

By avoiding society you become separate from society and being separate from society is being beat - Gregory Corso

We were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move - Jack Kerouac

The psychic outlaw . . . the rebel cell in our social body - Norman Mailer

The draft dodgers of commercial civilization - Ned Plotsky

Beer

Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man -- A.E. Houseman

Belief

A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish - Chesterton

Berra, Yogi

You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might end up someplace else. - Yogi Berra

Bible

I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof & the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, & made mine heritage an abomination. — Jeremiah 2:7

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. - HL Mencken

He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord. -- The Bible

But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. -- Galatians 5:19

And gladness is taken away, and joy out of the plentiful field; and in the vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there be shouting: the treaders shall tread out no wine in their presses; I have made their vintage shouting to cease. Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and mine inward parts for Kirharesh. -- Isaiah 16:11

"As for your male and female slaves whom you may have; You may buy your male and female slaves from among the nations around you.....You may bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a possession forever." -- Leviticus 25:44-46

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves. -- Matthew 23:13-15

If the King James version was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. - Ma Ferguson, Inaugurated as Texas' first woman governor. Married to the impeached governor Pa Ferguson, Ma ran on the slogan "two governors for the price of one."

Bierce, Ambrose

Devil's Dictionary

Billions

It takes some perspective to think in billions. Keep the following in mind: one thousand seconds is about 17 minutes. One million seconds is about eleven and a half days. One billion seconds is about 32 years -- Tim Weiner

Biography

The creative person should have no other biography than his works. - B Traven

Bipartisanship

Whenever a fellow tells me he is bipartisan, I know he is going to vote against me -- Harry Truman

Bob and Ray

RAY: We're fortunate to have with us today the world- renowned Komodo dragon authority from Upper Montclair, New Jersey. His name is Doctor Daryll Dexter. Doctor, would you tell our listeners all about the Komodo dragon, please?

BOB: The Komodo dragon, the world's largest living lizard, is a ferocious carnivore. It's found on the steep-sloped island of Komodo in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian Archipelago and the nearby islands of Rinja, Padar, and Flores.

R: Where do they come from?

B: The Komodo dragon, the world's largest living lizard, is found on the steep-sloped island of Komodo . . . in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian Archipelago.. . . and the nearby islands of Rinja, Padar, and Flores. We have two in this country at the National Zoo in Washington. . . which were given to the U.S. by the late former premier of Indonesia. . . Sukarno. . . some years ago.

R: I believe I read somewhere....that a foreign potentate gave America some Komodo dragons. Is that true?

B: Yes. . . the former premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, gifted this country with two Komodo dragons. . . world's largest living lizards. . . some years back. . . and they're now residing at the National Zoo in Washington.

R: Well, now, if we wanted to take the children to see a Komodo dragon....where would we take the children to see a Komodo dragon?

B: If you were in the vicinity of our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. . . you would take the kiddos to the National Zoo, and there you would see two Komodo dragons. . . the world's largest living lizard. There is a stuffed Komodo dragon in the lobby of the Royal Hotel in Katmandu, Nepal.

R: Er. . . they're of the lizard family?

B: Yes. They are the world's largest living lizard and a ferocious carnivore. They have red darting tongues which suck in air and take it to their smelling glands in their throats.

R: Do they eat other animals, these Komodo dragons?

B: Yes, they're ferocious carnivores. In fact, they can gulp down the hindquarters of a deer in one bite.

Body

No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own from, its parts, their functions and actions -- Thomas Jefferson

Boredom

I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on. -- James Thurber

Books

The worm thinks it strange and foolish that man does not eat his books. - Rabindranath Tagore

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. - Christopher Morley

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer. - Ernest Hemingway

Deeply versed in books and shallow in himself - John Milton

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. -Winston Churchill

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed & digested. - Francis Bacon

Boswell, James

I went home and saw my wife and then dined with the Colonel at his lodgings, and as he was to be busy, just drank half a bottle of port; the sallied forth between four and five with an avidity for drinking from the habit of some days before. I went to Fortune's; found nobody in the house but Captain James Gordon of Ellon. He and I drank five bottles of claret and were most profound politicians. He pressed me to take another; but my stomach was against it. I walked off very gravely though much intoxicated. Ranged through the streets till, having run hard down the Advocates' Close, which is very steep, I found myself on a sudden bouncing down an almost perpendicular stone stair. I could not stop, but when I came to the bottom of it, fell with a good deal of violence, which sobered me much. It was amazing that I was not killed or very much hurt; I only bruised my right heel severely. I stopped at Sir George's." - James Boswell, 4 November 1774

Bribery

You can hope to bend or twist/thank god the British journalist./ But seeing what the man will do/unbribed there is no reason to. -- Humbert Wolfe

British Navy

Winston Churchill's said the Royal Navy ran on "rum, buggery and the lash."

Broadcasting

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the coporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. It is not easy for the same small group of men to decide whether to buy a new station for millions of dollars, build a new building, alter the rate card, buy a new Western, sell a soap opera, decide what defensive line to take in connection with the latest Congressional inquiry, how much money to spend on promoting a new program, what additions or deletions should be made in the existing covey or clutch of vice-presidents, and at the same time-- frequently on the same long day--to give mature, thoughtful consideration to the manifold problems that confront those who are charged with the responsibility for news and public affairs. - Edward R. Murrow, 1958

Burns, George

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair - George Burns

Bush, George

See, one of the problems we've had that shows -- what we found out in New Orleans there's not -- there wasn't a lot of -- we take -- some things we take for granted like the generations passing assets from one generation to the next just didn't happen in the African American community, and should. We ought to encourage -- we take that for granted, don't we? Some of us do. You know, you pass the house on. A lot of these people didn't own their own homes. A lot of them didn't have checking accounts. And yet one of the things we ought to encourage is systems -- is reforms that enable somebody to own something so they can pass it on to their child. It's part of creating stability and healthy families and strength. And so I want to be known as an ownership guy.

Don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. -

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be the Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Societies Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon to Try to Shake the Conscience of the Free World.. . .

We stand for things.

As you know, we don't have relationships with Iran. I mean, that's -- ever since the late '70s, we have no contacts with them, and we've totally sanctioned them. In other words, there's no sanctions -- you can't -- we're out of sanctions.

Let me put it to you bluntly. In a changing world, we want more people to have control over your own life.

I cut the taxes on everybody. I didn't cut them. The Congress cut them. I asked them to cut them.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

I'm telling you, when you start asking the question, can you read and write and add and subtract, all of a sudden, people start learning better.

REPORTER: Thank you, Mr. President ... What would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?. . . BUSH: Hmm. I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. ... You know, I just, uh, I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet. .. I, uh, hope I -- I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

I'm not a lawyer.

I'm not a member of the legislative branch.

I'm not a numbers cruncher. I'm not one of these bean counters.

I'm not a stockbroker or a stock picker.

I'm not a very formal guy to begin with.

I'm not an Iraqi citizen.

If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator

There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says: Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. . . . Fool me . . . you can't get fooled again.

C

Cadoc the Wise

I hate the judge who loves money, the scribe who loves war,
Chiefs who do not guard their subjects, and nations without vigor.

I hate houses without dwellers, lands untilled, fields that bear no harvest,
Landless clans, the agents of error, the oppressors of truth.

I hate him who respects not father or mother, those who make strife among friends,
A country in anarchy, lost learning, and uncertain boundaries.

I hate journeys without safety, families without strength, lawsuits without reason,
Ambushes and treasons, faults in counsel, and justice unhonored.

I hate a man without a trade, a laborer without freedom, a society without teachers, false witness before a judge, the undeserving
exalted to high position.

-- Cadoc the Wise, a 6th century Celtic monk

California

We're all from California now -- Character in a Walker Percy novel

Camus, Albert

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. - Albert Camus

Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man's grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition. - Albert Camus

Canada

Americans are so benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States. - J. Bartlet Brebner.

Candidate

A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other - Anonymous

Capitalism

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists - GK Chesterton

I can hire half the working class to kill the other half. -- Jay Gould

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." -- John Maynard Keynes

Carelessness

"We fear the cold and the things we do not understand. But most of all we fear the doings of the heedless ones among ourselves." -- Eskimo shaman to the explorer Knut Rasmussen

They were careless people -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. -- F Scott Fitzgerald

Cartoons

People who see a drawing in the "New Yorker" will think automatically that it's funny because it is a cartoon. If they see it in a museum, they think it is artistic; and if they find it in a fortune cookie they think it is a prediction. - Saul Steinberg

Casablanca

Capt. Louis Renault: What on earth brought you to Casablanca? Rick Blaine: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. Capt. Louis Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert. Rick Blaine: I was misinformed.

Rick Blaine: I stick my neck out for nobody.

Rick Blaine: Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

[A croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.

Captain Renault: [aloud] Everybody out at once!

Catholicism

Because it's a family, Catholics around the country won't give up on it very easily. There will be outrage and embarrassment and anger, but the church is often referred to as Holy Mother Church. And you might get angry with your mother, but it's your mother. -- R. Scott Appleby

Caucus

The pricks are on the outside - the late Rep. Mo Udall explaining how a cactus differs from a caucus.

Caution

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. -- Susan B. Anthony, 1860

Celebrity

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized. - Fred Allen

Censorship

The censorial power is in the people over the government and not in the government over the people -- James Madison

In America you can say anything you want -- as long as it doesn't have any effect -- Paul Goodman

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging conceptions and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorship in a nutshell. - George Bernard Shaw

Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of the common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them - William Hazlitt

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. - General William Westmoreland

Certainty

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell

The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. A person who claims to know the mind or will of God is pathological. - The Rev. Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral

Chance

I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not - Fran Lebowitz

Change

When you're finished changing, you're finished. - Benjamin Franklin

Character

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right . . and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers." -- John Adams

Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has - Alphonse Kan

Character is that which can do without success - Emerson

Chance

Chance is the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign - Anatole France

Change

I never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that has -- Margaret Mead

We must be fond of the world, even in order to change it -- G. K. Chesterton

If you come to a fork in the road, take it. Yogi Berra

If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting. -- Laura Ingalls Wilder

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stage coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place. -- Washington Irving

Chaos

Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from chaos. -- Lord Malquist in `Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon' by Tom Stoppard

Charm

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question. Albert Camus

Chemistry

Organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl -- Mike Adams

Childhood

Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was 'shut up' - Joe Namath

It takes a whole village to raise a child -- African proverb

The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers. -- Socrates

All children wear the sign: 'I want to be important NOW.' Many of our juvenile delinquency problem arise because nobody reads the sign - Don Herold

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of their tires - Dorothy Parker

If you want your children to be brilliant, tell them fairy tales. If you want them to be very brilliant, tell them even more fairy tales. - Albert Einstein

Chinatown

Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown -- 'Chinatown'

Choice

If the world were merely seductive that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. -- E. B. White

When you come to a fork in the road, take it -- Yogi Berra

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. "Which road do I take?" she asked. His responses was a question: "Where do you want to go?" "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." -- Lewis Carroll

Christianity

The truly simple way of presenting Christianity is to do it. -- Soren Kierkegaard

CHRISTIAN: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. - Ambrose Bierce

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. - Gandhi

Christmas

The little children of the rich have grown critical with overabundance, and nothing short of an electric tree with fairy effects produced by that wizard bower, satisfies them. It is easy to spend $100 on the electricity alone if it is brought into the house for this single service. - NY Times, 1894

Churches

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work. - Brooks Atkinson

Churchill, Winston

[From the Idler, UK]

1909: As president of the Board of Trade, he nails his colors to the mast with the following statement. "There is no reason at all why people should wander about in a loafing and Idle manner; if they are not earning their living they ought to be put under some sort of control."

1910: Churchill's time as Home Secretary was marred by Industrial unrest. His hard-line response to the strikers is still remembered with bitterness in many working class communities - none more so that the Welsh town of Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley where, it has been said, Churchill used soldiers against striking miners. Contemporary evidence shows that it was the police and not the army who were used at Tonypandy, but the troops were ready. Two miners are reported to have died in the ensuing violence. This year, Churchill also orders the breaking of the suffragettes. "The women's suffrage movement is only the small end of the wedge," Churchill proclaimed at the time. "If we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands."

Churchill perhaps inherited these attitudes from his fearsome mother. "Lady Churchill was an ardent opponent of women's suffrage and appeared at anti-suffrage meetings, "reported the New York Times at the time of Churchill's death in 1965. "She was often accompanied by her son Winston at meetings where both were heckled and booed by suffragettes."

1929: Writes the following letter to his son Randolph. His sentiments weakly echo those voiced by his own father about him forty years earlier. "My dear Randolph, Your Idle and lazy life is v(er)y offensive to me. You appear to be leading a completely useless existence. You do not value or profit by the opportunities wh(ich) Oxford offers for those who care for learning. You are not acquiring any habits of industry or concentration. Even in Idleness you find it trying to pass the day."

1930: As foreign secretary, Churchill orders the use of mustard gas against Kurdish Villages, "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using gases against uncivilised tribes."

1940: Far from being hero-worshipped by the people of England, the working classes hated him as a lackey of the ruling classes. "Come World War Two most working class people's feelings were that the Nazis had to be defeated," writes Frank Henderson, a young soldier during the Second World War. "But that did not mean we lost our hatred of Winston Churchill. The general view was that, while we were stuck with him during the war, we would get him out once it was over."

1945: Defeated in the post-war general election.

http://www.idler.co.uk/archives/?page_id=44

CIA

I think we were fairly well penetrated. But the point is, so what? It didn't save the USSR. And it didn't bring down the US -- Ex-CIA officer Victor Marchetti

Civil liberties

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip. -- George Orwell

I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately it's the government. -- Woody Allen

Where the people possess no authority, their rights obtain no respect - Historian George Bancroft 1834

While the machinery of law enforcement and indeed the nature of crime itself have changed dramatically since the Fourth Amendment became part of the Nation's fundamental law in 1791, what the Framers understood then remains true today - that the task of combating crime and convicting the guilty will in every era seem of such critical and pressing concern that we may be lured by the temptations of expediency into forsaking our commitment to protecting individual liberty and privacy. - Justice William Brennan, 1984

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the crown. It may be frail - its roof may shake - the wind may blow through it - the storm may enter - the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter! - all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! - William Pitt

Civil rights

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired - Fannie Lou Hamer

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. - Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from the Birmingham Jail", 1963

Civil Service

The business of the civil service is the orderly management of decline -- Peter Hennessy Whitehall, former head of the British Civil Service

Cities

Great cities must ever be centres of light and darkness; the repositories of piety and wickedness; the home of the best and the worst of our race -- Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow, 1868

This city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches [who] patrol the streets making night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves -- NYC Mayor Philip Home, 1839

"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." --Jane Jacobs

A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence. -- Aristotle

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends. - Lewis Mumford

As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach - Albert Camus

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist. Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level, most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone, is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. - Jane Jacobs

Classic

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. - Mark Twain

Clothes

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. - Henry David Thoreau

Citizenship

There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities - Edward R Murrow

Civilization

If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. - Henry Demarest Lloyd

Coal mining

God, if You had but the moon
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,
Even You'd tire of it soon,
Down in the dark and the damp.

Nothing but blackness above
And nothing that moves but the cars. . ..
God, if You wish for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars.

- Louis Untermeyer, Caliban in the Coal Mines

Columbus, Christopher

They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane. . . They would make fine servants. . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." - Christopher Columbus writing in his logbook of what would be later called the Bahamas.

Comedy

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious - Peter Ustinov

Commas

"Commas in the New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim." -- EB White

Commerce

Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society. - John Stuart Mill

Commission

The reports of presidential commissions on 'social problems' have a characteristic style. Since the style is essential to the form, it can't be transcended by the impressive intelligence, erudition, insight, and humanity that at least some of its members bring to it. The assumptions that create such commissions are typical of American social thinking. The first of these assumptions is that 'social problems' can be defined in isolation. This is based on contemporary medical thinking, which in turn comes from the theory of auto repair. That is: One does not see the problem as an ailing system, one seeks a malfunctioning part which is then repaired or replaced. When the system continues to ail, another part is sought, and so on, ad infinitum. Although an inefficient and self-defeating approach, it is highly lucrative. The excessive cost of human and mechanical repair in our society is rooted in this peculiar approach to systems and wholes. - Philip Slater, "Footholds: Understanding The Shifting Sexual And Family Tensions In Our Culture" (1977)

Committee

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. - Sir Barnett Cocks

A committee is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done. - Fred Allen

Communism

Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth. - 21st century Russian proverb

Community

Our community belongs to us and whether it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered in shame, we cannot but share its character and destiny. -- Frederick Douglass

Competition

COMPETITION: An event in which there are more losers than winners. Otherwise it's not a competition. A society based on competition is therefore primarily a society based on losers. - John Ralston Saul

Computers

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. - Pablo Picasso

640K ought to be enough for anyone. -- Bill Gates, 1981

Conformity

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering. - Gary Snyder

Conjunction Junction

Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hookin' up words and phrases and clauses.
Conjunction Junction, how's that function?
I got three favorite cars that get most of my job done.
Conjunction Junction, what's their function?
I got And, But, and Or.
They'll get you pretty far.
And! That's an additive, like "this and that"
But! That's sort of the opposite, "not this but that"
And then there's Or, O-R,
When you have a choice like "this or that".
And, But, and Or, get you pretty far!

Conquest

Conquest after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses... Flies conquer the flypaper. Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper. -- Lt. Tonder in 'The Moon is Down' by John Steinbeck

Conscience

A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good - Steven Wright

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory - Steven Wright

Vanity asks, is it popular? Politics ask, will it work? But conscience and morality ask, is it right? -- Martin Luther King Jr.

Conservative

Tory in all but essentials - Description of by a contemporary of Gladstone

Consequences

He who shits in a road will meet flies on his return - African proverb

Consistency

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency. -- R W Emerson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has nothing to do - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Constitution

The illegal we can do right now; the unconstituional will take a little longer -- Henry Kissinger

You hear about 'constitutional rights,' 'free speech,' and the 'free press.' Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red....' You never hear a real American talk like that. - Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City 1917-47

Contradiction

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large -- I contain multitudes)
--Walt Whitman

Contradictory positions

They killed St. George and kept the dragon -- GK Chesterton of the Puritans

Conventions
Everything has been said but not everyone has said it yet -- Rep. Morris Udall, 1988 Democratic convention

Conversation

The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds. -- Joseph Conrad

Nat: What were we talking about?
Midge: We wasn't talkin. You was talkin.
Nat: What was I saying?
Midge: I wasn't listening either. -- Herb Gardner, 'I'm Not Rappaport'

Converts

The smug self-assurance of certain people who think that because they were completely wrong 20 years ago, they must be completely right now that they entertain diametrically opposite opinions. It has apparently not occurred to them that they could be completely wrong both times -- Elmer Davis

Cooperation

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness -- Thich Nhat Hanh

Cool Papa Bell

Cool Papa Bell was so fast he could get out of bed, turn out the lights across the room and be back in bed under the covers before the lights went out. - Josh Gibson of the Negro Baseball League player who batted .400 several years and once stole 175 bases in a season. It was said that he was so fast he once was hit by a ball he had just batted as he headed for second base.

Corporation

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. - How is this? - Diary of Rutherford B Hayes

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself - John Kenneth Galbraith

It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process . . .The state need not permit it own creation to consume it. -- Justices White, Brennan and Marshall in First National Bank of Boston vs. Belotti, 1978

A corporation cannot be ethical; its only responsibility is to turn a profit - Milton Friedman

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation -- Howard Scott.

Unless you become more watchful in your states and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of govenrment have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interessts have been passed into the hands of these coporations." --Andrew Jackson

The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar.-Thomas Jefferson

I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies - Thomas Jefferson

Correlation

Correlation does not imply causation. -- Statistician's maxim

Corruption

An injudicious mixture of sand and cement -- Boston mayor James Michael Curley explaining why a highway overpass collapsed

"We're beyond politics now" -- Richard Nixon in the movie 'Nixon' talking about the involvement of the CIA and Mafia in Watergate.

Country & Western

All My Exes Live In Texas

All the Guys that Turn Me On Turn Me Down

Are You Drinkin With Me Jesus? [I know you can walk on the water but can you walk on this much beer?]

Billy Broke My Heart at Walgreens and I Cried All the Way to Sears

Did I Shave my Legs for This?

Drop Kick Me Jesus Through The Goal Posts Of Life

Get Your Biscuits In The Oven, And Your Buns In The Bed

Happiness is Lubbock in a rear view mirror.

How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

I Bought the Shoes that Just Walked Out on Me

I Changed Her Oil, She Changed My Life

I Don't Care if it Rains or Freezes 'Long as I Have My Plastic Jesus

I Don't Know Whether To Kill Myself Or Go Bowling

I Fell for Her, She Fell for Him, and He Fell for Me

I Fell In A Pile Of You And Got Love All Over Me

I Got Tears In My Ears From Lying On My Bed Crying On My Pillow Over You.

I Only Miss You On The Days That End In " Y "

I'd Rather Pass a Kidney Stone than Another Night With You

If I'd Killed You When I Wanted To, I'd be Out of Jail By Now

If Love Were Oil, I'd Be A Quart Low

I'll Marry You Tomorrow, But Let's Honeymoon Tonight.

I Spent My Last Ten Dollars on Birth Control and Beer

I'm So Miserable Without You, it's Almost like Having you Here

I Want a Beer as Cold as My Ex-Wife's Heart

I Was Looking Back to See If You Were Looking Back to See If I Was Looking Back to See if You Were Looking Back at Me

I Went Back to My Fourth Wife for the Third Time and Gave Her a Second Chance to Make a First

If I Can't Be Number One In Your Life, Then Number Two On You

If Love Were Oil, I'd Be A Quart Low

If My Nose Was Running Money, Honey, I'd Blow It All on You

If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me

If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead?

If You Don't Leave Me, I'll Find Someone Who Will

Jesus Loves Me But He Can't Stand You

Loving here, living there, and lying in between --

Mama tried to turn me to Jesus, but I turned to the devil's ways. And I turned out to be the only hell my mama ever raised

My John Deere Was Breaking Your Field, While Your Dear John Was Breaking My Heart

Never Went to Bed With an Ugly Woman but I Sure Woke Up With a Few

Queen Of My Double-Wide Trailer

Red Necks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer

She Walked Across My Heart Like It Was Texas

Thank God and Greyhound You're Gone

Thanks to the Cathouse, I'm in the Doghouse With You

There Ain't Enough Room in my Fruit Of The Looms to Hold All My Lovin' For You

Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for L.A.

Velcro Arms, Teflon Heart

What Made Milwaukee Famous Has Made a Loser Out of Me

Would Jesus Wear A Rolex On His Television Show?

You Done Stomped on My Heart and Mashed That Sucker Flat

You Shot the TV but You Were Aiming at Me

You'd think my Bed was a Bus Stop, the Way You Come and Go

You're the Hangnail In My Life, And I Can't Bite You Off

You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly

Crazy

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right. - Jack Kerouac

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted - Martin Luther King Jr.

Cricket

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been given out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game! - Washington Cricket League

Crime

It was more than a crime; it was a blunder -- Joseph Fouche. Also attributed to Tallyrand

The individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense; first, he is guilty against human conscience, and, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges. --- Mikhail Bakunin

Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law. - Albert Camus

Criminal

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation. - Clarence Darrow

Crisis

"Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living that wears you out." -Anton Chekhov

Criticism

Criticism is prejudice made plausible -- Mark Twain

Many critics are like a woodpecker, who, instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk pecking holes in the bark to discover some little worm or other - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Crowds

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. --Yogi Berra

Crumb, R

Hey kids, while you're out smashing the state keep a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts. - R Crumb

Cult

A cult is a religion with no political power - Tom Wolfe

Culture

"If I added spaghetti, the detained Italians sent me an engrossed testimonial and everybody else objected. If I put pierogi and mazovian noodles on the table, the Poles were happy and the rest disconsolate. Irish stew was no good for the English and English marmalade was gunpowder to the Irish. The Scotch mistrusted both. The Welsh took what they could get." -- Henry Curran, Ellis Island commissioner. Found on the menu of Kelly's Ellis Island Restaurant & Pub, which offers everything from St. Louis spare ribs to vegetarian baked penne pasta.

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams - Mary Ellen Kelly

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future. - Albert Camus

Curmudgeon

A curmudgeon's reputation for malevolence is undeserved. They're neither warped nor evil at heart. They don't hate mankind, just mankind's absurdities. They're just as sensitive and soft-hearted as the next guy, but they hide their vulnerability beneath a crust of misanthropy. They ease the pain by turning hurt into humor. . . They attack maudlinism because it devalues genuine sentiment. . . Nature, having failed to equip them with a serviceable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit. Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can't compromise their standards and can't manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse - Jon Winokur

D

Danger

Danger lies not in what we don't know, but in what we think we know that just ain't so. - Mark Twain

Daydreaming

I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering. - Steven Wright

Deadlines

Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn't do nothing. -- Duke Ellington.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams

DC

Ninety percent of the people you meet in this town spend 100 percent of their time telling you how great they are, and they can't move and talk at the same time. So they stop to brag and you can just slide right on past them. -- Jerry 'Bama' Washington

Death

I've left this life with no rancour, I'll never have toothache again, Now I lie in the communal grave, the communal grave of time. - Georges Brassens

We thought the years would last forever,
They are all gone now, the days
We thought would not come for us are here.

- Kenneth Rexroth, elegy in memory of his first wife, Andrée

Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. - - last words of Pancho Villa

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dryrot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time

- Jack London, sailor, tramp, gold miner, author

[On the other hand, London committed suicide at age 40 leading Ford Maddox Ford to say, "Like Peter Pan, he never grew up, and he lived his own stories with such intensity that he ended by believing them himself."]

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. - WALT WHITMAN

If I shouldn't be alive
When the robins come,
Give the one in red cravat
A memorial crumb.

If I couldn't thank you,
Being just asleep,
You will know I 'm trying
With my granite lip! - Emily Dickinson

I've seen a dying eye
Run round and round a room
In search of something as it seemed,
Then cloudier become
And then be soldered down
Without disclosing what it be
'Twere blessed to have seen. - Emily Dickinson

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man\'s death diminishes me,