|
I
Ideas
To die for an idea is to set a rather high
price on conjecture - Anatole France
If nature has made any
one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,
it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which
an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it
to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into
the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess
himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses
the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who
receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives
light without darkening me. - Thomas Jefferson
[Charles Hodge, who taught at Princeton Seminary in the early
19th century] boasted that in his fifty years of teaching he
had never broached a new or original idea -- Perry Miller
All ideas are beyond them.
They can only grasp events -- HL Mencken
It is better to have enough ideas for some
of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas
at all. - Edward de Bono
Ideals
Asked by a young state
legislator whether he thought ideals had any place in politics,
Louisiana Governor Earl Long replied, "Hell yes. I think
you should use ideals or any other damn thing you can get your
hands on."
Ignoring
Don't even ignore them
-- Sam Goldwyn
Imagination
Captain MacWhirr of the
freighter Nan Shan, which he headed straight into a typhoon,
had "just enough imagination to carry him through each successive
day." -- Joseph Conrad in Typhoon
Imagination is more important
than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the
world. - Albert Einstein
Immigration
Illegal aliens have always
been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian. - Robert
Orben
Imortality
I don't want to achieve immortality through
my work. I want to achieve it by not dying - Woody Allen
If I have any beliefs about
immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to
heaven, and very, very few persons - James Thurber
Impossible
The word "impossible"
is not in my dictionary. In fact, everything between "herring"
and "marmalade" appears to be missing. - Dirk Gently,
"Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"
Improvisation
You have to practice improvisation
- Art Tatum
Indians
The white man knows how to make everything,
but he does not know how to distribute it. - Sitting Bull
We must act with vindictive
earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men,
women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of the
case. -- General William Tecumseh Sherman in a dispatch to
President Grant
Independence
I'd rather sit on a pumpkin
and have it all to myself than to be crowded on a velvet stool.
-- Henry Thoreau
Whoso would be a man must
be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not
be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be
goodness. -- Ralph W. Emerson
If a man does not keep
pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different
drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured
or far away. - Henry Thoreau
Indifference
I don't know, I don't care,
and it doesn't make any difference -- Jack Kerouac
Individualism
Each person behaves as
though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. . .
As for his transactions with his follow citizens, he may mix
among them, but does not feel them; he exist only in himself
and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in
his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of
society." -- Alexi de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
Inferiority
Nobody can make you feel
inferior without your permission. - Eleanor Roosevelt
Infinity
Only two things are infinite, the universe
and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former - Albert
Einstein
Information
Quite honestly, Minister,
I want a job where I don't spend endless hours circulating information
which isn't relevant about subjects that don't matter to people
who aren't interested -- Sir Humphrey Appleby in 'The Complete
Yes, Minister'
Information wants to be
free - Jonathan Postel
Innocence
Experience, which destroys
innocence, also leads one back to it - James Baldwin
Innovation
Innovation is hard to schedule.
-- Dan Fylstra
Insanity
Insanity is doing the same
thing over and over and expecting a different result -- Albert
Einstein
Insincerity
They have a habit of looking
at you and conveying unfathomable depths of insincerity -- Patricia
Strauss of Labor politicians in the 1940s
Inspiration
You can't wait for inspiration.
You have to go after it with a club - Jack London
Insults
A $400 suit on him would
look like socks on a rooster -- Louisiana Governor Earl Long
of an opponent
Intellectuals
Bloodless intellectuals
who sit just at the edge of the lamplight and dissect everything
in dry little voices. -- Raymond Chandler
The political calling of
the intellectual [is in] the unmasking of lies which sustain
irresponsible power - C. Wright Mills
Intelligence
[He] has the gift on compressing
the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts
- Winston Churchill
The intelligent man who is proud of his
intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his cell.
- Simone Weil
Who would give the exam?
-- Harvard's professor Kitteridge explaining why he had never
obtained a Ph.D.
Intelligence appears to
be the thing that enables a man to get along without education.
Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along
without the use of his intelligence - A. E. Wiggen
Internet
The Internet interprets
the US Congress as system damage and routes around it - Jeanne
DeVoto
Getting information off
the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. - Mitchell
Kapor
Give a person a fish and
you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet
and they won't bother you for weeks - Anonymous
While you are destroying
your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV,
we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most
uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our "CONFIG.SYS"
settings. - Dave Barry
There's a statistical theory
that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to
work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare.
Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true. - Ian Hart
It's important for us to
explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life
of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the
dark dungeons of the Internet. - George W. Bush
The largest experiment
in anarchy that we have ever had. - Eric Schmidt
Hooked on Internet? Help
Is a Just a Click Away - Unknown
Interpretation
Interpretation is the revenge
of the intellect upon art - Susan Sontag
Inventiveness
In the 18th century we
were incomparably the most inventive people in the world -- not
just the western world -- in the realm of politics and society.
We invented practically every major political institution we
have, and we have invented none since. -- Henry Steel Commanger
Inventions
Our inventions are wont
to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious
things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end - Henry
Thoreau
Iraq
"Our armies do not come into your
cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.
Your wealth has been stripped of you by unjust men ... The people
of Baghdad shall flourish under institutions which are in consonance
with their sacred laws." - General F S Maude, commander
of British forces in Iraq, 1917
Irish
We ~ are no petty
people. we are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the
people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet,
the people of Parnell. We have created most of themodern literature
of this contry. We have created the bet of its political intelligence.
-- WB Yeats on the Anglo-Irish during a debate on divorce
in the Irish Senate, 1925
Isms
There are only three isms
I'm against: fascism, communism and snake-oilism -- Earl Long
Issues
Issues aren't real. Issues
are just masses of opposing scenarios vying to become perceptions.
-- Mark Alan Stamaty
J
Jacobs, Jane
A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing
forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. . . The collapse
of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, makes
it more likely that others will give way . . . until finally
the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.
Cities have the capability of providing
something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are
created by everybody.
Jesus
Jesus' life didn't go well.
He didn't reach his earning potential. He didn't have the respect
of his colleagues. His friends weren't loyal. His life wasn't
long. He didn't meet his soul mate. And he wasn't understood
by his mother. Yet I think I deserve all those things because
I'm so spiritual. -- Hugh Prather, "Spiritual Notes to
Myself"
Johnson, Lyndon
I don't want loyalty. I
want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window
at high noon and tgell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker
in my pocket. -- LBJ speaking of a prospective assistant
So dumb he can't fart and
chew gum at the same time. -- LBJ on Gerald Ford. It was later
said that Betty Ford's birth control divorce was to give Jerry
some chewing gum.
Did you ever think that
making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your
leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else. --
LBJ to John Kenneth Galbraith
Journalism
To be a newspaper reporter,
you need two things: You need to know how to type. And you need
a job at a newspaper. - John Doyle, news editor of the Green
Bay Chronicle
As a method of sending
a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the
earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a
practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers
the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one
begins to doubt . . . for after the rocket quits our air and
really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated
nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might
have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark
College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does
not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need
to have something better than a vacuum against which to react
. . . Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out
daily in high schools. - New York Times editorial, 1920
JOURNALIST - A rat-like
cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability. The
capacity to steal other peoples' ideas and phrases is also invaluable
- HL Mencken
We were perceived as a
lower form of life, amoral, half-literate hacks in cheap suits.
This I was assigned to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Nashville
in the late 1940s and, with other reporters, was given lunch
at a card table set up in a hallway to protect the dining room
from contamination. -- Richard Harwood
If you're not careful the
media will have you hating the people who are being oppressed,
and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. -- Malcolm
X
Journalism consists largely
in saying "Lord Jones died" to people who never knew
that Lord Jones was alive. -- G. K. Chesterton
A profession whose business
is to explain to others what it really does not understand --
Lord Northcliffe
Journalism consists in
buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten
cents a pound --- Charles A. Dana
If you don't want to work,
become a reporter. That awful power, the public opinion of the
nation, was created by a horde of self-complacent simpletons
who failed at ditch and shoemaking and fetched up journalism
on their way to poorhouse - Mark Twain
Newspapers are unable,
seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the
collapse of civilization -- G B Shaw
"The average newspaper,
especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly
evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist
boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste
of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station
lawyer." -- HL Mencken
Paul (Race Horse) Mitchell,
57, of one address right after another, died on the street here
yesterday, unexpectedly, and after a long illness, but mostly
from two bullet wounds in his chest... The grief, if it may be
allowed to pass for that, was dry-eyed enough but it had those
overtones of sincerity which lend a definite, if indefinable,
dignity to the human spirit on such occasions. This is to say
that only one man was really glad the rascal was dead -- and
the police were looking for him. -- Harry Gabbett, Washington
Post, 1968
Remember this: many a good
story has been ruined by over-verification -- James Gordon Bennett
You cannot hope to bribe
or twist/Thank God the British journalist/ But seeing what the
man will do/ Unbribed, there is no occasion to -- Humbert Wolfe
A journalist is a man who
has missed his calling -- Bismarck
Drunkards, deadbeats and
bummers -- Harvard president Charles Eliot's description of reporters
in rejecting Joseph Pulitzer's offer to endow a journalism school.
Trying to be a first-rate
reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to
play Bach's St. Matthew Passion on a ukulele - Ben Bagdikian
Once you want something
from them, they've got you - IF Stone on official sources
ASSISTANT EDITOR: A mouse
learning to be a rat - Unknown
Judge
It has been said that a
judge is a member of the bar who once knew a governor -- Judge
Curtis Bok
Judgement
Good judgment comes from experience, and
a lot of that comes from bad judgment - Will Rogers
Juries
JURY: A group of 12 people,
who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and
business engagements, have failed to fool him. - HL Mencken
"It is not only [the juror's] right, but his duty, to find
the verdict according to his own understanding, judgement, and
conscience, through in direct opposition to the direction of
the court." -- John Adams, 1771
I consider the trial by jury as the only
anchor ever yet imagined by man by which a government can be
held to the principles of its constitution. - Thomas Jefferson.
Justice
Gradually it was disclosed
to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through
states, not between classes, nor between political parties --
but right through every human heart -- and all human hearts."
-- Alexander Sozhenitzyn
K
Kelly, Walt
There is no need to sally
forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human
are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that
on this very ground, with small flags waving & tiny blasts
of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he
be ours, he may be us.
Kindness
Human kindness has never
weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people.
A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. -Franklin D.
Roosevelt
King, Martin Luther
From an address by Martin
Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967: It is curious that the Americans, who calculate
so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not
realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological
and political defeat. The image of America will never again be
the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image
of violence and militarism. . .
A true revolution of values
will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many
of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called
to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will
be only an initial act.
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.
- "Letter from the Birmingham Jail", 1963
One day we must come to
see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men
and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make
their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than
flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial.
It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily
on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous
indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual
capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia,
Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no
concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say:
"This is not just." It will look at our alliance with
the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not
just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything
to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A
true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and
say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just."
. . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money
on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death.
Knowledge
It's what you learn after
you know it all that counts -- Baltimore Orioles manager Earl
Weaver
L
Labor
Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole
room lay in perfect silence. The tire builders stood in long
lines, touching each other, perfectly motionless, deafened by
the silence. A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the
revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing
tire tools. Now there was absolute stillness, no motion anywhere,
no sound. Out of the terrifying quiet came the wondering voice
of a big tire builder near the windows: "Jesus Christ, it's
like the end of the world." He broke the spell, the magic
moment of stillness. For now his awed words said the same thing
to every man, "We done it!' We stopped the belt! By God,
we done it!"' And men began to cheer hysterically, to shout
and howl in the fresh silence. Men wrapped long sinewy arms around
their neighbors' shoulders, screaming, "We done it! We done
it!" For the first time in history, American mass-production
workers had stopped a conveyor belt and halted the inexorable
movement of factory machinery. - Ruth McKenney, 'Industrial
Valley'
I can hire half the working class to kill
the other half. -- Jay Gould
If the workers of the world want to win,
all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have
nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The
workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than
all the property of the capitalists. As long as the workers keep
their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put theirs
there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing
to move, lying absolutely silent, they are more powerful than
all the weapons and instruments that the other side has for attack."
- Early 20th century labor organizer Joe Ettor
What does labor want?
We want more school houses and less jails,
More books and less arsenals,
More learning and less vice,
More constant work and less crime,
More leisure and less greed,
More justice and less revenge - Samuel Gompers, 1893
The rights and interests of the laboring
man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators,
but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has
given control of the property interests of the country - George
F Baer, spokesman for the mine operators in the 1902 Pennsylvania
coal strike.
Land
We abuse land because we regard it as a
commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to
which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
- Aldo Leopold
Language
The great enemy of clear
language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real
and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to
the long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting
out ink. In our time, political speech and writing are largely
the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has
to consist largely of euphemisms, question-begging and sheer
cloudy vagueness. Political language is designed to make lies
sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind. -- George Orwell
[I'll] discuss these issues
in plain English, the language my mother spoke, the language
the Holy Bible was wrote in -- Congressman Guffaw, a creation
of John Henry Faulk
If language is not correct,
then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not
what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this
remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes
astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence
there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters
above everything. -- Confucius
Last words
Either that wallpaper goes
or I do -- The supposed last words of Oscar Wilde
"I must begin Sanskrit
tomorrow." -- Last recorded words of Herbert Coleridge,
31, the first editor of what would become the Oxford English
Dictionary. Coleridge, who was working on the letter A at the
time, contracted a fatal chill following a walk in the rain to
an unheated meeting of the Philological Society.
WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE
SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD --
Kurt Vonnegut's suggested last words of humans to be carved perhaps
on the Grand Canyon for "flying-saucer creatures or angels
or whatever."
"Don't let it end
this way. Tell them I said something." - Pancho Villa
"Is it the fourth?"
Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826
"Hold me up; I want
to shit." - Walt Whitman
"Leave the shower
curtain on the inside of the tub" - Conrad Hilton
"I am about to - or
I am going to - die; either expression is used." - French
grammarian Dominique Bouhours
Lawrence of Arabia
- Lawrence: "I
killed two people. One was yesterday. He was just a boy, and
I led him into quicksand. The other was . . . well . . . before
Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something
about it that I didn't like."
- General Allenby:
"That's to be expected."
- Lawrence:
"No, something else."
- General Allenby:
"Well, then let it be a lesson."
- Lawrence:
"No . . . something else."
- General Allenby:
"What then?"
- Lawrence:
"I enjoyed it."
Law enforcement
While I recommend in the strongest terms
to the respective officers, activity, vigilance and firmness,
I feel no less solicitude that their deportment may be marked
with prudence, moderation and good temper. ~ They will bear in
mind that their countrymen are freemen, and as such are impatient
of everything that bears the least mark of domineering spirit.
They will, therefore refrain, with the
most guarded circumspection, from whatever has the semblance
of haughtiness, rudeness or insult. If obstacles occur, they
will remember that they are under the particular protection of
the laws and they can meet with nothing disagreeable in the execution
of their duty which these will not severely reprehend. . .
This reflection, and regard to the good
of the service, will prevent at all times a spirit of irritation
or resentment. They will endeavor to overcome difficulties, if
any are experienced, by a cool and temperate perseverance in
their duty - by address and moderation rather than by vehemence
and violence. - From Alexander Hamilton's instructions to
the first officers of the Revenue Marine, forerunner of the US
Coast Guard
Law
The large print giveth and the small print
taketh away - Tom Waits
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous
the laws. - Tacitus
All laws not based on wisdom are a danger
to the state - Inscription on appellate court building of
the state of New York
Scarcely any political
question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner
or later, into a judicial question. Hence all parties are obliged
to borrow, in their daily controversies, the ideas, and even
the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings. As most public
men are or have been legal practitioners, they introduce the
customs and technicalities of their profession into the management
of public affairs. The jury extends this habit to all classes.
The language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar
tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools
and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls
into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes,
so that at last the whole people contract the habits and the
tastes of the judicial magistrate. The lawyers of the United
States form a party which is but little feared and scarcely perceived,
which has no badge peculiar to itself, which adapts itself with
great flexibility to the exigencies of the time and accommodates
itself without resistance to all the movements of the social
body. But this party extends over the whole community and penetrates
into all the classes which compose it; it acts upon the country
imperceptibly, but finally fashions it to suit its own purposes."
- Tocqueville"Laws
are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps
and hornets break through." -- Jonathan Swift.
The law, in its majestic
equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under
bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread -- Anatole
France
Laws: We know what they
are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich
and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets
in the hands of government. --Pierre Joseph Proudhon
The whole drift of our
law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge
in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind
that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing
custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which
erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning
of personality into a capital crime against society. - H.
L. Mencken
Law and order
The streets of our country
are in turmoil. The universities are full of students rebelling
and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia
is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger.
Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Without
law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall
restore law and order -- Adolph Hitler, 1932
Cops is a race all their
own -- Easy Rawlins
Lawsuit
A machine you go into as
a pig and come out as a sausage -- Ambrose Bierce
Lawyers
99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
- Steven Wright
LAWYER - One skilled in the circumvention
of the law - Ambrose Bierce
[Lawyers] protect us from
robbery by taking away the temptation -- H L Mencken
There was a trial lawyer
in Texas who stole from the rich and gave approximately half
to the poor. -- Jim Hightower
All the extravagance and
incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to
lawyers, and in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible
for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter
the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain
attempt to enforce them. Every federal judge is a lawyer. So
are most congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the
citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow,
and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer
and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half --
H. L. Mencken
Laziness
Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave
his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six
days of work, he rests for all eternity. - Paul LaFargue,
The Right to be Lazy & Other Studies, 1907
Leadership
He was the sort of Tigger
who was always in front when you were showing him the way anywhere,
and was generally out of sight when at last you came to the place
and said proudly, 'Here we are.' -- A. A. Milne
Too long have the workers
of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage.
He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out
if I could for if you could be led out, you could be led back
again. -- Eugene V. Debs
Strong leaders make for
a weak people; strong people do not need a strong leader. --
Mexican revolutionary in 'Viva Zapata.'
Of the best rulers, the
people only know that they exist;
The next best they love and praise;
The next they fear;
And the next they revile . . .
But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done,
The people all remark, "We have done it ourselves."
-- Lao-tzu
Left
We must admit that today
conformity is on the left. To be sure, the right is not brilliant.
But the left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught
in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies,
constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it
nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The left is schizophrenic
and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise
of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty. Until such
an effort at re-examination is well under way, any rallying will
be useless and even harmful. Meanwhile, the intellectual's role
will be to say that the king is naked when he is, and not to
go into raptures over his imaginary trappings. -- Albert Camus,
1957
Legend
Legend: a lie that has
attained the dignity of age. - H.L. Mencken
Lehrer, Tom
An awful debility,
A lessened utility,
A loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I'll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability,
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of futility,
So let's act with agility
While we still have facility,
For we'll soon reach senility
And lose the ability ...
- Tom Lehrer
When someone makes a move
Of which we don't approve,
Who is it that always intervenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,
They have their place, I guess,
But first send the Marines!. . .
For might makes right,
And till they've seen the light,
They've got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
'Till somebody we like can be elected.
Members of the corps
All hate the thought of war,
They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means.
Stop calling it aggression,
O we hate that expression.
We only want the world to know
That we support the status quo.
They love us everywhere we go,
So when in doubt,
Send the Marines!
- Tom Lehrer
Lennon, John
Your Majesty, I am returning this MBE in
protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing,
against our support of America in Vietnam, and against "Cold
Turkey" slipping down the charts. With love - John Lennon
of Bag., November 25, 1969
Liberal
Someone who won't take his own side of
an argument - Robert Frost
The liberals can understand everything
but people who don't understand them - Lennie Bruce
Liberalism
Liberals don't have ideas
anymore, only icons; ideology has been replaced by iconography
--Josiah Swampoodle
Liberation
Twenty million young women
rose to their feet with the cry 'We will not be dictated to;
and proceeded to become stenographers. -- G K Chesterton
Liberty
The liberties of the country are a deposit,
a trust, in the hands of individuals; they are an entailed estate,
which the possessors have no right to dispose of; they belong
to our children, and to them we are bound to transmit them as
a representative body. - Thomas Treadwell at the New York
constitutional convention, 1788
Liberty is the only thing
you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
-- William Allen White
If ye love wealth better
than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating
contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your
counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands of those
who feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you. May posterity
forget that ye were our countrymen. - Samuel Adams
"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
The saddest epitaph which
can be carved in the memory of a vanished liberty is that it
was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving
hand while yet there was time. - Thomas Jefferson
We come to give you liberty
and equality. But don't lose your heads about it. The first person
who stirs without my permission will be shot -- Marshal Pierre
F.J. Lefebvre, 1807
The establishment of civil
and religious liberty was the motive which induced me to the
field; the object is attained, and it now remains to be my earnest
wish and prayer that the citizens of the United States would
make a wise and virtuous use of the blessings placed before them
-- George Washington 1783
They that can give up essential
liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty
nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin
He that would make his
own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression;
for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that
will reach to himself. -- Thomas Paine
As nightfall does not come
at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is
a twilight when everything seems seemingly unchanged. And it
is in such twilight that we must be most aware of change in the
air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of
the darkness -- Justice William O. Douglas
Rightful liberty is unobstructed
action according to our will within limits drawn around us by
the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of
the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always
so when it violates the rights of the individual. -Thomas Jefferson
Life
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 mumozdev.org
- autocopy localizationst countenance a measure of heresy.
One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all. - Herbert
Read
Life is like a sewer. What you get out
of it depends on what you put in. - Tom Lehrer
Knock hard. Life is deaf
- Mimi Parent
Life is not being dealt
a good hand but playing a poor hand well -- Robert Lewis Stevenson
We are here on earth to
do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know
-- WH Auden
A dead thing can go with
the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. -- GK
Chesterton.
Work like you don't need
the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's
watching. -- Satchel Paige
We must learn to love life
without ever trusting it - GK Chesterton
Sweetie, if you're not
living on the edge, you're taking up space. - Progressive
lawyer Flo Kennedy
I long ago came to the
conclusion that all life is six to five against - Damon Runyan
I have seen quite a few
things in my time. I don't recall that a single one of them seemed
reasonable - Paavo Haavikko, Finnish poet and author
Light Brigade
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, cited in a
recent speech by Senator Robert Byrd
Liston, Sonny
Sonny Liston has a lot of good points.
It's his bad points that aren't so good - Sonny Liston's manager
Long, Earl
Don't write anything you can phone. Don't
phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper.
Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you
can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink - Governor Earl Long
of Louisiana
I'm for the po' folk, I'm for the middlin'
folk, and I'm for the rich folk, if they behave themselves.
I'm not against anybody for reasons of
race, creed, or any ism he might believe in except nuttism, skingameism
or communism.
I can make them voting machines sing Home
Sweet Home.
If you ever want to hide something from
(Louisiana attorney general) Jack Gremillion, put it in a law
book.
One of these day the people of Louisiana
are gonna get good government--and they ain't gonna like it!
Hell yes, I think you should use ideals
or any other goddamn thing you can get your hands on - When
asked by a young state legislator whether ideals had any role
in politics
See Louisiana
Lost
Not all those who wander
are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkein
Louisiana
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong... this feeling's gettin' stronger
The longer, I stay away
Miss them moss covered vines...the tall
sugar pines
Where mockin' birds used to sing
And I'd like to see that lazy Mississippi...hurryin' into spring
The moonlight on the bayou.......a Creole
tune.... that fills the air
I dream... about Magnolias in bloom....and I'm wishin' I was
there
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart
And there's one thing more...I miss the one I care for
More than I miss New Orleans
There's a difference between the blues
of the New Orleans guys and anyone else and the difference is
in a chord, but I can't figure the name of it. It's a different
chord, and they all make it. - Jimmy Rushing
New Orleans food is as delicious as the
less criminal forms of sin - Mark Twain
I went down to St. James Infirmary To see
my baby there, She was lyin' on a long white table, So sweet,
so cool, so fair.
Went up to see the doctor, "She's
very low," he said; Went back to see my baby Good God! She's
lying there dead.
I went down to old Joe's barroom, On the
corner by the square They were serving the drinks as usual, And
the usual crowd was there.
On my left stood old Joe McKennedy, And
his eyes were bloodshot red; He turned to the crowd around him,
These are the words he said:
Let her go, let her go, God bless her;
Wherever she may be She may search the wide world over And never
find a better man than me
Oh, when I die, please bury me In my ten
dollar Stetson hat; Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch
chain So my friends'll know I died standin' pat.
Get six gamblers to carry my coffin Six
chorus girls to sing me a song Put a twenty-piece jazz band on
my tail gate To raise Hell as we go along
Now that's the end of my story Let's have
another round of booze And if anyone should ask you just tell
them I've got the St. James Infirmary blues
The people cannot have wells, and so they
take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars or
graves, the town being built upon "made ground;" so
they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none
of the others. - Mark Twain
Carnival is a butterfly of winter whose
last real flight of Mardi Gras forever ends his glory. Another
season is the season of another butterfly, and the tattered,
scattered, fragments of rainbow wings are in turn the record
of his day. - Perry Young
It's a funny thing how life can be such
a drag one minute and a solid sender the next. The day I got
out of jail Mardi Gras was being celebrated. It is a great day
for all of New Orleans, and particularly for the Zulu Aid Pleasure
and Social Club. . . When I ran into this celebration and the
good music I forgot all about Sore Dick [the prison yard captain]
and the Parish Prison - Louis Armstrong
Don't write anything you can phone. Don't
phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper.
Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you
can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink. - Earl Long
People say I steal. Well, all politicians
steal. I steal. But a lot of what I stole has spilled over in
no-toll bridges, hospitals . . . and to build this university.
- Huey Long
The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tyrin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
President Coolidge came down in a railroad
train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame what
the river has done
To this poor crackers land." - Louisiana, 1927
TYLER BRIDGES, BAD BET ON THE BAYOU - Over
the past thirty years, Louisiana has seen a parade of elected
officials convicted of crimes. The list includes a governor,
an attorney general, an elections commissioner, an agriculture
commissioner, three successive insurance commissioners, a congressman,
a federal judge, a State Senate president, six other state legislators,
and a host of appointed officials, local sheriffs, city councilmen,
and parish police jurors (who are the equivalent of county commissioners).
Of the eight men and women elected to statewide office in 1991,
three -- Governor Edwin Edwards, elections commissioner Jerry
Fowler, and insurance commissioner Jim Brown -- were later convicted
of crimes. The FBI said more people -- sixty-six -- were indicted
on public-corruption charges in Louisiana in 1999 than in any
other state. . .
"We're just not genetically disposed
to handle money," lamented political consultant James Carville,
who was from Carville, Louisiana. "We ought to bring in
the legislature from another state -- maybe Wisconsin or Minnesota
-- to handle our money. In return, we'll handle the cooking and
entertainment for them. They'll handle our fiscal oversight,
and we'll handle their cultural matters." . . .
I WISH I WAS IN NEW ORLEANS - TOM WAITS
Man come down from Chicago, gonna set that
levy right; / He said it’s got to be 3 feet high up or it
won’t make it thru the night. / The old man down in the
quarter / said don’t you listen to that boy, / The water
be down by mornin’, son he’ll be on his way to Illinois
- Leon Everette
Forget that New Orleans is actually a little
like the Combat Zone with French cooking, it still happens to
be part of the great state of Louisiana where people play the
political game the same way it's played in Lebanon. The place
is one layer after another of tribes, factions and at least a
million laughs. The busybodies and goo-goos who adorn Beacon
Hill would soon be calling room service at McLean Hospital if
they plied their preachy trade in Baton Rouge. The suspender
set around Boston. . . would be babbling to a Vienna-bred shrink
if they found themselves going one on one with a bunch of down-home
pols who think that Ben Franklin is famous because he invented
the $100 bill. - A. J. Liebling
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun...
Way down in Louisiana
Close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods
Among the evergreens...
She's my red-hot Louisiana Mama
From a town called New Orleans
Like the morning [Earl Long] saw that Schwegmann's
was selling potatoes for forty-nine cents a ten-pound sack. Schwegmann's
is a string of three big supermarkets here that sell everything
-- furniture, automobile parts, grits, steak....Earl says, 'Come
on, boys, I can't afford to pass that up,' and he goes downstairs
and gets into his eleven-thousand-dollar air-conditioned official
Cadillac ... , and the state troopers get out in front on motorcycles
to clear the way, . . . and they take off. They pull up in front
of Schwegmann's -- all the sirens blowing, frightening hell out
of the other shoppers. . . . So he buys a hundred pounds of the
potatoes and tells a state senator to pick them up and carry
them to the car, and then he sees some alarm clocks on sale and
buys three hundred dollars' worth, and tells some representatives
from upcountry to carry them. And eighty-seven dozen goldfish
in individual plastic bags of water, and two cases of that sweet
Mogen David wine. . .. "Well, when they got out there on
the sidewalk, under about a hundred degrees of heat, the stuff
won't all go in the trunk of the Cadillac. . . . So Uncle Earl
sends a couple of senators and a judge into the store again to
buy some rope. - A.J. Liebling
Blanche DuBois: You're married to a madman.
Stella: I wish you'd stop taking it for
granted that I'm in something I want to get out of.
Blanche DuBois: What you are talking about
is desire - just brutal Desire. The name of that rattle-trap
streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street
and down another.
Stella: Haven't you ever ridden on that
streetcar?
Blanche DuBois: It brought me here. Where
I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be.
Stella: Don't you think your superior attitude
is a little out of place?
bury me down in new orleans
so I can spend eternity above ground
you can flood this town
but you can't shut the party down
ain't no drownin' the spirit
we callin' the children home
ain't no drownin' the spirit
we callin' the children home
- B. Payne, P. Barrere, and F. Tackett,
'Calling the Children Home'
Here . . . is Ignatius Reilly, without
progenitor in any literature I know of -- slob extraordinary,
a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas
rolled into one -- who is in violent revolt against the entire
modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom
on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic
seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big
Chief tablets with invective.
His mother thinks he needs to go to work.
He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates
into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has,
like Don Quixote's, its own eerie logic. . .
Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported
to New Orleans whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps
to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the
faculty men's room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastrointestinal
problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to
the lack of a "proper geometry and theology" in the
modern world. - Walker Percy, Introduction to Confederacy
of Dunces
I could only imagine how many haggard and
depraved eyes were regarding me hungrily from behind the closed
shutters; I tried not to think about it. Already I was beginning
to feel like an especially toothsome steak in a meat market.
However, no one called enticingly from the shutters; those devious
mentalities throbbing away in their dark apartments were apparently
more subtle seducers. I thought that a note, at least, might
flutter down. A frozen orange juice can came flying out of one
of the windows and barely missed me. I stooped over and picked
it up in order to inspect the empty tin cylinder for a communication
of some sort, but only a viscous residue on concentrated juice
trickled out on my hand. Was this some obscene message? While
I was pondering the matter and staring up at the window from
which the can had been hurled, an old vagrant approached the
wagon and pleaded for a frankfurter. Grudgingly I sold him one,
ruefully concluding that, as always, work was interfering at
a crucial moment. - Ignatius J. Reilly in Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
I know all about you degenerates in the
Quarter. I ain't let rooms ten years in the Quarter for nothin'.
- Tennesee Williams, Angels in the Alcove
One of these days the people of Louisiana
are going to get good government - and they aren't going to like
it. - Huey Long
Hard work is damn near as overrated as
monogamy. - Huey Long
I'm for the po' folk, I'm for the middlin'
folk, and I'm for the rich folk, if they behave themselves. -
Earl Long
I'm not against anybody for reasons of
race, creed, or any ism he might believe in except nuttism, skingameism
or communism. - Earl Long
Hell yes, I think you should use ideals
or any other goddamn thing you can get your hands on - Earl
Long asked by a young state legislator whether ideals had any
role in politics
Love
The difference between
love and sex is that sex relieves tension and love causes it.
-- Woody Allen
Nobody loves me but my
mama -- and she may be jivin' too. -- BB King
Loyalty
That we are to stand by the president,
right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally
treasonable to the American public. - Theodore Roosevelt
He has all the qualities
of a dog except loyalty -- LB Johnson of one of his aides
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.
Luck
The more I practice, the
luckier I get -- Ben Hogan
Lying
The men the American people
admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men
they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the
truth." -- H. L. Mencken
DON PEDRO, PRINCE OF ARRAGON:
Officers, what offense have these men done?
DOGBERRY, A CONSTABLE:
Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they
have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and
lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified
unjust things; and to conclude, they are lying knaves. -- Much
Ado About Nothing
I have a higher and greater
standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie but
I won't - Mark Twain explaining his superiority to George
Washington |