E F G H
A-D I-L M-P Q-Z
E
Eating
If you are what you eat and
you don't know what you're eating, do you know who you are? -
Claude Fischler
Eccentricity
In history, stagnant
waters, whether they be the stagnant waters of custom or those
of despotism, harbor no life; life is dependent on the ripples
created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life
and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must
countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if
one wants to live at all. - Herbert Read
Ecology
Laws of Ecology:
(1) Everything is connected to everything else. (2) Everything
must go somewhere. (3) Nature knows best. (4) There is no such
thing as a free lunch. -- Barry Commoner
Bergeron's epitaph
for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in
big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer
people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE
TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. . . Only he didn't say 'doggone.'" -
Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
"When we
try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything
else in the Universe." -- John Muir, "My First Summer
in the Sierra"
"Heaven
is under our feet, as well as over our heads." -- Henry
David Thoreau
I heard the song of the world's
last whale
As I rocked in the moonlight
And reefed the sail.
It'll happen to you
Also without fail
If it happens to me
Sang the world's last whale.
- Pete Seeger
Economics
A study of economics
usually reveals that the best time to buy anything was last year.
- Marty Allen
Editing
Editing should
be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather
than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor
to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How
can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and
avoid "How can I show him how I would write it, if it were
my piece.' -- James Thurber
Editors
A person employed
on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from
the chaff, and to see to it that the chaff is printed -- Elbert
Hubbard
Eating through
a text, leaf and branch, like tent caterpillars, leaving everywhere
their mark -- Renata Adler's description of editors
Education
Never try to
teach a pig how to sing. It's a waste of time and it annoys the
pig -- Paul Dickson
Education is
a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy,
no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enclave. At home a friend,
abroad in introduction, in solitude a solace, and in society
an ornament. -- Joseph Addison
The object of
education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout
their lives. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins
Education: a
debt due from present to future generations -- George Peabody
Education is
what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten -
B.F. Skinner
Education is
a progressive discovery of our own ignorance -- Will Durant
Provocative thinking
and the American university seem never to have got on well together
-- V. L. Parrington
The ink of a
scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. -- Mohammed
The secret of
education is respecting the pupil -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The things taught
in schools are not an education but the means of an education
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is of interest
to note what while some dolphins are reported to have learned
English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human
being has been reported to have learned dolphinese -- Carl Sagan
A university
is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in
students. - John Ciardi
Educational
TV
Educational television
should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable
expectations and eventual disappointment when your child discovers
that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books
and dance around the room with royal blue chickens. - Fran Lebowitz
Effort
If we always
do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always
got -- Toni Worst
If at first you
don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no sense being
a damn fool about it. - W.C. Fields
Einstein Albert
How do I work?
I grope. - Albert Einstein
Elections
Anything important
is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote
on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do. -- Will
Rogers
A man that would expect to train
lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that
thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer
and remains at large. - Finley Peter Dunne
Eloquence
The prime purpose
of eloquence is to keep other people from talking -- Louis Vermeil
Efficiency
Our quarrel with
efficiency is not that it gets things done, but that it is a
thief of time when it leaves us no leisure to enjoy ourselves
and that it frays our nerves in trying to get things done perfectly.
An American editor worries his hair gray to see that no typographical
mistakes appear on the pages of his magazine. The Chinese editor
is wiser than that. He wants to leave his readers the supreme
satisfaction of discovering a few typographical mistakes for
themselves. More than that, a Chinese magazine can begin printing
serial fiction and forget about it halfway. In America it might
bring the roof down on the editors, but in China it doesn't matter
simply because it doesn't matter. -- Lin Yutang, a Chinese writer
of the thirties
Emerson
He half created
the climate of opinion by which he was nurtured -- Carlos Baker
I could readily see in Emerson
. . . the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the
world was made he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
- Herman Melville, speaking of Ralph
Empire
We have
pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed
their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows
and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some
dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten
millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name
of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred
concubines and other slaves of our business partner Sultan of
Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so,
by the Providences of God — and the phrase is the government's,
not mine — we are a World Power. - Mark Twain on our
nation-building in the Philippines
Our real task. . . is to devise
a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this
position of disparity [U.S. military- economic supremacy]...
To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and
day-dreaming... We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal
objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards,
and democratization... we are going to have to deal in straight
power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better. - George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning. U.S.
State Department. 1948
The reluctant
obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it is
worth. -- Macaulay
All empires fall
sooner or later - Boston Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino
Enemy
Why all of a
sudden this unrest and confusion. (How solemn the faces have
become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders, and said that there
are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
-- Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)
Encyclopedia
To me, the charm
of an encyclopedia is that it knows - and I needn't - Francis
Yeats-Brown
Epithets
A range of exhausted
volcanos -- Disraeli's description of the opposition bench.
Errors
One error almost
compels another -- S.T. Coleridge
An American editor
worries his hair gray to see that no typographical mistakes appear
on the pages of his magazine. The Chinese editor is wiser than
that. He wants to leave his readers the supreme satisfaction
of discovering a few typographical mistakes for themselves --
Lin Yutang
Etc.
How pierceful
grows the hazy yon!/How myrtle petaled thou!/For spring hat sprung
the cyclotron/How high browse thou, brown cow? -- Churchy LaFemme,
Pogo, 1950
Pretty damn seldom
where my bag go. She no fly. You no more fitten master baggage
than Jesus Christ's sake, that's all I hope -- Japanese tourist
complaining about lost baggage, quoted by the New Yorker in the
1950s
Ethnicity
It is generally established
that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the
economic structure that compels one worker to compete against
another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the
exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition.
- Jean Toomer, 1919
Only in America
-- Yogi Berra upon hearing that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish
Lenin asked Trotsky
whether he was a Jew; Trotsky replied no, he was a social democrat.
You're ofay,
I'm spade. Let's blow -- Louis Armstrong on meeting Jack Teagarden
You can not spill
a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole
world. -- Herman Melville
Evil
When choosing
between two evils, I always like to tak ethe one I haqven't tried
before - Mae West
Exclamation
points
People think
that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter
will make their point forcefully. I tell them they're allowed
two exclamation points in their whole life. - Linda Landis Andrews,
University of Illinois at Chicago
Get rid of all
those exclamation points. It's like laughing at your own joke.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Existentialism
I've opened my
heart to the benign indifference of the universe -- Albert Camus
Man can will
nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no
one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the
midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no
other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny
than the one he forges for himself on this earth. - Jean Paul
Sartre
Existentialism
means that no one else can take a bath for you - Delmore Schwartz
Experience
Though burned,
you are hopeful, experience cannot tell you;
Experience is what you do not want to experience -- Robert Lowell
Experience is
that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when
you make it again. - F. P. Jones
Exploration
We shall not
cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring will
be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first
time. --TS Eliot, Four Quartets
Extremists
The question
is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists
we will be...The nation & the world are in dire need of creative
extremists. - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr
F
Failure
I've missed more
than 9,000 shots in my life -- Michael Jordan
Faith
Keep the faith,
baby -- Adam Clayton Powell
I respect faith, but doubt
is what gets you an education - Wilson Mizner
The way to see
by faith is to shut the eye of reason -- Benjamin Franklin
A man is accepted
into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what
he knows. -- Mark Twain
Fame
I am nobody!
Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell
They'd banish us you know. . .
How dreary to
be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog! -- Emily Dickinson
I'm as big a
hoodlum as there is in Chicago -- Jackie "The Lackey"
Cernone in a complaining phone call to the Chicago AP bureau
after the news service referred to him as a "minor Mafia
figure."
What is the
end of fame?
'Tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapor;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their "midnight taper,"
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse a bust.
- Lord Byron
Family
A family is like
having a bowling alley installed in your brain -- Martin Mull
Fanaticism
Fanaticism consists
in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim --
George Santayana
Farming
[Farmers should]
raise less corn and more Hell! -- Mary Ellen Lease
There are three
great crops raised in Nebraska. One is a crop of corn, one a
crop of freight rates and one a crop of interest. One is produced
by farmers who by sweat and toil farm the land. The other two
produced by men who sit in their offices and behind their bank
counters -- Editor of a farm journal, early 20th century
Fascism
Fascism doesn't
start with concentration camps...That's where it ends. -- Jon
Bishop
The liberty of
a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of
private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their
democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism --
ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any
controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
[The fascist
economy] is organized by the producers themselves, under the
supreme direction and control of the state -- Alfredo Rocco,
Italian fascist economic theorist.
If fascism came
to America it would be on a program of Americanism -- Huey Long
The product of
the transition from the market capitalism of the independent
producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly. -- Adrian
Lyttelton, biographer of Mussollini
Fascism after
all is only a development of capitalism.-- George Orwell
This is what
separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to
serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours
her truth. -- Albert Camus to a German friend on World War II
What happened
was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little,
to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated
in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that
the government had to act on information which the people could
not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand
it, it could not be released because of national security. ~
The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people
that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole
process of government growing remoter and remoter. ~ To live
in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to
believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political
awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop.
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained
or, on occasion, 'regretted.' ~ Believe me this is true. Each
act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little
worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking
occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will
join you in resisting somehow. ~ Suddenly it all comes down,
all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more
accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was
required of most of us: that we did nothing) . . . You remember
everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised
beyond repair. -- German professor in They Thought They
Were Free by Milton Mayer
If it is admitted
that the 19th-century has been the century of socialism, liberalism
and democracy, it does not follow that the 20th must also be
the century of liberalism, socialism and democracy. Political
doctrines pass; peoples remain. It is to be expected that this
century may be that of authority, a century of the "right,"
a fascist century. If the 19th was the century of the individual
it may be expected that this one may be the century of "collectivism"
and therefore the century of the state. - Benito Mussolini,
The Doctrine of Fascism, 1932
Fashion
Fashion is a
form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every
six months - Oscar Wilde
I have always had a sacred veneration
for anyone I observed to be a little out of repair in his person,
as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher - Jonathan Swift
Fast Lane
The trouble with life in the
fast lane is that you get to the other end in an awful hurry.
- John Jensen
Fat
I was so far
that when I hanted to haul ass, I had to make two trips -- Dolly
Parton
Fear
We will not be
driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our
history and remember that we are not descended from fearful men,
not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and
to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. - Edward
R. Murrow, 1954
Ferlinghetti,
Lawrence
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
Fighting
When elephants
fight it is the grass that suffers. -- African proverb
Film
If there's ever a problem,
I film it and it's no longer a problem. It's a film - Andy Warhol
Final Judgement
Do not wait for
the last judgment. It takes place every day - Al Camus
First Amendment
A few years back, a man high
up in the CIA named Ray Cline was asked if the CIA, by its surveillance
of protest organizations in the United States, was violating
the free speech provision of the First Amendment. He smiled and
said: 'It's only an amendment.' - Howard Zinn
What we have
there is what should have been at least three separate amendments,
and maybe as many as five, hooked together willy-nilly in one
big Dr. Seuss animal of a nonstop sentence. It is as though a
starving person, rescued at last, blurted out all the things
he or she had dreamed of eating while staying barely alive on
bread and water -- Kurt Vonnegut
Fishing
There's a fine line between
fishing and standing on the shore looking like an idiot. - Steven
Wright
Flag
But your flag
decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.
They're already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for,
And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.
- John Prine
Food
"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.
Fooling
You can fool too many
of the people too much of the time - James Thurber
Foolish
The worm thinks it strange and
foolish that man does not eat his books. - Rabindranath Tagore
If fifty million
people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing - Anatole
France
Every man is
a fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists of
not exceeding the limit. - Elbert Hubbard
Football
[I have] found
similar but greater interest in watching an aging Harvard professor
negotiate the Widener Library steps with a large armful of books
after a bad ice storm -- John Kenneth Galbraith
College football
is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty
played instead of the students, and even more interesting if
the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken
arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution
in the loss to humanity. - H. L. Mencken
Foreign Affairs
Come to our bracing
desert
Where eternity is eventful
For the weather-glass
is set at Alas,
The thermometer at Resentful
Come to our well-run desert
Where anguish arrives by cable
And the deadly sins
May be bought in tins
With instructions on the label --
For the Time Being, WH Auden
In the nightmare
of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark
And the living nations wait
Each sequestered in its hate -- In Memory of W B Yeats, WH Auden
History teaches
us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted
all other alternatives -- Abba Eban
A governmnent
official explained to us that under Clinton our foreign policy
was led by Jews who believed in the New Testament. Now our foreign
policy under Bush is being led by Christians who believe in the
Old Testament - TPR
Foreigners
Foreigner: A
villain regarded with various and varying degrees of toleration,
according to his conformity to the eternal standard of our conceit
and the shifting one of our interests. - Ambrose Bierce
Fortune
Fortune smiles
on the well prepared -- Anonymous (Latin)
Fourth of
July
That which distinguishes
this day from all others is that both orators and artillerymen
shoot blank cartridges. - John Burroughs, July 4, 1859
Freedom
When the Iron Curtain fell,
all of the West rejoiced that the East would become just as free
as the West. It was never supposed to be the other way around.
- Rick Falkvinge, founder and the leader of Swedish Pirate
Party
Much madness is divinest
sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur; - you're straightway dangerous
And handled with a chain.
- Emily Dickenson
The jaws of power are
always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if
possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing
- John Adams
If there is no
struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom
and yet deprecate agitation are people who want crops without
plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.
That struggle might be a moral one; it might be a physical one;
it might be both moral and physical, but it must be struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. - Frederick Douglass
We cannot defend
freedom abroad by deserting it at home. - Edward R. Murrow
Oppression and
harassment are a small price to live in the land of the free
- C. Montgomery Burns, The Simpsons
I never could
believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready
booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled
to be ridden -- English republican Richard Rumbold on the
scaffold, 1685
Those who want
the government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are
like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit
suicide. -- Harry Truman
Unscrew the locks
from the door! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
-- Walt Whitman
Freedom is the
right to tell people what they don't want to hear -- George
Orwell
The greatest
right in the world is the right to be wrong. - Harry Weinberger
Every new generation
must wage a new war for freedom against new forces which seek
through new devices to enslave mankind -- Progressive Party
platform, 1924
I believe there
are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people
by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by
violent and sudden usurpations -- James Madison
It is my impression
that the Capitol is now rather more like the Kremlin during Stalin's
feisty reign than a place where the citizens used to wander about
and feel at home . . . We have made so many enemies all around
the world that, in the name of terrorism, a quite effective police
state has ever so gradually replaced the old republics. . . When
the people dislike the state as much as the state dislikes them,
what happens next? -- Gore Vidal's memoirs
Slaves become
so debased by their chains as to lose even the desire of breaking
from them -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The instinct of nearly all societies
is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins
by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you.
If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.
- Jean Cocteau
I prefer to die
as a free man struggling to create a human community than as
a pawn of empire. -- William Appleton Williams
Sir, there have
existed in every age and every country, two distinct orders of
men -- the lovers of freedom and devoted advocates of power.
-- Robert Haynes, 1830
Freedom and whiskey
go together - Robert Burns
Freedom of
speech
Free thought, necessarily
involving freedom of speech & press, I may tersely define
thus: no opinion a law - no opinion a crime." - Alexander
Berkman
In America you
can say anything you want -- as long as it doesn't have any effect
-- Paul Goodman
The censorial
power is in the people over the government and not in the government
over the people -- James Madison
If you can't
say 'fuck,' you can't say 'fuck the government.' -- Lennie Bruce
An unconditional
right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I
consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment --
Justice Hugo Black in NY Times Company v. Sullivan
Free press
Make no laws whatever
concerning speech and speech will be free; so soon as you make
a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have
a hundred lawyers proving that `freedom does not mean abuse,
nor liberty license;' and they will define freedom out of existence.
Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination
to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. -
Voltairine de Cleyre
Friends
My glory was I had such
friends - Yeats
Friendship
If you pick up
a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.
This is the principal difference between a dog and a man --
Mark Twain
It takes your
enemy and your friend, working together to hurt you: the one
to slander you, and the other to bring the news to you - Mark
Twain
Funerals
Always go to
other people's funerals. Otherwise they won't come to yours.
-- Yogi Berra
John Henry Faulk
tells the story of Totsie who was run down by the Katy Flyer.
His remains were so scattered that the family leased four acres,
just to be safe. The minister said it was "the biggest funeral
he had ever preached. Acreage-wise."
Future
It would great to have a big
ocean liner - and that is an important and exciting goal. But
we don't have it - yet. We have a small oar-propelled boat. Let's
work hard to turn that into a larger fishing boat, and we can
do this. From there we can build a yet bigger boat; and by that
time we will be able to reach out for and get a still bigger
boat and then be in position to get our ocean liner. - Julius
Nyerere
Real generosity
toward the future lies in giving all to the present -- Albert
Camus
More than any
time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads
to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.
Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. - Woody
Allen
The earth belongs
in usufruct to the living -- Thomas Jefferson
Cause no harm
to the seventh generation yet unborn -- Original Instructions
to the Alkonkian people
I like the dreams
of the future better than the history of the past -- Thomas
Jefferson
G
Galbraith,
John Kenneth
Politics is not
the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the
disastrous and the unpalatable.
Nothing is so
admirable in politics as a short memory.
Few can believe
that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that
is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
Wealth, in even
the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
It has been the
acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx
the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all
others with indignation.
Much literary
criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is
a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness,
the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
Gandhi
I have learned through bitter
experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as
heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled
can be transmuted into a power that can move the world. - Mahatma
Gandhi
It is alarming and also nauseating
to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing
as fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked
up the steps of the vice regal palace . . . to parley on equal
terms with the representatives of the king-emperor - Winston
Churchill
Generals
"I fired MacArthur
because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I
didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although
he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was,
half to three-quarters of them would be in jail." - Harry
S. Truman
Generations
Every age and
generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as
the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no property
in man, neither has any generation a property in the generations
which are to follow -- Thomas Paine
Genius
Compose yourself, Archie.
Why taunt me? Why upbraid me? I am merely a genius, not a god
- Nero Wolfe, hero of the novels of Rex Stout
Genius is childhood
recaptured. - Charles Baudelaire
Gentle
If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't
be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to
be alive - Philip Marlowe in response to the question, "How
can a hard man be so gentle?"
God
If God created us in his own
image we have more than reciprocated - Voltaire
Some people are
happy inside the church, some are happier outside. Those who
prefer to stay outside should write Nature with a capital N.
They should bless and venerate the Nature that composed mankind.
That would leave a thin wall between them and those who are inside
and write God with a capital G. If you knock, it can be heard
on both sides. The disagreement is about the spelling of a word
- Thor Heyerdahl
God don't make
no mistakes. That's how he got to be God -- Archie Bunker
I sometimes think
that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability
- Oscar Wilde
If only God would
give me some clear sign. Like making a large deposit in my name
in a Swiss bank. - Woody Allen
It is impossible
to imagine the universe run by a wise, just, omnipotent God,
but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If
such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board
of a corporation that is losing money. - HL Mencken
Call on God,
but row away from the rocks. - Indian proverb
Golf
Golf is a good
walk spoiled - Mark Twain
Gospel
Preach the gospel
at all times. If necessary, use words -- Saint Francis of Assisi
In western formal
choral tradition, there's an aim for a blend so you cannot distinguish
where the parts are coming from. With congregational singing,
I could drive up to the church and they could be singing and
I could tell you who was there, because the individual timbres
of a voice never disappear. That congregational style is one
of the things I think is important for democracy -- the individual
does not have to disappear, and it does not operate as an anti-collective
expression - Bernice Johnson Reagon
Government
The whole purpose
of government is to see that the little fellow who has no special
interest gets a fair deal - Harry S Truman
A government which
robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw
To be governed is to be watched
over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented,
closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed,
evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither
the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue. . . To be governed means that
at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered,
entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented,
licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed,
set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute,
trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured,
mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the
general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of
complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued,
hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned,
judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and
to cap all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged and dishonored. That
is government, that is its justice and its morality. - P.J.
Proudhon
Behind the ostensible government
sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and
acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this
invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt
business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship
of the day. - Theodore Roosevelt
Corrupted by wealth and power,
your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've
got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic
waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters
brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in
the same Wall Street kitchen - Huey Long
Sometimes it is said that man
cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then,
be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels
in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this
question. - Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
Every government
is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed - IF
Stone
As I get older
. . . I become more convinced that good government is not a substitute
for self-government - Dwight Morrow
The police state
that politicians are building isn't some cartoony reproduction
of Nazi Germany; it's an America of the future that looks much
like the United States of today, but works as if the whole country
has been turned into an airport security checkpoint. It'll be
like Mexico, with everybody averting their eyes as the cops stroll
by, but with better plumbing. It's a country that has a familiar
flag, regular elections and outraged civil liberties columnists,
but where it's easier than ever to get yourself arrested for
things that our parents wouldn't have considered crimes - or
just for annoying the wrong people. Yes, America is becoming
a police state. But unless you pay attention, you might not notice
until it's too late. - J.D. TUCCILLE
"The natural
tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse -- that
is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and
less satisfactory to those who support it." - HL Mencken
When it shall
be said in any country in the world, 'My poor are happy; neither
ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are
empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in
want, the taxes are not oppressive -- when these thing can be
said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government."
-- Thomas Paine
The budget should
be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should
be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and
controlled. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 B.C
The care of human
life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and
only object of good government -- Thomas Jefferson
You take a billion
here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about
some real money. -- Everett Dirksen
The average age
of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage
to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from
courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance
to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacence
to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again
into bondage. - Attributed to Alexander Tytler
If people behaved
like governments, you'd call the cops. - Kelvin Throop
The art of a
government is the organization of idolatry - George Bernard
Shaw
The legitimate
object of government is to do for a community of people what
they need to have done, but cannot do at all or cannot do so
well for themselves, in their separate or individual capacities.
- Abraham Lincoln.
Grace
[Before meal]
Benedictus Benedicat per Jesum Christum Dominum Nostrum. Amen
[After meal]
Benedicto Benedicatur per Jesum Christum Dominum Nostrum. Amen
Gratitude
If you pick up
a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.
This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. -Mark
Twain
Gravitas
'A mysterious
carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind;' -- which
definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would say,
deserved to be wrote in letters of gold. - Laurence Sterne,
Tristam Shandy
Gravity
It's a good thing we have gravity,
or else when birds died they'd just stay right up there. Hunters
would be all confused. - Steven Wright
Greatness
Percival is a
great man, but he is not a good man. -- Amy Lowell of her astronomer
brother
Greed
You can't have everything.
. . Where would you put it? - Steven Wright
Growth
Growth for the
sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell -- Edward Abbey
Guns
Certainly one
of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government,no matter
how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and
bear arms.... The right of citizens to bear arms is just one
guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against
the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically
has proven to be always possible." - Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
H
Habeas Corpus
Why suspend the
habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history
of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the
habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have
been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well
have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful
they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein
the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that
operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation
almost prepared to live under its constant suspension. -Thomas
Jefferson to James Madison, 1788
Habit
Habit is habit,
and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed
down the stairs one step at a time -- Mark Twain.
Happiness
Let us all be
happy and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the
money to do it with. - Artemus Ward
What is happiness except the
simple harmony between a man and the life he leads? Albert Camus
Harvard
[Harvard students]
learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and
enter a room gently (which might as well be acquired at a dancing
school) [and graduate] as great blockheads as ever, only more
proud and self-conceited -- Benjamin Franklin
Hate
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, poet of ancient Ireland.
Hawthorne,
Nathaniel
But Hester Prynne,
with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a
period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had habituated
herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign
to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as
the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding
a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart
had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed
as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she
had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions,
and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticising
all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for
the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows,
the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes
had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport
into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair,
Solitude! These had been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and
they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss
Health
If I'd known I was gonna
live this long I'd have taken better care of myself. - Eubie
Blake, at age 100
Be careful about reading
health books. You may die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Heart
The greatest challenge of the
day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart - a revolution
which has to start with each one of us. - Dorothy Day
Hell
Hell is truth seen too late
- Anonymous
Maybe this world is another
planet's hell - Aldous Huxley
Helplessness
If you think
of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that
you will create a despotic government to be your master. The
wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular
sense that they are helpless and ineffectual -- Frank Herbert,
"The Dosadi Experiment"
Hero
A hero is no braver than
an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer - Ralph
Waldo Emerson
This thing of being a
hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die - Will
Rogers
History
History may not
repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot. -- Mark Twain
A society without
a history is like a man without a memory - Unknown
Until lions have
their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the
hunter. - African proverb
It has been said that
though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps
because they can be useful to him in this respect that he tolerates
their existence. - Samuel Butler
History is the
sum total of the things they're not telling us. - Don DeLillo
To be ignorant
of what happened before you were born is to be forever a child
-- Cicero
The past is a
foreign country; they do things differently there. -- Anonymous
I never realized
that there was history, close at hand, beside my very own home.
I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles
at the foot of our farm was history. -- Stephen Leacock
An account mostly
false, of event unimportant, which are brought about by rulers
mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. - Ambrose Bierce
History repeats
itself. That's one of the things that's wrong with history --
Clarence Darrow
History is nothing
but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead. -- Voltaire
We learn from
history that we do not learn from history. -- George Frierich
Wilhelm Hegel
History is a
nightmare from which we are trying to awaken. -- James Joyce
To understand
the choices open to people of another time, one must limit oneself
to what they knew; see the past in its own clothes, as it were,
not in ours. -- Barbara Tuchman
Hollywood
Hollywood is
a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars
- Fred Allen
Homosexuals
The Bible contains
six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals.
That does not mean God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just
that they need more supervision - Lynn Lavner
Honesty
Honesty is no
substitute for experience -- Texas politician
Honor
The louder he talked of
his honor, the faster we counted our spoons - Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Hope
Hope don't pay the cable - Anonymous
Horse sense
Horse sense is
the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
- W. C. Fields
Humans
Detestable race, continue to
expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade . . .
Convert again into putrescent
matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed
. . .
Breed, crowd, encroach, expand,
expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens. - Edna St. Vincent Millay
A human being is part of a whole,
called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something
separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons
nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty - Albert Einstein
Humor
A joke is a very
serious thing. -- Winston Churchill
When I ad-lib
something, I laugh. I laugh for the same reasons the audience
does; I've never heard that joke before -- and I'm just as surprised
as they are. -- Steve Allen
Hope
Nothing that is worth doing
can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by
hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete
sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must
be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished
alone; therefore we must be saved by love. - Reinhold Niebuhr
Hope has two beautiful daughters:
anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to
change them. - Saint Augustine
In the depth
of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible
summer. - Albert Camus
Hunger
To those who
have hunger, give bread. To those who have bread, give a hunger
for Justice. - Latin American grace
Hunting
The unspeakable
in pursuit of the uneatable. -- Oscar Wilde
Hurt
It takes your
enemy and your friend, working together to hurt you: the one
to slander you, and the other to bring the news to you - Mark
Twain
Huxley Aldous
Contrary to common
belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy
the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally
imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is
required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history.
As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore
the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared
were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there
would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us
of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much
that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared
that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the
truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared
we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become
a trivial culture. . . As Huxley remarked in Brave New World
Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever
on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account
man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984,
Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave
New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short,
Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that
what we love will ruin us. - Neil Postman comparing Brave
New World and 1984