Food for Thought by Jack Tourette
The concepts presented in "Food for Thought" do not constitute
an endorsement of the ideas by the editor. The editor assumes
no control nor responsibility for how these ideas are used, nor
does the editor advocate or suggest any illegal and/or immoral
behavior, nor is any warranty expressed or implied. Further,
the editor recommends the retention of legal council before any
action whatsoever, as ignorance of the law IS NO EXCUSE.
Subjects
ABILITY
ADVERSITY
ADVERTISING
AFTERLIFE
AGING
AGNOSTICISM
AMBITION
ANARCHY
APATHY
ART
ATHEISM
AVARICE
BEAUTY
BELIEF
BIBLE
BIRTH
BIRTH CONTROL
BIZARRE
BUREAUCRACY
CAPITALISM
CATS
CENSORSHIP
CHARACTER
CHASTITY
CHILDREN
CHRISTIANITY
CIVILIZATION
CLICHE
COMMUNICATION
CONFORMITY
CONSCIENCE
CONSCIOUSNESS
CONSTITUTION
CONSUMERISM
COURAGE
CRAP
CREATION
CRIME
CRITICISM
CULTURE
CURIOSITY
CYNICISM
DEATH
DEMOCRACY
DESIRE
DEVIANTS
DOGMA
DOGS
DREAMS
DRINK
DRUGS
DRUG WAR
DUTY
ECOLOGY
EDUCATION
EGO
EMOTION
ENLIGHTENMENT
EPITAPHS
EVIL
EXPERIENCE
FAITH
FAME
FANATICISM
FASCISM
FEAR
FEMINISM
FOOLS
FORTUNE COOKIES
FREE SPEECH
FRIENDSHIP
GENIUS
GOD
GOVERNMENT
GRAVE
GRIEF
GUNS
HABIT
HAPPINESS
HASH HOUSE HARRIERS
HATE
HEAVEN
HELL
HISTORY
HONESTY
HOPE
HUMILTY
HUMOR
IDENTITY
IGNORANCE
IMAGINATION
IMMORTALITY
INDIVIDUALITY
INDOCTRINATION
INQUIRY
INTELLECT
JEST
JUSTICE
KNOWLEDGE
LANGUAGE
LAST WORDS
LAW
LEGISLATURE
LIBERTY
LIFE
LITERATURE
LOVE
LUCK
MADNESS
MANKIND
MARRIAGE
MAXIMS
MEDIA
MEDICINE
MIND
MODERATION
MORALITY
MORTALITY
MURPHY'S LAW
MUSIC
NATURE
NEEDS
NEUROSIS
PARANOIA
PATRIOTISM
PESSIMISM
PHILOSOPHY
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
POLITICS
PORNOGRAPHY
POWER
PREJUDICE
PROGRESS/CHANGE
PROPAGANDA
PUNISHMENT
REALITY
REASON
RELIGION
REVENGE
REVOLT
RIGHTS
SARCASM
SCIENCE
SECURITY
SELF-DEFENSE
SEX
SIN
SLAVERY
SLEEP
SPIRITUALITY
STATE
STUFF
STUPIDITY
SUFFERING
SUICIDE
SUPERSTITION
TAXES
TECHNOLOGY
TELEVISION
TEMPTATION
THEOLOGY
TIME
TRANSCENDENCE
TRUST
TRUTH
TYRANNY
VIOLENCE
VIRTUE
WAR
WEALTH
WISDOM
WIT
WONDER
WORK
The quotations
QUOTATIONS ON QUOTATIONS
---------- -- ----------
Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Journals (1843)
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is
as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
- William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"My Early Life" (1930), ch.9
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
- Tom Stoppard (b.1937)
Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.
- Simeon Strunsky (1879-1948)
I improve on misquotation. - Cary Grant (1904-1986)
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
The words erroneously repeated. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
- Lord Peter Wimsey
(Dorothy Leigh Sayers, "Gaudy Night")
(1893-1957)
A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for
some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
- Robert Chapman
Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors
are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public
grown superficial and external. - Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920)
He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the
purple of Emperors. - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
"I must claim the quoter's privilege of giving only as much of the text as
will suit my purpose," said Tan-Chun. "If I told you how it went on, I
should end up by contradicting myself!"
- Cao Xueqin
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire (1694-1778)
Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.
- Andre-Georges Malraux (1901-1976)
Anti-censorship address, 12 Nov 1966
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
on Shakespeare
An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.
- E.P. Whipple
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ABILITY
-------
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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ADVERSITY
---------
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous
circumstances would have lain dormant. - Horace (65-8 BC)
Adversity is the first path to truth. - Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
- Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885)
Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
- Horace (65-8 BC)
Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry
but wise. - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
- Harry S Truman (1884-1872)
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
- unknown
Common and vulgar people ascribe all ills that they feel to others; people
of little wisdom ascribe to themselves; people of much wisdom, to no one.
- Epictetus (c.55-c.135)
To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education.
To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither
oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.
- Epictetus (c.55-c.135)
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
- William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)
Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.
- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are
those which never happen. - James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest
affliction of life is never to be afflicted. Adversity makes men, and
prosperity makes monsters. - Victer Marie Hugo (1802-1885)
The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which
resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and
frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than
those of a loftier character. - Walter Scott (1771-1832)
To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he
will have the most need to know. - Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for
itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.
- Matthew 6:34
Men often bear little grievances with less courage than they do large
misfortunes. - Aesop (620-560 BC)
Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as
came to those who passed before you? - Quran
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas.
In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur
of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them.
- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
_Les Enfants Terribles_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw
that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms
trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his
strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon
his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do?
I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?
To shrug. - Francisco d'Anconia
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ADVERTISING
-----------
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical
advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses
truth to deceive the public. - Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962)
The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately
destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the
existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the
integrity of man. - Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
- Norman Douglas (1868-1952)
Advertising is legalized lying. - Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence
long enough to get money from it. - Stephen Butler Leacock (1869-1944)
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of
selling goods, especially if the goods are worthless.
- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to
prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
- Louis Kronenberger (b.1904)
Sanely applied advertising could remake the world.
- Stuart Chase (1888-?)
Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to
improve their economic status. - Ralph S. Butler
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AFTERLIFE
---------
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled
dream; it may be so at the moment after death.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we
leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we
can enter another. - Anatole France (1844-1924)
We are bound to our bodies like an oyster is to its shell.
- Plato (428-348? BC)
Dying is like getting out of a car. You leave a shell behind, but you're the
same person as ever. - Pres. Klein
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and
tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls
a butterfly. - Richard Bach, _Illusions_
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing
of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur
of this life. - Albert Camus (1913-1960)
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we yearn for another
that will be eternal. - Anatole France (1844-1924)
...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is
to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness,
friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh
start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes
are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that
has no finish line. - Tom Robbins (b.1936)
_Skinny Legs and All_, 1990, p. 305.
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AGING
-----
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they
quit playing. - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears
the journey's end. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.
- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I know I'm going to get old and be one of those crazy women who sits on
balconies and spits on people and screams, 'Get a haircut!' I know this,
and I don't really fear it. I'd just like to move toward it with as much
grace and dignity as possible. - Carrie Fisher (b.1956)
_Postcards From the Edge_
I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is
to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say,
"You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute.
"And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll
run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get
bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch
it crumble, decay, and rot. - Clive Barker (b.1952)
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AGNOSTICISM
-----------
Agnosticism is the philosophical, ethical and religious dry-rot of the
modern world. - F.E. Abbot
Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that
for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.
- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart
there is no God, and that is the folly of the people that says with its head
that it does not know whether there is a God or not.
- Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)
Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper
under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a
secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that,
knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And,
meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you
trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least
try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster.
- Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)
"An agnostic's Apology",
Fortnightly Review, 1876
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is
wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that
unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is
it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant
beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only be incessant-
ly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every
conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but
hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or
end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't
know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish,
he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity
for his faithlessness.... - Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)
"An agnostic's Apology",
Fortnightly Review, 1876
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AMBITION
--------
You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were;
and I say, "Why not? - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"Back to Methuselah"
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power
and magic in it. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Ah, but a man's grasp should exceed his reach,
Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning (1812-1889)
"Andrea del Sarto"
Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in
our folly. - Horace (65-8 BC)
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ANARCHY
-------
Our government...teaches the whole people by its example. If the government
becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to
become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
- Will Durant (1885-1981)
To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there
is nothing to say. - Lionel Tiger (b.1937)
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection
of authority. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to
rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least';
and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, - 'That
government is best which governs not at all.'
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Inside every anarchy lurks an old boy network.
- Mitchell Kapor
Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.
- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
_The Education of Henry Adams_, Ch.16
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Following a bit of the recent debate/discussion, i read a great quote from
"Benjamin Ricketson Tucker and the Champions of Liberty", an anthology put
out by Michael Coughlin and his great press. It comes from pages 170-171.
"Anarchy," Tucker insisted, "means a slow growth of the principles of liberty
and justice; the gradual dropping of the 'thou shalts' and the 'thou shalt
nots' of laws and consitutions as men slowly learn that it is better to be
governed by reasonable and intelligent conviction from within than by
compulsion from without..." And the first step in this procedure, he held,
is to disabuse oneself of the idea that government, even when that government
takes the form of parliamentary democracy functioning after the principle of
majority rule and minority rights, is capable of assuring the individual
freedom or of brining about a condition of harmonious relations among people.
If mankind is ever to realize justice in its actual social relations, the
notion that the individual citizen has a moral obligation to the State must
be completely abandoned. We anarchists, Tucker proclaimed, "look upon all
obligations, not as moral, but as social, and even then not really as
obligations except as these have been consciously and voluntarily assumed."
And this means nothing less than that the State, which is to say formal
government itself, must be discarded as an instrument of social control.
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APATHY
------
Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.
- Richard Linklater
"Slacker" 1991
Apathy is a sort of living oblivion. - Horace Greeley (1811-1872)
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ART
---
I don't know art, but I know what I like.
- unknown (O.W. Holmes?)
People don't know what they like, but they like what they know.
- anonymous
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
- James Grover Thurber (1894-1961)
The demand of readers for brand new material which is just like what they've
already read is a publishing reality, and it can be found behind virtually
every best seller. (The same principle applies - even more strongly - to the
less literate media: television, movies, popular music.)
- Ted White
Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons
for it afterwards. - Soren F. Petersen
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't usually know why they
chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
- William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Great art is a irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
- George Jean Nathan
Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.
- Roy Adzak
quoted in "Contemporary Artists", 1977
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward
you can remove all traces of reality. - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
We all know that art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realize
truth -- at least the truth that is given us to understand.
- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions
to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.
- John Trudell
Life without industry is guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality.
- John Ruskin (1819-1900)
The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
- Max Eastman (1883-1969)
The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the
artist is to make him ruin his work. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother
drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist
free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)
Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry,
music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
_Conduct of Life: Wealth_
Art isn't something you marry, it's something you rape.
- Edgar Degas (1834-1900)
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
- Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907)
The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization.
When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer
make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying. The "mass mind" has
taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap
heap. - Elie Faure (1875-1937)
The highest problem in every art is, by means of appearances, to produce the
ilusion of a loftier reality. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
_Truth and Poetry_, Book xi
Nature is a revelation of God;
Art a revelation of man. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
_Hyperion_, Book iii, ch. 5
The man who never in his mind and thought travelled to heaven, is no
artist.... Mere enthusiasm is the all in all.... Passion and expression
are beauty itself. - William Blake (1757-1827)
Gilchrist, _Life_, i, 310
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
- Susan Sontag (b.1933)
"Against Interpretation"
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ATHEISM
-------
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is
identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection
of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and
I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries...
- Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and
denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their
human interests. - George Santayana (1863-1952)
The athiest has no hope. - James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888)
To be an athiest requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to
receive all the great truths which athiesm would deny.
- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they
be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
- George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924)
"Free Inquiry" magazine, Fall 1988
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AVARICE
-------
The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears
the journey's end. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Avarice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase
our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Avarice is the vice of declining years.
- George Bancroft (1800-1891)
Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape
and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will
part with nothing. - Barrow
If an emergency strikes, a man should be able to leave his home with nothing
more than the clothes on his back without feeling that he has left something
behind. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
If you would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
*Want* is a growing giant whom the coat of *have* was never large enough to
cover. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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BEAUTY
------
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's
deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?
- Jean Kerr (b.1923)
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BELIEF
------
We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears beauty.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little
consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
- John Ruskin (1819-1900)
I hear and I forget.
I see and I believe.
I do and I understand. - Confucius (551-479 BC)
Conceptions without experience are void; experience without conceptions
is blind. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
- James Anthony Froude (1818-1894)
Belief is not the beginning but the end of all knowledge.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
- Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world.
There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety
of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by
virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to
support their own existence. - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
- Hungarian proverb
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the
alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
So as this only point among the rest remaineth sure and certain, namely, that
nothing is certain.... - Pliny The Elder (AD 23-79)
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
_Human, All Too Human_
A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is
a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Theory: when you have ideas. Ideology: when ideas have you.
- anonymous
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
It is easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.
- Alfred Adler (1870-1937), 1939
To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures.
- Anatole France (1844-1924)
There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an
opinion. - Anatole France (1844-1924)
Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
- Paul Eldridge (b.1888)
Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the
idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness
of a belief. - Arthur Schnitzler (1882-1931)
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't
fit to live. - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest
complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it
be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they
have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to
others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their
lives. - Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
- John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.
- Maurice Chapelain (b.1906)
We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our
principles. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will
be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on
the things you have long taken for granted.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath
my feet. - Edward Abbey (b.1927)
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured
we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful
inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion
as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the
naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we
might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately,
do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their
protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear
that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God,
then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus
Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous in-
habitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustrated
in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the
undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent
to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware
of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality.
- Steve Allen (b.1921)
from _The Courage of Conviction_
edited by Philip Berman
The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously
that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
"Prejudice"
You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.
- Timothy Leary (b.1920)
Cursed is he that does not know when to shut his mind. An open mind is
all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no
keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its
doors sometimes, or may be found a little draughty.
- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though,
perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression,
yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would
captivate or disturb them. - John Locke (1632-1704)
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper
insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely
those that challenge our convictions. - unknown
It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally
affirmative. - John Burroughs (1837-1921)
It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence. - W.K. Clifford
British philosopher, circa 1876
Those who obstinately oppose the most widely held opinions more often do so
because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the
right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.
- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of
certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything,
and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything
to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about
it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else.
But I don't have to know an answer. I don't have to...I don't feel frightened
by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having
any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly.
It doesn't frighten me. - Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
Nova: "The Best Mind Since Einstein"
The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be. The
natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience
only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.
- Adam Smith (1723-1790)
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to
doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
- Alfred Korzybski
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not
utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind,
a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
"Marriage and Morals" (1929)
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which
is the exact opposite. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
For what a man would like to to be true, that he more readily believes.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
********************************************************************************
BIBLE
-----
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things
in all literature. - Alfred North Whitehead
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never
give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
All Bibles are man-made. - Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel
and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than
half the bible is filled, it would seem more consistent that we called it the
word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has
served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
The Book says BURN and DESTROY repent and redeem and revenge and deploy and
rumble thee forth to the land of the unbelieving scum 'cause they don't go
for what's in the Book and that makes 'em BAD. So verily we must choppeth
them up, and stompeth them down.... - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand,
but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible
were used to beat plowshares into swords.
- Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
"The Good Book" -- one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.
- Ashley Montagu
********************************************************************************
BIRTH
-----
It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.
- James James Augustine (1882-1941)
_Ulysses_
********************************************************************************
BIRTH CONTROL
-------------
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to
mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
Oh yes, the sentimentality for "unborn babies," but apparent lack of concern
for "born babies." What are you once you *are* born? Pre-dead?
- Arne Adolfsen
Prevention of birth is precipitation of murder.
- Tertullian (c.160-c.240)
I will not give to a woman an instrument to procure abortion.
- Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 BC)
However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by the
performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for
condoning the direct murder of the innocent.
- Pius XI (1857-1939)
Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts
to compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
Griswold v. Connecticut first established and guaranteed the `right of privacy'
in the conjugal act. Sexual love, however, in a most profound way is anything
but `private.' Its very purpose is to break the bonds of privacy by physical
consummation of an unreserved gift of self. The contraceptive, however, denies
the meaning of marital love by falsifying its bodily expression. Love is no
longer unreserved; something is held back. `I cannot love all of you,' the
contraceptive says, `because I cannot love all that might be created by you.'
- Edmund Miller
Anti-Abortion Commentator
Fidelity magazine, 10/89
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your
marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies.
- Randall Terry
Executive Director, Operation Rescue
I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure.
- Joseph Schiedler
Director, Pro-Life Action League
...the Pro-Life Action League opposes *all* forms of contraception....
- Joseph Scheidler
Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League
from The Wanderer, August 10, 1989
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
You can't stop abortion without fighting contraception: it is the gateway to
abortion. Not one of the 81 countries I've worked in has `clean' contraception
without abortion -- not one. Once there's contraception -- separating sexual
activity from procreation and teaching people to use each other's bodies for
selfish pleasure -- abortion is always used as a backup.
- Fr. Paul Marx
President, Human Life International,
"Pro Life/Family Catalog", 1991
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
Once contraception is accepted and the purposes of sex are separated from
procreation and marriage, sterilization and abortion become acceptable, and
then infanticide, the precursor of outright euthanasia. Furthermore, homo-
sexuality and unnatural sexual activities become `natural and normal,' the
venereal diseases get out of control, divorce and illegitimacy rates mount,
and the family swiftly disintegrates.
- Valerie Riches
Family Planning Educator
in her brochure, Contraception's Legacy,
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
For instance, several years ago we tracked down a twelve-year-old girl who
was going to have an abortion so that we could talk her out of it. Talking
a woman out of having an abortion is not news. But tracking her down using
a private detective is. - Joseph Scheidler
Executive Director, Pro Life Action League
"Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion", 1985
(from "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
I don't think we should punish the criminal [a rapist] by killing his child.
- Dr. John Wilke
President, National Right to Life Committee,
"Search for Common Ground", taped for television 4/89,
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
I would never give artificial birth control to an unmarried person...
- Judie Brown
President, American Life League
"Nightline", 7/21/89
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
To be against abortion and not against contraception -- it makes no sense
because both of them are the same mentality.
- Nancy O'Brien
Anti-Choice Activist,
introducing Joan Andrews, 3/11/89,
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
- Florynce Kennedy
It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of
contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or
the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby
even ten years later when she may be happily married.
- Phillis Steward Schlafly (b.1924)
Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions.
- Phillis Steward Schlafly (b.1924)
What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective
propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex,
while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is
robbing children of their childhood.
- Phillis Steward Schlafly (b.1924)
President, Eagle Forum, 2/81,
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her...the practice
of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
_Mein Kampf_
********************************************************************************
BIZARRE
-------
The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other
subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up
every bird watcher in the country. - John Mitchell
Attourny General, 1969-1972
The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged
that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be mis-
interpreted.... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution
comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911)
Presidential candidate, 1979
Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by
vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions
standards from man-made sources. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911)
"Sierra", 10 September 1980
I have flown twice over Mt. St. Helens out on our west coast. I'm not a
scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that that one
little mountain has probably released more sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere
of the world than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving
or things of that kind that people are so concerned about.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1980 (b.1911).
Actually, Mount St. Helens, at its peak activity,
emitted about 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide per day,
compared with 81,000 tons per day by cars.
Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911)
A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?
- Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1966
opposing expansion of Redwood National Park
What would this country be without this great land of ours?
- Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911)
This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911)
"People" magazine, 26 December 1985
The State of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911)
Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they?
- George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924)
during a tour of Auschwitz, 28-SEP-87
I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions -- but I don't always agree
with them. - George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924)
The final lesson of Viet Nam is that no great nation can long afford to be
sundered by a memory. - George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924
Inaugural Address, 1989
I just don't believe in the basic concept that someone should make their
whole career in public service. - J. Danforth Quayle (b.1947)
Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.
- Jimmy Swaggart
Christians maintain a higher enjoyment level in the intimacy of their love
life than the population in general.
- Beverly LaHaye, President, Concerned Women of America,
in her book, _The Act of Marriage, The Beauty of Sexual
Love_, 1976, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
For those who say I can't impose my morality on others, I say just watch me.
- Joseph Scheidler
Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League
"Pro-Life Action News", 8/8/89,
from "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves,"
a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
I see a divine hand in this AIDS thing.
- Dr. John Wilke
President, National Right to Life Committee,
"Planned Parenthood and Sex Clinics",
Fundraising Audiotape Mailout for Dr. James C. Dobson's
"Focus on the Family", winter '87,
from "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves,"
a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
Indeed, to quarantine a person with AIDS or the AIDS virus does entail a loss,
in the short run, of human freedom. Agreed. But the idea of human freedom
isn't now, and never has been, absolute. Besides, in the long run, as I have
noted, all people with AIDS die.
- John Lofton, Anti-Choice Columnist
The Washington Times,
3/31/89, quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking
For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
You can't just let nature run wild. - Wally Hickel (b.1919)
Alaskan governor
We shall never understand peace, justice and the living of life until we
recognize that all people are human and that humans are the most precious
things on earth. - Wally Hickel (b.1919)
Alaskan governor
People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a
tremendous impact on history. - J. Danforth Quayle, 09/88 (b.1947)
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees
of difference and no difference. - William James (1842-1910)
under nitrous oxide; 1882
Just say no! - Nancy Davis Reagan (b.1923)
Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them.
- Madonna Louise Ciccone (b.1958)
If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the
smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the
right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
If the day should ever come when we [the Nazis] must go, if some day we are
compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that
the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.
- Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945)
Who says I am not under the special protection of God?
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to
hell. - Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88
We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are
fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation
today...our battle is with Satan himself.
- Reverend Jerry L. Falwell (b.1933)
In our society, sometimes you have to penalize (innocent) people for the good
of everybody else. - a Pittsburgh cop 10/16/93
My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the
land until Jesus returns. - James Watt (b.1938)
"The Washington Post", 24 May 1981
We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand.
- James Watt (b.1938)
You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you
take a gun and shoot him. - Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson (b.1930)
about Muammar Kadhafy
I would rather see my four daughters shot before my eyes than to have them
grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see those kids blown
into Heaven than taught into hell by the Communists.
- Pat Boone (c.1962)
One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature's
law; why try to contradict it? - Jean Jacques Rousseau
"Emile, ou de l'education", 1762
I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down.
Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see
myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body
on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered
everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains.
- Doris May Lessing (b.1919)
There is growing evidence that smoking has pharamacological...effects that are
of real value to smokers. - Joseph F. Cullman III
Pres. of Phillip Morris
Annual Report to Stockholders, 1962
I take Him shopping with me. I say, "OK, Jesus, help me find a bargain."
- Tammy Faye Bakker
********************************************************************************
BUREAUCRACY
-----------
A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.
- Alben W. Barkley (1877-1956)
U.S Vice President (1949-1953)
There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.
- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to
assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued
with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a
fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere
suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe,
seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for
an excuse for withholding it from him. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
_Prejudices: Sixth Series_ (1927):
"Life under Bureaucracy", pp.241-2
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen,
government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
********************************************************************************
CAPITALISM
----------
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
The forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich
richer and the poor poorer. - Jawaharlal Nehru
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
- Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self
interest backed by force. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
But owing to our wage system, this increase of wealth -- due to the combined
efforts of men of science, of managers, and workmen as well -- has resulted
only in an unprecedented accumulation of wealth in the hands of the owners of
capital; while an increase of misery for the great numbers, and an insecurity
of life for all, have been the lot of the workmen; the unskilled labourers, in
continuous search for labour, are falling into an unheard-of destitution. And
even the best paid artisans and skilled workmen labour under the permanent
menace of being thrown, in their turn, into the same conditions as the un-
skilled paupers, in consequence of some of the continuous and unavoidable
fluctuations of industry and caprices of capital.
- Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921)
_Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles_
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands
what will sell. - Confucius (551-479 BC)
Capitalism will kill competition. - Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land...but because it
was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely
less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive.
- John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
(1892-1964)
But surely no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of un-
employment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose
of which is to bring pressure on the labor market, to ensure a supply of cheap
labor. - Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not
just under the New Deal, but through a consensus that continued to grow after
the New Deal.... Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every
business in the country. - Norman Cousins
Free enterprise ended in the United States a good many years ago. Big oil,
big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations
fix prices among themselves and drive out the small entrepreneur. In their
conglomerate forms, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the
legitimacy of the state. - Gore Vidal (b.1925)
Only in time of peace can the wastes of capitalism be tolerated.
- F.R. Scott
The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social
system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides
itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony...it is
fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied
means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by
millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and
it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy
and sell for money every most precious thing -- even the life-long labor of
their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?
- Edward Carpenter (1844-1929)
The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual
to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the thesis that the exercise of
this right redounds to the general good.
- Ralph Barton Perry
********************************************************************************
CATS
----
They smell, they snarl and they scratch; they have a singular aptitude for
shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery; they're sneaky, selfish and not at all
smart; they are disloyal, condescending and totally useless in any rodent-free
environment. - Jean-Michel Chapereau
The scalded cat fears even cold water. - Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in
it--and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid.
She will never sit on a hot stove lid again--and that is well; but also she
will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity
killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
- Arnold Edinborough (b.1922)
Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.
- Steven Wright (b.1955)
Curiosity got the cat wet. - Bev
Colostomy killed the cat. - Me
A chronic disposition to inquiry deprives domestic felines of vital qualities.
- unknown
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail
in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive
them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
when asked to describe radio
The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domesticated
animal. - Compton MacKenzie (1883-1972)
If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the
cat. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not more of a pastime to her than
she is to me? - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Cats are like Baptists. They raise hell but you can't catch them at it.
- unknown
Cats don't adopt people. They adopt refrigerators.
- Solomon Short
Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will
turn instinctively for more assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject
submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
- Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) (1870-1916)
The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will
always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
...But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes
no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or
the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us
have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death.
But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the
cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting
to the grave first. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
_Orthodoxy_
********************************************************************************
CENSORSHIP
----------
Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of
fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and
reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children
the authorized ones only. - Plato (428-348? BC), "The Republic"
I am...mortified to be told that, in the United States of America...a question
about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate.... Are
we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold and what
we may buy? Shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule
for what we are to read?.... It is an insult to our citizens to question
whether they are rational beings or not.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense
since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the
graveyard. - Alexander Cockburn (1802-1880)
[The Nation, 4 February 1991]
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in
the end, the kind of society that is uncapable of exercising real discretion...
in the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the
difference between independence of thought and subserviance.
- Henry Steel Commager (b.1902)
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts
by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of
the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of
increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to
all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
- Harry S Truman (1884-1872)
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of
comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical
comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a
safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is
part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be
excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of
humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity
from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
- Eric Idle (b.1943)
They have a right to censure that have a heart to help.
- William Penn (1644-1718)
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
- Granville Hicks (1901-1982)
A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of
ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)
An older person or a teenager can look at this (rock videos) and see the
humor in it, but an eight- or ten-year-old isn't anesthetized yet.
- Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson "Tipper" Gore
Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret police and laws
similar to those in the USSR, there are thousands of underground publications,
a legal independent Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first
and only independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is an
affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and
the World Confederation of Labor. There is literally a world of difference
between Poland - even in its present state of collapse - and Soviet society
at the peak of its "glasnost." This difference has been maintained at great
cost by the Poles since 1944.
- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing
a gateway from EARN (European Academic Research
Network) to Poland
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in
the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private
schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or
in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers....
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and
gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the
private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the
books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man
against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating
drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century
when bigots lighted faggots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence
and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
- Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)
at the Scopes Monkey Trial
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its
details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing
in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and
devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late,
now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its bill of rights made a
mock of by its sworn officers of the law.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
about the Scopes Monkey Trial
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"The Rejected Statement"
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should
end there. - Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987)
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written,
or badly written, That is all. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist.
- A. Trevor Hodge
To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to
hew blocks with a razor. - Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
The chief enemy of creativity is "good" taste.
- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
********************************************************************************
CHARACTER
---------
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never
would be found out. - Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature
and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples.
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
The discipline of desire is the background of character.
- John Locke (1632-1704)
The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but
hides us from ourselves. We injure our own cause in the opinion of the world
when we too passionately defend it. - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
If you wish to appear agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught
many things which you know already. - Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801)
If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a
scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they
were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the
spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats,
as a drunken disturber? ... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a
sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and
masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the
stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a
different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now
acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.
- Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536)
The Praise of Folly
The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet,
challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that
keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents
itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb
of innocence. To yield to its blandishments is so easy. The wrong, it seems,
is venial... Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of
adventurous youth. - Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1870-1938)
There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and
developed into something higher and nobler than he is by nature.
- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just
man is also a prison. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to
what lies within us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
You are only what you are when no one is looking.
- Robert C. Edwards
Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy
billows of the world. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
_Torquato Tasso_, i. 2
Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy
to none. - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
_Poor Richard_, 1756.
Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they
are. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt others.
- The Dalai Lama (b.1935)
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy
begins. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Friendship"
********************************************************************************
CHASTITY
--------
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that
virginity could be a virtue. - Voltaire (1694-1778)
It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a
pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin
of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
- Anatole France (1844-1924)
Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
- Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915)
We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue
than malnutrition. - Alexander Comfort (b.1920)
********************************************************************************
CHILDREN
--------
Children are the periscopes of the dead.
- Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky
(b.1933)
Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
I think an embryo/fetus/baby becomes a "person" when it is smarter than a
non-primate like a dog. By those standards, chimpanzees and gorillas are
persons (although somewhat cognitively impaired -- kind of like Fundamentalist
Christians), but human newborns are not.
- Dave Touretzsky
Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect
that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I
don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be
too big for the bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep
falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have
learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are
like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no
one must make another one. - Gore Vidal (b.1925)
Conversations With Gore Vidal - 1981
When I was a baby I kept a diary. Recently I was reading it. It said:
(1)Still tired from the move. (2)Everybody keeps talking to me like I'm
an idiot. - Steven Wright (b.1955)
********************************************************************************
CHRISTIANITY
------------
If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a
Christian anywhere. - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
One Christian is no Christian. - Harvey Gallagher Cox (b.1929)
The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think
itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique
relation to its maker? ...Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh
or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was
the world created. - Julian The Apostate (332-363)
The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.
- George Washington (1732-1799)
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in
the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines,
and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.
- John Adams (1735-1826)
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world,
and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming
feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being
as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of
the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the
dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with
this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine
doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never
give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world
ugly and bad. - Friedrick Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Christianity makes suffering contagious.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality
at any point. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost
perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too
venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty -- I call it the one
immortal blemish of mankind. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God
is a cruel and capricious tyrant. - Edward Gibbon (1734-1794)
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found
difficult, and left untried. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936),
"What's Wrong with the World"
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make
empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made
a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds
of Hell. - Saint Augustine (340-430)
There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their
faith. - William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903)
There is one single fact which we may oppose to all the wit and argument
of infidelity, namely, that no man ever repented of being a Christian on
his death bed. - Hannah More (1745-1833)
Unless you hate your father and mother and wife and brothers and sisters and,
yes, even your own life, you can't be my disciple.
- Jesus Christ (Luke 14:26)
Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his
doctrine. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"Thus Spake Zarathustra"
As to Jesus of Nazareth...I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as
he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I
apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most
of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study
of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds
by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of
no conclusion. - Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan,
and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his
35th year, when he became a Christian.... To him is ascribed the sublime
confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This
does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said:
And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it
is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it
is impossible.
Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of
philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it.
- Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
in Psychological Types
(Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church).
********************************************************************************
CIVILIZATION
------------
Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by
complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures.... Civilization
has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him,
which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies.... Hour by hour needs
increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with dis-
contented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries
indispensable. - Isabelle Eberhardt
_The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt_
by Annette Kobak
(found in RE/Search's Angry Women)
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense
of boredom. - Cyril Parkinson
...technical advance could actually be an impediment to utopia: unlike in
previous centuries, technology in the twentieth century has made necessity
increase rather than diminish. - Cristovam Buarque
A descent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
(Boswell, _Life_, ii, 130)
The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor
countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them
doing so upon our television sets. - Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980)
The difficulty with this is, of course, that Modern Man does not see, hear,
or most importantly _believe_ anything which does not take place before the
glassy stare of the television camera. How inconvenient, then, that millions
of starving children and fallen heroes lack the foresight to die in the right
places for the right causes. - Zaccariah Michaelson
_Essays_on_the_Inhuman_Race_
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies
the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system
of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew
scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair
of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if
there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).
- Robert Ranke Graves (1895-1985)
Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers
and springs, and believes it civilization.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly
from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
1 December 1945
(also attributed to Oscar Wilde)
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
- Eric Berne (b.1910)
I think it would be a good idea. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
(When asked what he thought of
Western civilization)
When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to
pause and wonder. - David Ross Brower (b.1912)
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
- Brian Aldiss (b.1925)
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
- Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881)
The slum is the measure of civilization.
- Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
The flush toilet is the basis of Western civilization.
- Alan Coult
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as
the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of
North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives
on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492
was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b.1922)
_Breakfast of Champions_
In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out
to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them
again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that
the world will be destroyed--amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who
think it is all a joke. - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
_Either/Or_, Diapsalmata
Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor.
- Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)
Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does
not know everyone else. - Julian Jaynes
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.
- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
_The Fountainhead_
I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.
- Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903-1989)
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I remain convinced that Man is the
missing link between apes and civilized beings.
- Solomon Short
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three
distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistica-
tion, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the
first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by
the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we
have lunch?' - Douglas Adams (b.1952)
_Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
You can't say civilization isn't advancing: In every war, they kill you in
a new way. - Will Rogers (1879-1935)
It's so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the Devil
when he is the only explanation of it. - unknown
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is
learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic
animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
- E.C. Stakman
Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other
of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are
smaller ones -- you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single
states. - Plato (428-348? BC)
"The Republic"
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
The desire to impose upon the disorder of nature some orderly pattern or
arrangement makes men into poets, painters and gardeners; it also makes
them prey to the illusion that a highly organized state will be civilized
and preferable to a disorganized and muddled one.
- Len Deighton (b.1929)
What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better for us than
to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go and take artificial
exercise in order to preserve our health.
- George Wharton James, 1908
The man who first abused his fellows with swear-words instead of bashing their
brains out with a club should be counted among those who laid the foundations
of civilization. - John Cohen
Civilization is paralysis. - Paul Gaugin
(Cournos, _Modern Plutarch_)
Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization
is the last world we will see? - George Santayana (1863-1952)
_Life of Reason_, Vol. ii, 127
********************************************************************************
CLICHE
------
Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a
truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half
its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost
its cliches. - Marvin G. Gregory
Develop your own set of cliches. - Robert Fripp (b.1946)
********************************************************************************
COMMUNICATION
-------------
When people have trouble communicating, the least they can do is to shut up.
- Tom Lehrer
The fantastic advances in the field of communication constitute a greater
danger to the privacy of the individual.
- Earl Warren (1891-1974)
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men
communicate than by the content of the communication.
- (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is
metaphysics. - Voltaire (1694-1778)
There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a communicative man having
nothing to communicate. - Christian Nestell Bovee
********************************************************************************
CONFORMITY
----------
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, how-
ever measured or far away. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"Walden", 1854
The rewards...in this life are _esteem_ and _admiration_ of others - the
punishments are _neglect_ and _contempt_.... The desire of the esteem of
others is as real a want of nature as hunger - and the neglect and contempt
of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone....
- John Adams, 1805 (1735-1826)
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation
of thinking. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.
- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
"An Enemy of the People", 1882
If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's
another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of
nonconformity. - Bill Vaughan
Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with
nonconformity. - Eric Hoffer (b.1902)
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
- Eric Hoffer (b.1902)
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the
fashionable non-conformist. - Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
How is it that the American, once he has attained his majority, appears to
us as the perfect conformist. It is, perhaps, because he has exhausted during
his childhood and adolescence practically all his indiscipline and anarchy, so
that he has no difficulty later in life in integrating himself into a collect-
ive society, which he himself fully accepts.
- Andre Siegfried (1875-1959)
Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of
the general opinion. - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best to, night and
day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which
any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
- e.e. cummings (1894-1963)
"A Miscellany"
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says, or
does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
- Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD)
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but
nothing to choose from. - Peter Alexander Ustinov (1871-1945)
On applause: They named it Ovation from the Latin _ovis_, a sheep.
- Plutarch
********************************************************************************
CONSCIENCE
----------
Conscience...is merely instinct socialized into guilt.
- Robert Coover (b.1932)
********************************************************************************
CONSCIOUSNESS
-------------
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
- William James (paraphrase) (1842-1910)
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very
restricted circle of their potential being. They _make use_ of a very small
portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in
general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get
into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies
and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had
supposed. - William James (1842-1910)
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our
present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that
exist. - William James (1842-1910)
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological
clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant
perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are
still in the early morning of our April day.
- Stephen Jay Gould (b.1941)
It is by undermining the idea of reason, of order, of harmony, that we gain
consciousness of ourselves. - B.M. Cioran, _The Temptation to Exist_
********************************************************************************
CONSTITUTION
------------
The U.S. Constitution isn't perfect -- but it's a hell of a lot better than
what we have now.... - unknown
...the value of the constitution depends on the good will of government
itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Rights should not
interfere with the important business of government (which they have done
on at least two occasions), then the constitution is meaningless.
- John Kormylo
********************************************************************************
CONSUMERISM
-----------
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners
of addiction and the prisoners of envy. - Ivan Illich (b.1926)
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
The American people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without
individual responsibility. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there
is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only
role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
- Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928)
If you can persuade your customer to tattoo your name on their chest, they
probably will not switch brands. - an Indiana University professor
re: Harley-Davidson owners
The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the
consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise.
He degrades and simplifies the client. - William Seward Burroughs (b.1914)
_Naked Lunch_, 1959
I do not without a certain inner resistance and resentment accept a system of
marketing in which all the decisions have been taken out of both the shopkeeper
and the customer and put under the remote control of the market researcher and
the packaging expert, the advertising agency and the wholesale distributor.
Those who have grown up in this packaged world accept such external controls
and compulsions as normal. Their loss of choice, their loss of taste; they do
not even notice for they have never known anything different.
- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
from his autobiography
I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their
lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things
they don't need to impress people they dislike.
- Emile Henry Gauvreay
Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father's earnings on consumer
goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches
television. - Germaine Greer (b.1939)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Occupational regulation has served to limit consumer choice, raise consumer
costs, increase practitioner income, limit practitioner mobility, deprive the
poor of adequate service, and restrict job opportunities for minorities -- all
without a demonstrated improvement in quality or safety....
Critics of this hypothesis believe to the contrary, however, that regulators'
and professional groups' self-interest has been and still is the primary
motivator of regulatory legislation. And indeed the evidence shows that
consumers rarely engage in campaigns to license occupations. If the purpose of
licensing were to improve the quality of service, one would expect consumers,
who might be the prime beneficiaries, to promote licensure, but licensing is
systematically promoted by practitioners....
- The Rule of Experts - Occupational Licensing in America.
By S. David Young. Cato Institute, 1987.
ISBN 0-932790-62-3 (paper). 99 pages.
********************************************************************************
COURAGE
-------
It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
- Aesop (620-560 BC)
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance
comes when we are in the majority. - Ralph W. Sockman (b.1889)
********************************************************************************
CRAP
----
"99.9% of everything is crap" is Sturgeon's law, named for its originator,
Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985).
If memory serves, it came up in a conversation with then-editor of _Amazing_
John W. Campbell, in which Cambpell lamented to Sturgeon that "90% of what
passes for science fiction today is crap."
Sturgeon is said to have replied, "But John, 90% of _everything_ is crap."
And another aphorism was born.
********************************************************************************
CREATION
--------
The first creation of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense,
the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the
illumination of the spirit. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
God created the world out of nothing, but the nothingness still shows through.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the
world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the
world, where was He before creation? How could God have made the world without
any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are
faced with an endless regression.... Know that the world is uncreated, as time
itself is, without beginning and end. - The Mahapurana, Jinasena
Si Dios no hubiera descansado el domingo
habria tenido tiempo de terminar el mundo.
(If God hadn't rested on Sunday,
He would have had time to finish the world.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b.1928)
"Los Funerales de Mama Grande", 1974
The universe is one of God's thoughts.
- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
(1759-1805)
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which
comes to the same thing). - Albert Camus (1913-1960)
_The Myth of Sisyphus_
********************************************************************************
CRIME
-----
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
- Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862)
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
- Max Stirner (1806-1856)
Poverty is the mother of crime. - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (490-575)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. *Crimes*
are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.
*Vices* are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own
happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no
interference with their persons or property.
In vices, the very essence of crime -- that is, the design to injure the person
or property of another -- is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can
be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade
the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any
such criminal intent. He practises his vice for his own happiness solely, and
not from any malice toward others.
Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized
by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty,
or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own
person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man
to the control of his own person and property.
For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such,
is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it
would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.
- Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)
"Vices Are Not Crimes"
********************************************************************************
CRITICISM
---------
It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
Speech at the House of Commons
24 January 1860
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.
- Dale Carnegie (1888-1955)
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds
most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-
warmed, and well-fed. - Herman Melville (1819-1891)
********************************************************************************
CULTURE
-------
The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable
of becoming. - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
_Essays: J.P.F. Richter_
********************************************************************************
CURIOSITY
---------
Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a
vigorous intellect. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity
killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
- Arnold Edinborough (b.1922)
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
- Ellen Parr
Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.
- Steven Wright (b.1955)
Curiosity got the cat wet. - Bev
********************************************************************************
CYNICISM
--------
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who
have not got it. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.
- Bergen Evans (1904-1978)
American lexicographer
********************************************************************************
DEATH
-----
Vivi, mortuus sum, non curo (I lived, I'm dead, I don't care).
- unknown
Ars longa, vita brevis. - unknown
If we don't know life, how can we know death?
- Confucius (551-479 BC)
This is my death...and it will profit me to understand it.
- Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Death is the best part of life. That's why they save it for last.
- Solomon Short
There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.
- Owen Meredith (1831-1891)
Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his own death; a thousand doors
open on to it. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
For certain is death for the born / And certain is birth for the dead; /
Therefore over the inevitable / Thou shouldst not grieve.
- Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2:27
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as
death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
The goal of all life is death. - Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Come now, don't you know that dying is also one of life's duties? Besides,
since there's no fixed number of duties laid down which you're supposed to
complete, you're leaving no duty undone. Every life is, without exception,
a short one. As it is with a play, so it is with life - what matters is not
how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what
point you end. End it wherever you will - only make sure that you end it up
with a good ending. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so
long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.
- Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)
Death is psychosomatic. - Charles Manson (b.1934)
Esquire, 1971
One must not die unreconciled. - Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Those who live, live off the dead. And death too must live; and there's
nothing like an insane asylum to tenderly incubate death, and to keep the
dead in an incubator. - Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)
_Artaud Le Momo_
Anyway: I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do and
I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent
and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and
boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death
is a release and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in
the end, I'm there for all of them. - Neil Gaiman (b.1960)
The Sandman #20: Facade
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear
in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
_Of Death_
When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money,
it's sex. When you have both, it's health. If everything is simply jake,
then you're frightened of death. - James Patrick Donleavy (b.1926)
Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There's the shock of that
sharp cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then accepting is a swim in
reality. - Richard Bach, _Illusions_
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing
whatever to do with it. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Pryor's Observation: How long you live has nothing to do with how long you
are going to be dead.
The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
- Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
Be happy while y'er leevin, For y'er a lang time deid.
- Scottish motto for a house
By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.
- Titus Lucretius Carus
To die is landing on some distant shore.
- John Dryden (1631-1700)
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
To have died once is enough. - Virgil (70-19 BC)
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death
but once. - William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Do not seek death; death will find you. But seek the road which makes death
a fulfillment. - Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961)
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater
one. - Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
quoted in "Time", 1981
Death is a comingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man,
eternity is seen looking through time.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
For good men but see death, the wicked taste it.
- Johnson
Death is life's answer to the question 'Why?'
- unknown
I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment,
it takes place every day. - Albert Camus (1913-1960)
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when every-
thing in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming
eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good
fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we
have death. - Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
Again I'm asked, how much heat does it take to cremate a cadaver in a
crematorium? About 2200 degrees Fahrenheit for 90 minutes, then 1800
degrees F for another 60 to 150 minutes.
- The Informed Source
If life must not be taken too seriously -- then so neither must death.
- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they
die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their
last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their
funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal
that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.
- William Ernest Hocking
To the atheist, death is the end; to the believer, the beginning; to the
agnostic, the sound of silence. - unknown
When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind
wonderfully. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.
- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
Life as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death,
dismemberment, disintegration, and with it the crucifixion of our hearts
with the passing of the forms we have loved.
- Joseph Campbell (1881-1944)
Death is nothing to us: for that which is dissolved is without sensation;
and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.
- Epicurus (341-271 BC)
_Principal Doctrines_, II
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELYOT: Death's very laughable, such a cunning little mystery. All done with
mirrors.
AMANDA: Darling. I do believe you're talking nonsense.
ELYOT: So is everybody else in the long run. Let's be superficial and pity
the poor philosophers. Let's blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy
the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school
children. Let's savor the delight of the moment. Come kiss me
darling, before your body rots and worms pop in and out of your eye
sockets. - Noel Coward
"Private Lives," Act II (1930)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And as we stand on the edge of darkness
Let our chant fill the void
That others may know
In the land of the night
The ship of the sun
Is drawn by
The grateful dead. - Tibetan "Book of the Dead," c.4000 BC
********************************************************************************
DEMOCRACY
---------
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of
stupidity attained by the bourgeois. - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather
of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in
carrying elections. - Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
(1834-1902)
The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The
terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The tendencies of democracies are, in all things, to mediocrity, since the
tastes, knowledge and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.
- James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
The right to vote is a *consequence*, not a primary cause, of a free social
system -- and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing
and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an
instance of the principle of tyranny. - Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.
- W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular
representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
- Robert Byrne
Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to
the test, usually find it to be an 'inconvenience.' We have opted instead
for an authoritarian system *disguised* as a Democracy. We pay through the
nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then
wonder how all those assholes got in there.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass
meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Atti-
tude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude
toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is
based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, with-
out restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license,
agitation, discontent, anarchy. - U.S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25
(1928-1932), since withdrawn.
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public
welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
- Charles de Secondat Montesquieu
(1689-1755)
The imposition of stigma is the commonest form of violence used in democratic
societies. - R.A. Pinker
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we
choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats, We choose
between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the
land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of
the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves
from this injustice? - Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968)
letter to British suffragist, 1911
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist
until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (that is,
excessive gratuities) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the
majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the
public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose
fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the
world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have pro-
gressed through this sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith.
2. From spiritual faith to great courage.
3. From courage to liberty.
4. From liberty to abundance.
5. From abundance to selfishness.
6. From selfishness to complacency.
7. From complacency to apathy.
8. From apathy to dependency.
9. From dependency back again into bondage.
- Professor Alexander Tyler
The previous was written over 200 years ago while our original 13 colonies were
still a part of Great Britain. At the time, the author was writing about the
fall of the Athenian Republic over 2000 years earlier.
********************************************************************************
DESIRE
------
There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any
resemblance to the things in one's mind.
- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
- William Blake (1757-1827)
Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough
to be controlled. - William Blake (1757-1827)
He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
- William Blake (1757-1827)
Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger
for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
The passions are the only orators that always persuade.
- Francois La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
The passions often engender their contraries.
- Francois La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be
fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere
spectators of life. - Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927)
Reason, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
The passions and desires, like the two twists of a rope, mutually mix one with
the other, and twine inextricably round the heart; producing good if moderately
indulged; but certain destruction, if suffered to become inordinate.
- Burton
********************************************************************************
DEVIANTS
--------
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom...Make no
mistake all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.
- William Seward Burroughs (b.1914)
_Yage Letters_
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original
virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
_The Soul of Man Under Socialism_
Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgement to the very first
radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history, the first radical known
to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively he won
his own kingdom -- Lucifer. - Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972)
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation
as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases
which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
- Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)
The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be
antisocial...he cannot go along with currents and trends.
- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be
obscene, they could never have dared to be great.
- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring
liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them
the truth. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on
the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b.1922)
Traveling there was really boring so I headed for the ditch. It was a rough
ride but I met more interesting people there.
- Neil Young (b.1945)
Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.
- Jodie Foster (b.1962)
To create a community of radical scholars, men and women who recognize that
rules and social conventions are arbitrary, but have mastered them nonetheless--
a community which shares such a scorn and disrespect for the present society
that it can embrace the whole bundle of rules and subvert them thereby--that
should be our goal. - Howard Adelman (b.1938)
If you sincerely desire a _truly_ well-rounded education, you must study the
extremists, the obscure and "nutty". You need the balance! Your poor brain
is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours
a day, _no matter what_. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the
supermarket...even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even
if you are deaf and blind, the _telepathic pressure alone_ of the uncountable
normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded
in consensus reality. - Rev. Ivan Stang
_High Weirdness By Mail_
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The
latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to
hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The weirder you are going to behave, the more normal you should look. It
works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose,
I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
- P.J. O'Rourke (b.1947)
You know why there are so few sophisticated computer terrorists in the United
States? Because your hackers have so much mobility into the establishment.
Here, there is no such mobility. If you have the slightest bit of intellectual
integrity you cannot support the government.... That's why the best computer
minds belong to the opposition.
- an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity
...there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends
are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data
available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you
haven't noticed already. - Robert Anton Wilson
_The Illuminatus! Trilogy_
There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the
establishment -- and nothing more corrupting.
- Alan John Percivale Taylor (b.1906)
The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither
hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that
makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain
undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely
anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal.
- Dr. Karl Menninger
"The Human Mind", 1930
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
********************************************************************************
DOGMA
-----
What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry
combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether
inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
All dogmas perish the thinking mind, especially ones you agree with.
- Adam Richardson
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
- William Osler
********************************************************************************
DOGS
----
The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic.
- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at
strangers, it is patriotism! - David Starr Jordan (1851-1931)
********************************************************************************
DREAMS
------
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane
every night of our lives. - William Dement, in "Newsweek", 1959
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses
of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of
the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make
it possible. - Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935)
_The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_
If I'm dreaming, never let me wake. If I'm awake, never let me sleep.
- old chinese fellow
I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether
I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.
- Chuang-tzu (c.369-c.286 BC)
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses
of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of
the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to
make it possible. - Daniel Keys Moran
_The Last Dancer_
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
"Darkness," line 1
In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to
dream in concert. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
_The Idler 32_.
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
_The Higher Pantheism_.
********************************************************************************
DRINK
-----
Teetotaler, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally,
sometimes tolerably totally. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Five stages of drunkness: Verbose, jocose, lachrymose, bellicose, comatose.
- anonymous
There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
- John Ciardi
Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food
and water. - W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
Bibo, ergo sum (I drink, therefore I am.)
- Fredirect Toyou
'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank
her for it. - W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right
out of the bottle. - Henny Youngman (b.1906)
Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own
punishment with it, and that a very severe one.
- Hannah Moore (1745-1833)
How can you waste beer like that!! Don't you realize there are sober children
in Africa!! - unknown
[Alcoholic beverages] sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth
digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it reliseth the heart, it lighteneth
the mind, it quickeneth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head from
whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from
snaffling, the teeth from chattering, and the throat from rattling; it keepeth
the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering,
the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching,
and the marrow from soaking. - Anonymous (13th Century)
Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker. - Odgen Nash (1902-1971)
"Reflections on Ice-breaking"
Do you think that the grave is too deep? Well, then, take a drink. Take one
or two or three: You'll die happier. - Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795)
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkeness expands, unites,
and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
- William James (1842-1910)
_The Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1961
********************************************************************************
DRUGS
-----
The drug user drowns in the same pool mystics swim in.
- Joseph Campbell (1881-1944)
In brief, the really possible Utopia would be this world experienced by a
psychophysique at full aperture. - Gerald Heard (1889-1971)
_The Five Ages of Man_
There are experiences that most people avoid talking about because they do
not fit into the reality of everyday life and defy rational explanation.
- Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906)
Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related
hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails
dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account
the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our
consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date
amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its pro-
found effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug.
Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an
LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience.
- Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906)
The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between
the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience,
makes it possible with their help, and after suitable internal and external
preparation...to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak...
I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid
to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive
reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character
of LSD as a sacred drug. - Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906)
I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability
more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction
with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonder
child. - Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906)
When the conscious becomes unconscious, you're drunk. When the unconscious
becomes conscious, you're stoned. - anonymous
From the conscious mind comes intellect; from the unconscious, wisdom.
- anonymous
(found in _Exploring Inner Space_, p.69)
Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system.
- P.J. O'Rourke (b.1947)
Ram Dass' (b.1931) retrospective dictum regarding the psychedelics:
"When you get the message, hang up."
There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory, decreased
short term memory, and I forget the third.
- Timothy Leary (b.1920)
I don't like the word 'drugs' at all.... It's a complete misnomer when it
refers to psychedelics, which have nothing to do with drugs that make you
lethargic, dull, sleepy. The psychedelics wake you up. They wake you up
in such startling ways that they can give you very disorienting experiences.
- Nina Graboi
(interview in bOING bOING #8, p.37)
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've
always worked for me. - Hunter S. Thompson (b.1939)
...only drugs make you feel as good as people in TV ads appear to be.
- Hakim Bey
Opiate, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the
jail yard. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
I do not take drugs, I am drugs. - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
_Diary of a Genius_, 1966
I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.
- Maurits Corneille Escher (1898-1970)
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
- Steven Wright (b.1955)
Drugs affect adults differently than they affect children.
- David Byrne (b.1952)
Chemistry is applied theology. - Augustus Owsley Stanley (b.1935)
Drugs don't take people, people take drugs
- Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989)
When one wants to get rid of an unsupportable pressure, one needs hashish.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I
didn't like it and didn't inhale and never tried it again.
- Gov. William Jefferson Clinton
(b.1946)
I can say with confidence I know a fair bit about LSD.
- Dan Rather (b.1931)
Being stoned on marijuana isn't very different from being stoned on gin.
- Ralph Nader (b.1934)
I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal
in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911)
Drugs are the product of Satan. Drug users need to be saved by the Holy Power
of Jesus Christ. - William Bennett
Marijuana is like Coors beer. If you could buy the damn stuff at a Georgia
filling station, you'd decide you wouldn't want it.
- Billy Carter
Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke
pot will someday become congressmen and legalize it in order to protect
themselves. - Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
In short, the commonly used illegal drugs -- narcotics, hallucinogens,
marijuana, amphetamines, and cocaine -- are much less dangerous medically
than alcohol and less addicting than cigarettes.... I would also rate them
much less dangerous medically than many drugs used widely in clinical practice
(including many antibiotics and antihypertensives). I do not believe there
are any valid medical arguments against the choice of drugs as a means to
satisfy the need for periodic episodes of altered consciousness.
- Andrew Weil MD (Harvard)
_The Natural Mind_ (1986 edition)
********************************************************************************
DRUG WAR
--------
These are the two Americas. No other line you can draw is as trenchant as
this. On one side, people of normal human appetites, for food and sex and
creature comforts; on the other, those who crave only the roar and crackle
of their own neurons, whipped into a frenzy of synthetic euphoria. The
Crack Nation. It is in our midst, but not a part of us; our laws barely
touch it on its progress through our jails and hospitals, on its way to
our morgues. - "Crack" Newsweek cover story 28-NOV-88
It's almost a suicidal technique. You can't lie to kids. Drug education is a
uniformed policeman coming into the first grade and telling all these fucking
lies [about marijuana] so that by the time [the kids are] in junior high and
they've tried it, they know you're full of shit. Marijuana _is_ a gateway drug
- it teaches you disrespect for authority.
- Timothy Leary (b.1920)
The act of consuming the forbidden fruit was politicized by the mere fact that
it was illegal. When you smoked marijuana, you immediately became aware of the
glaring contradiction between the way you experienced reality in your own body
and the official descriptions by the government and the media. That pot was
not the big bugaboo that it had been cracked up to be was irrefutable evidence
that the authorities either did not tell the truth or did not know what they
were talking about. Its continued illegality was proof that lying and/or
stupidity was a cornerstone of government policy. When young people got high,
they knew this existentially, from the inside out. They saw through the great
hoax, the cover story concerning not only the narcotics laws but the entire
system. Smoking dope was thus an important political catalyst, for it enabled
many a budding radical to begin questioning the official mythology of the
governing class. - from _Acid Dreams_, p.129
by Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain
The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters
over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away.
It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.
- Terence McKenna (paraphrase) (b.1946)
The Nazis had a Jewish problem. We have a drug abuse problem. Actually,
'Jewish problem' was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the
Jews; 'drug abuse problem' is the name we give to our persecution of people
who use certain drugs. - Thomas Szasz (b.1920)
Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a
species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of
reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and
makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes
a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
speech in the Illinois House of
Representatives, 18 Dec 1840
Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of
temperance. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I cannot convince myself that there is anyone so wise, so universally
comprehensive in his judgment, that he can be trusted with the power to
tell others: 'You shall not express yourself thus, you shall not describe
your own experiences; or depict the fantasies which your mind has created;
or laugh at what others set up as respectable; or question old beliefs; or
contradict the dogmas of the church, of our society, our economic systems,
and our political orthodoxy.' - Jake Zeitlin
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered by considerably by the
Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government
and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an
open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely
connected with this. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"My First Impression of the U.S.A."
An interview for _Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant_, 1921.
Appeared in _Berliner Tageblatt_, 7 July 1921.
Reprinted in _Ideas and Opinions_, published by Bonanza Books.
The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil
are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not _for_ God in themselves, but
_against_ the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but
leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was,
before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however
excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
_The Devils of Loudun_
Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary,
categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.
- Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989)
_Steal This Urine Test _
What are politicians going to tell people when the Constitution is gone
and we still have a drug problem? - William Simpson, A.C.L.U.
Our generation is the first ever to have made the search for self-awareness
a crime, if it is done with the use of plants or chemical compounds as a
means of opening the psychic doors. But the urge to become aware is always
present, and it increases in intensity as one grows older.
- Alexander T. Shulgin (b.1925)
I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a
multibillion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no
control. - George L. Roman, 1992
Authorities are now saying that the war on drugs will be bigger than World
War II.... Oh, *great*...more Time-Life books.
- Jay Leno (b.1950)
Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they
pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If
it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have
the smartest race of people on earth. - Will Rogers (1879-1935)
If you say "Would the were no wine" because of the drunkards, then you
must say, going on by degrees, "Would there were no steel," because of the
murderers, "Would there were no night," because of the thieves, "Would there
were no light," because of the informers, and "Would there were no women,"
because of adultery. - Saint John Chrysostom (c.345-407)
Homilies, c.388
For every prohibition you create you also create an underground....
- Jello Biafra
********************************************************************************
DUTY
----
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares
that it is his duty. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"Caesar and Cleopatra", Act III
The paths of glory at least lead to the grave, but the paths of duty may
not get you any where. - James Grover Thurber (1894-1961)
There is no possible line of conduct which has not at some time and place
been condemned, and which at some other time and place been enjoined as a
duty. - William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903)
********************************************************************************
ECOLOGY
-------
One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something
pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add
up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape.
It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this
insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of
everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous
and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly
disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had
become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease.
It can be cleaned away. - David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less
time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness
and respecting her seniority. - Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985)
We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b.1922)
We do not inherit this land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
- Haida Indian saying
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by
destroying the earth. - Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Man is a blind, witless, low-brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions
upon the earth. - Ian McHarg
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture
and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
- James Anthony Froude (1818-1894)
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he
intends to eat until he eats them. - Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal.
When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.
- Joseph Wood Krutch
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they
happened to be within reach of predatory human hands.
- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
"The Dance of Life", 1923
We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal
tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous
extinction. - Stephen Jay Gould (b.1941)
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion
over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living
thing that moves upon the earth. - Genesis 1:28
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all
response is the desire to control environment.
- John Dewey (1859-1953)
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
- Henrik Tikkanen
We have nowhere else to go...this is all we have.
- Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
In the deepest woods,
lies the heart of our country
A people without forests
is a dying race
that is why
when a tree perishes we grow
another on its grave. - Verse seen on a Swiss forester's wall
Samuel Mines
_The_Last_Days_of_Mankind_ p.111, 1971
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious
and dangerous hallucination. - Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peace and the survival of life on earth as we know it are threatened by human
activities that lack a commitment to humanitarian values. Destruction of
nature and natural resources results from ignorance, greed and lack of respect
for the earth's living things.
Our ancestors viewed the earth as rich and bountiful, which it is. Many
people in the past also saw nature as inexhaustibly sustainable, which we know
is the case only if we care for it.
It is not difficult to forgive destruction in the past that resulted from
ignorance. Today, however, we have access to more information, and it is
essential that we re-examine ethically what we have inherited, what we are
responsible for, and what we will pass on to coming generations.
Clearly, this is a pivotal generation. Global communications is possible, yet
confrontations take place more often than meaningful dialogue for peace.
Our marvels of science and technology are matched, if not outweighed, by many
current tragedies, including human starvation in some parts of the world and
extinction of other life forms. Many of earth's habitats, animals and plants
that we know as rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have
the capability and the responsibility. We must act before it is too late.
- The Dalai Lama (b.1935)
GreenPeace magazine
March/April 1990, p.10
********************************************************************************
EDUCATION
---------
Train a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not
depart from it. - Proverbs XXII, 6
A little learning is a dangerous thing; /
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; /
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, /
And drinking largely sobers us again.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts
at education. - Paul Karl Feyerabend (b.1924)
_Farewell to Reason_, 1987
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
- Ben Franklin (1706-1790)
Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
- R.S. Ingersoll
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Louis Berlioz (1803-1869)
"Almanach des lettres francaises"
Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.
- George Iles
Scimus te prae litteras fatuum esse.
(We know that you are mad with much learning.)
- Petronius (d.c.66 A.D)
He who can, does. He who cannot teaches.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to
distinguish what is worth reading. - George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish
their lack of understanding. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because
they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life.
- Petronius (d. circa 66 AD)
_The Satyricon_
A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing.
The rest is mere sheep-herding. - Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)
_ABC of Learning_.
Some people never learn anything because they understand everything too soon.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
'Tis education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent, the tree's
inclin'd - Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow,
"is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow
old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to
the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world
about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the
sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn
why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can
never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust,
and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what
a lot of things there are to learn." - Terence Hanbury White (1906-1964)
"The Once and Future King"
A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life.
- Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)
The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
- Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870)
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
- Aesop (620-560 BC)
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember that nothing that
is worth knowing can be taught. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
_The Critic as Artist_.
The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man
almost nothing. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free
meandering brook. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle
answered, "As much as the living are to the dead."
- Diogenes Laertius (fl.2nd century)
********************************************************************************
EGO
---
How can the cortex observe and control the cortex? Perhaps there will come a
day when the human brain will fold back on itself again and develop a higher
cortex, but until then the only feedback which the cortex has about its own
states comes through other people. (I am speaking here of the cortex as a
whole. One can of course remember remembering.) Thus the ego which observes
and controls the cortex is a complex of social information relayed back into
the cortex - Mead's 'generalized other.' But this is social misinformation
when it is made to appear that the information of which the ego consists is
something other than states of the cortex itself, and therefore ought to be
controlling the cortex. The ego is the unconscious pretense that the organism
contains a higher system than the cortex; it is the confusion of a system of
interpersonal information with a new, imaginary, fold in the brain - or with
something quite other than a neural pattern, a mind, soul, self. When, there-
fore, I feel that 'I' am knowing or controlling myself - my cortex - I should
recognize that I am actually being controlled by other people's words and
gestures masquerading as my inner or better self. Not to see this brings
about utter confusion, as when I try to force myself to stop feeling in ways
that are socially unacceptable.
If all this is true, it becomes obvious that the ego feeling is pure hypnosis.
Society is persuading the individual to do what it wants by making it appear
that its commands are the individual's inmost self. What we want is what you
want. And this is a double-bind, as when a mother says to her child, who is
longing to slush around in a mud puddle, 'Now darling, you don't want to get
into that mud!' This is misinformation, and this - if anything - is the
'Great Social Lie.'
Let us suppose, then, that the false reflex of 'I seeing my sights' or 'I
feeling my feelings' is stopped.... It is hardly too much to say that such
a change of perception would give far better ground for social solidarity
than the normal trick of misinformation and hypnosis.
- Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold
of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp (b.1908)
********************************************************************************
EMOTION
-------
The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you were to take negative emotions away from people, they would simply
collapse and go up in smoke. What would happen to what we call art, theater,
drama, to most novels? In the emotional center there is no natural negative
part, the greater part of negative emotions are artificial, they are based
on instinctive emotions which are transformed by petty imagination and
identification (losing self in an object). Positive emotions are emotions
which cannot become negative. But all our pleasant emotions such as joy,
affection, can, at any moment, turn to boredom, irritation, envy at the
slightest provocation, or even without provocation. So we can say that we
can have no positive emotions. At the same time we can say that we have no
negative emotions without identification and imagination.
Ordinarily, one accepts expression of negative emotion as quite natural and
even necessary. Very often people call it 'sincerity'. But it is simply a
sign of weakness in man. After the expression of negative emotion one can
notice another curious mechanical feature. This is talking. There is no
harm in talking by itself, but with some people, it really becomes a vice.
They talk all the time, they never stop. All the results of your observations
will evaporate in talking. People ascribe to the word 'imagination' a quite
artificial and quite undeserved meaning in the sense of being creative.
Actually imagination is a destructive faculty that always carries you away
from more conscious decisions. - Ouspensky/Gurd
_The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution_
********************************************************************************
ENLIGHTENMENT
-------------
I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason
it is called Supreme Enlightenment. - Buddha (c.563-c.483 BC)
Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single
moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Then the Lord himself spoke and said: "If you can grasp what is meant by
this, you will be delivered from the fear of Endings. So do not cease from
searching. Yet, remember this; when you find that for which you are looking,
you will at first be struck with horror and amazement. But after the horror
will come understanding; and in the end you will find yourself to be set apart,
and honoured above them all." - The Gospel of St. Thomas (Apocryphal)
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
Spiritual development is seen as a threat to the worldly power structures
because enlightenment renders individuals less susceptible to their
manipulation. - Von K. Lechner
Salon No. 12
Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved
only through persistent exercise of real love.
- M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Do not say, "I follow the one true path of the Spirit," but rather, "I have
found the Spirit walking on my path," for the Spirit walks on all paths.
- Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and
kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
- Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it
arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further developments.
- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
- Eugene Ionesco
_Decouvertes_
Everybody who gets into what's known as "higher consciousness" or "ways of
liberation" or "mysticism" or whatever you want to call it -- they look here,
they look there, they look everywhere and all the time what they're looking
for is carrying them around. It is what creates the reality tunnel that you
live in. It's what makes a sad world for the sad person, a happy world for
the happy person, an angry world for the angry person, and a totally paranoid
world for the DEA.... - Robert Anton Wilson
********************************************************************************
EPITAPHS
--------
Think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will
be of any use to him - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), epitaph
It is so soon that I am done for, I wonder what I was begun for.
- Epitaph, Cheltenham Churchyard
We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
- Epitaph of two astronomers
Remember as you pass me by
as you are now, so was I
as I am now, you all will be
so be prepared to follow me... - Epitaph, Windhoek, Namibia
I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.
- Nikos Kazantzakis
********************************************************************************
EVIL
----
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do
nothing. - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are
quite capable of every wickedness. - Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interr'd with their
bones. - William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The love of money is the root of all evil; which while some coveted after
they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many
sorrows. - I Timothy VI, 10
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at
its root. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
An evil, at its birth, is easily crushed, but it grows and strengthens by
endurance. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Banish Evil from the world? Nonsense! Encourage it, foster it, sponsor it.
The world owes Evil a debt beyond imagination. Think! Without greed ambition
falters. Without vanity art becomes idle musing. Without cruelty benevolence
lapses to passivity. Superstition has shamed man into self-reliance and, with-
out stupidity, where would be the savor of superior understanding?
- Magnus Ridolf
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than
to understand him. - Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881)
Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it
either a poison or a remedy. - Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim
(1493-1541)
Since the generality of persons act from impulse much more than from principle,
men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.
- Hare
Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
_Mein Kampf_, 1933
Venture not to the utmost bounds of even lawful pleasure; the limits of good
and evil join. - Fuller
You may either win your peace or buy it; win it by resistance to evil;
buy it by compromise with evil. - John Ruskin (1819-1900)
********************************************************************************
EXPERIENCE
----------
Conceptions without experience are void; experience without conceptions
is blind. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday
experience. - unknown
Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens
to you. - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
"Reader's Digest", 1956
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when
you make it again. - Franklin P. Jones
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no
proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
- John Keats (1795-1821)
Correspondence, 1819
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in
it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove
lid. She will never sit on a hot stove lid again--and that is well; but also
she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
********************************************************************************
FAITH
-----
"Faith" can be defined as "any man's hope that the human spirit is capable of
understanding"; that anything actually matters in the larger universe; and that
understanding anything could be important outside of our own selfish whims and
desire to survive....and somehow, because it is important, understanding can
go on without us, waiting only to be rediscovered by the future, or at worst,
pissed away, in spite of all our prayers, and work, and suffering.
- unknown
Every expression of the human spirit is an act of faith.
- Ellyn Mustard, mustard@ficc.ferranti.com
Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between
the infinite passion of the individual's inwardness and the objective uncer-
tainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but
precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve my-
self in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective un-
certainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of
water, still preserving my faith. - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
'Truth is Subjectivity'
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
- Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
- Paul Johannes Tillich (1886-1965)
German theologian and historian
Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate.
- F.M. Knowles
The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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FAME
----
In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.
- Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness; some are born
great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
- Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Prizes are for children. - Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954)
[refusing the Pulitzer prize]
There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has not
yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
To be great is to be misunderstood. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Essays", 1841
Fame is proof that people are gullible.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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FANATICISM
----------
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-
compensates a secret doubt. - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
- Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any
hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
- Carl Edward Sagan (b.1934)
_Contact_
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
********************************************************************************
FASCISM
-------
Fascism in America will attempt to advance under the banner of Americanism
and anti-Fascism. - Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949)
Fascism is Capitalism plus Murder. - Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)
Fascism is big business armed with bayonets.
- Grant Singleton (1890-?)
Fascism is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure
and control of the economic, political, social and cultural life of the state.
- U.S. Army (1945)
An American Fascist seeking power would not proclaim that he is a fascist.
Fascism always camouflages its plans and purposes.... Any fascist attempt made
to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work
under the guise of "super-patriotism" and "super-Americanism". Fascist leaders
are neither stupid nor naive. They know that they must hand out a line that
"sells". Huey Long is said to have remarked that if Fascism came to America
it would be on a program of "Americanism".
- U.S. Army (1945)
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FEAR
----
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
- Psalms 111:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom
and instruction. - Proverbs 1:7
Quem metuunt, oderunt.
(They hate whom they fear.) - Quintus Ennius (239-169 BC)
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect.
Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.
- Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Fear is the parent of cruelty. - James Anthony Froude (1818-1894)
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
1st Inaugural Address, 1933
We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place.
- John Berryman (1914-1972)
In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what
begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a
motive, is the beginning of all evil. - Mrs. Jameson
Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.
- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for
they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers
and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.
- Edward Yashinsky
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses
to frighten you. - Eric Hoffer (b.1902)
"The Faber Book of Aphorisms," 1964
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FEMINISM
--------
I listen to feminists and all these radical gals -- most of them are failures.
They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper
Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need
a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man
to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it
and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate
men -- that's their problem. - Reverend Jerry L. Falwell (b.1933)
[The Equal Rights Amendment is part of a] feminist agenda [that is not
about equality but] about a socialist, anti-family political movement
that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children,
practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
- Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson (b.1930)
(From a fundraising letter for The Iowa Committee to Stop ERA, which
includes the Iowa chapter of the Christian Coalition. Pat Robertson
founded the Christian Coalition.)
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
- Timothy Leary (b.1920)
In the highest society, as well as in the lowest, woman is merely an instrument
of pleasure. - Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
A woman must be a cute, cuddly, naive little thing--tender, sweet, and stupid.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail,
no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, 'Women
don't have what it takes.' - Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987)
There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina,
and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
- Gloria Steinem (b.1934)
A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man.
An intelligent woman gives up. - Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954)
********************************************************************************
FOOLS
-----
All ceremonies are, in themselves, very silly things; but yet a man of the
world should know them. They are the outworks of manners and decency, which
would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which
keeps the enemy at a proper distance. It is for this reason that I always
treat fools with great ceremony: true good breeding not being a sufficient
barrier against them. - Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a
fool forever. - Old Chinese saying
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we
cannot resemble. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Although a wise man might urge that one should suffer fools gladly, this
should not be construed as license for any fool to demand that one do so.
- Frederic William Kantor
Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent and discerning if he holds his
tongue. - Proverbs 17:28 (NIV Bible)
It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and
remove all doubt. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove
all doubt. - George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924)
Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
- anonymous
As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are
the greatest blabbers. - Plato (428-348? BC)
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them
deliberately. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned,
but still 'tis nonsense. - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. Seest thou
a man wise in his own conceit? - Proverbs 26:11
As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty
may make a fool seem a man of sense. - Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so
good breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men equal.
- Steele
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists
of not exceeding the limit. - Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)
Fools admire, but men of sense approve.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
What fools these mortals be. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
********************************************************************************
FORTUNE COOKIES
---------------
Psychics will lead dogs to your grave. - anonymous from fortune cookie
Hell is paved with good intentions. - anonymous from fortune cookie
********************************************************************************
FREE SPEECH
-----------
The character of every act depends on the circumstances in which it is done.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely
shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example,
freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
Government should be concerned with anti-social conduct, not with utterances.
- Justice William Orville Douglas
(1898-1980)
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 and define freedom out of existence.
- Voltarine de Cleyre (1866-1912)
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions
makes it impossible to earn a living. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
- (Henry) Graham Greene (b.1904), 1981
The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without
any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely
rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils.
- Leo XIII (1810-1903)
From the polluted fountain of indifferentism flows that absurd and erroneous
doctrine or rather raving which claims and defends liberty of conscience for
everyone. From this comes, in a word, the worst plague of all, namely, un-
restrained liberty of opinion and freedom of speech.
- Gregory XVI (1765-1846)
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore
be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be
propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war
and they are screened at once from scrutiny.... In war, then, as in peace,
assert the freedom of speech and of the press. Cling to this as the bulwark
of all our rights and privileges. - William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)
The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk, but to
the majority, that does not want to listen.
- Zechariah Chafee (1885-1957)
Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act.
- The Talmud (Sabbath, 54 b.)
Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited
without being lost. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should
a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be
criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much
more fatal things than guns. - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924)
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
- John Morley (1838-1923)
_Rousseau_, 1876
Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck
the government." - Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
First as to speech. That privilege rests upon the premise that there is no
proposition so uniformly acknowledged that it may not be lawfully challenged,
questioned, and debated. It needs to rest upon the further premise that there
are no propositions that are not open to doubt; it is enough, even if there
are, that in the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of
heresy. Hence it has been again and again unconditionally proclaimed that
there are no limits to the privilege so far as words seek to affect only the
hearers' beliefs and not their conduct. The trouble is that conduct is almost
always based upon some belief, and that to change the hearer's belief will
generally to some extent change his conduct, and may even evoke conduct that
the law forbids. - Learned Hand
"The Spirit of Liberty"
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls
for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free
thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
1928
To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever
deprives another of the right to state unpopular views also deprives others of
the right to listen to those views. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
1928
Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority
opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines or thoughts.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
1928
Shock, hurt, and anger are not consequences to be weighed lightly. No member
of the community with a decent respect for others should use, or encourage
others to use, slurs and epithets intended to discredit another's race, ethnic
group, religion, or sex. [Yet] it may sometimes be necessary in a university
for civility and mutual respect to be superseded by the need to guarantee free
expression. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
1928
********************************************************************************
FRIENDSHIP
----------
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
There are friendships to one who lives in society; thus our present grief
arises from having friendships; observing the evils resulting from friendship,
let one walk alone like a rhinoceros. - Buddha (c.563-c.483 BC)
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a
rivalry of aim. - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
"The Education of Henry Adams", 1907
There is a scarcity of friendship, but not of friends.
- Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)
I do desire we may be better strangers.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
"As You Like It"
The best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may
offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate -
and quickly. - Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Time Enough For Love_
Jones' Law: Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
If a man does not make new acquaintances, as he advances through life, he soon
will find himself alone. A man should keep his friendship in constant repair.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in
the world. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), 1656
Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old
day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful:
a meaningful friend -- or a meaningful day.
- The Dalai Lama (b.1935)
"Time," 11 April 1988
********************************************************************************
GENIUS
------
When a true genius appears in this world you may know him by the sign that
the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
_Thoughts on Various Subjects_
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come
back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
_Essays, First Series: Self-Reliance_
The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has
always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its
time. - Voltaire (1694-1778)
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your
private heart is true for all men -- that is genius.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.
- Isaac D'Israeli
_Literary Character of Men of Genius_, Ch.12
********************************************************************************
GOD
---
God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1894-1983)
I cannot imagine a god who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation,
whose purposes are modeled after our own - a god, in short, who is but a
reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual
survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts
through fear or ridiculous egotism. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit
who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our
frail and feeble mind. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Raffinerat ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist Er nicht.
(God is subtle, but He is not malicious.)
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe.
- Albert Einstein, attributed (1879-1955)
God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
- Alfred Jarry (b.1873-1907)
If the work of God could be comprehended by reason, it would be no longer
wonderful. - Pope Gregory I (St. Gregory the Great)
Know then thyself; presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Question with boldness even the existance of God; because if there be one,
He must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfold fear.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education,
and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a
poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punshiment and hope of reward
after death. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their
hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without
an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea,
not God Himself. - Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1967)
(Spanish philosopher and writer)
Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of
the finger of God. - Herbert Westren Turnbull (1885-1961)
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
- Ghose Aurobindo (1872-1950)
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
Man is a dog's idea of what God should be.
- Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)
Whis is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
There is no God.
But it does not matter.
Man is enough. - Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
"Conversation at Midnight"
God and man are powerless without one another.
- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
_Note Books_
The gods too are fond of a joke. - Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Probably no invention came more easily to man than when he thought up heaven.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742-1799)
He was a wise man who invented God. - Plato (427?-348? BC)
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
"Epitres, XCVI"
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order
to save us. - Peter De Vries
_The Mackerel Plaza_
It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe
there are. - Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)
(43 BC-AD 18) "Ars Amatoria"
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create
him. - Arthur Charles Clarke (b.1917)
The world is not a prison-house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where
millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
- Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He
didn't. - Jules Renard (1864-1910)
An honest God is the noblest work of man.
- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
_Note Books_
An honest god is the noblest work of man. ...God has always resembled his
creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably
found on the side of those in power. ...Most of the gods were pleased with
sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine
perfume. - Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
_The Gods_, 1876
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader,
and of the merchants a merchant. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.
- Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)
...you see, God -- whatever anyone chooses to call God -- is one's highest
conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception
above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a
rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best,
the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine
a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.
- Kira Argounova
I...reject the argument put forth by many fundamentalists that science has
nothing to do with religion because God is not among the things making up the
universe in which we live. Surely if a necessity for a god-concept in the
universe ever turns up, that necessity will become evident to the scientist.
- Ralph Asher Alpher (b.1921)
"Theology of the Big Bang,"
Religious Humanism, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (Winter 1983), pg. 12
I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.
- John Marcellus Huston (1906-1987)
It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is
dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
The devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God.... But even so,
one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil.
- unknown
Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist there is no God.
- Heywood Hale Broun (1888-1939)
An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we
cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.
- Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann"
Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion: that the
secrets of nature were the secrets of God, part of that glory into which man
is not to press too boldly. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he
had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless; and understanding of
his adversity he would be senseless. - St. Augustine (340-430)
If God lived on Earth, people would knock out all His windows.
- Yiddish saying
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They
would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in
a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men
believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the mind, and can
search the stars with a telescope and not find God.
- J. Gustav White
The gods play games with men as pieces.
- Titus Maccius Plautus (254?-184 BC)
When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic.
- Lily Tomlin (b.1939)
No creo en Dios, pero le tengo miedo. (I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid
of Him.) - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b.1928)
_El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera_
It is difficult to imagine that the belief in a single jealous male god of
uncertain temper represents a "higher" spiritual state than the belief in
many gods, male and female alike, each an embodiment of some aspect of human
life as it can be empirically known and experienced.
- Vincent Scully
It is expedient that there should be gods, and, since it is expedient, let
us believe that gods exist. - Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)
_Ars Amatoria_, Book I, line 637
The universe is a machine for creating gods.
- Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1941)
_Two Sources for Morality and Religion_
********************************************************************************
GOVERNMENT
----------
Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?
- Pope Julius III
The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit
to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
- William H. Borah
A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring
it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge
will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors
must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
- James Madison (1751-1836)
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to
gain ground. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
...dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control
can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that
Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards 'justice,
freedom and democracy' within its domains.
- Avram Noam Chomsky
January 1988 (b.1928)
In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by
slow starvation. The old principle: Who does not work does not eat, has been
replaced by a new one: Who does not obey shall not eat.
- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), 1937
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will
not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
- Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am
horrified for having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is
always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept
this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes
me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed;
that they gamble -- yes, gamble -- with a whole part of their life and their
so-called "vital interests." - Albert Camus (1913-1960)
_Notebooks, Book I_
A Russian should rejoice if Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Armenia,
should be separated, freed from Russia; so with an Englishman in regard to
Ireland, India and other possessions; and each should help to do this, because
the greater the state, the more wrong and cruel is its patriotism, and the
greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Therefore,
if we really wish to be what we profess to be, we must not only cease our
present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease,
its weakening, and help this forward with all our might."
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
"Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence"
(As quoted in "Fellowship" magazine, July/August 1991)
The United States has a government, security organizations and allies. The
Soviet Union, however, has a regime, secret police and satellites. Our
leaders are consummate politicians; their are wily, cunning or worse. We
give the world information and seek influence; they disseminate propaganda
and disinformation while seeking expansion and domination.
- Stephen Cohen
On loaded language in _Sovieticus:
American Perceptions and Soviet Realities_
(NY: Norton, 1985) pp 29-31
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
- John Kenneth Galbraith (b.1908)
In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States,
industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference
between the two great oligarchies of our time.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
If we do not halt this steady progress of building commissions and regulatory
bodies and special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of
the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions
of dollars more. - Franklyn Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
...But when he [the people's champion] has disposed of foreign enemies by
conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always
stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
- Plato (427?-347 BC)
"The Republic"
In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did
not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been
accepted by the people; for there are many good laws, the importance of which
is known to be the sagacious lawgiver, but the reasons for which are not
sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade others to submit to them; and
therefore do wise men, for the purpose of removing this difficulty, resort to
divine authority. - Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are
menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world: our contem-
poraries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an
expression that will accurately convey the whole idea I have formed of it; the
old words `despotism' and `tyranny' are inappropriate; the thing itself is new,
and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the
world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multi-
tude of men, all equal and all alike incessantly endeavoring to procure the
petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them,
living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and
his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest
of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he
touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for
himself alone, and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any
rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon
itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That
power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the
authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object were to prepare men
for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual child-
hood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they
think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willing-
ly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of their
necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns,
directs their energy, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their
inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all
the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful
and less frequent; it circumvents the will within a narrower range and grad-
ually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has
prepared men for all these things; it has predisposed them to endure them,
and often to look on them as benefits.
- Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel de Tocqueville
(1805-1859)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the possessing
classes over the masses...the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most
complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all
men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose
of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest.... This flagrant ne-
gation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the State is, from
the standpoint of the State, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue....
Thus, to offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave
one's fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on the
other hand, from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are done for
the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the extension of its
power, it is all transformed into duty and virtue.... This explains why the
entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting
crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all
countries -- statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors -- if judged from
the standpoint of simply morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand
times over earned their sentence to hard labor or to the gallows. There is
no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous trans-
action, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not
been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states,
under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so
terrible: "for reasons of state."
- Michael A. Bakunin (1814-1876)
"Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism",
found in Noam Chomsky, _For Reasons of State_, Pantheon, 1973.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most bad government has grown out of too much government.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
One must respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation
and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary
submission to an unnecessary tyranny. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you
have sex - these are _not_ the affairs of the state. A government does not
exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be
fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the
blood of tyrants and patriots. - Gore Vidal (b.1925)
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take
it all away. - Barry Morris Goldwater (b.1909)
A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take
from you everything you have. - Gerald Rudolph Ford (b.1913)
(quoted in _Time_, 8 Nov 1976)
What all of this indicates is that despite the Constitution, despite the First
Amendment and its guarantees of free speech, American citizens must fear to
speak their minds, knowing that their speech, their writings, their attendance
of meetings, their signing of petitions, and their support of even the most
nonviolent of organizations may result in their being listed in the files of
the FBI, with consequences no one can surely know. It was Mark Twain who said,
'In our country, we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of
speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.'
- Howard Zinn (b.1922)
"Second Thoughts on the First Amendment"
The Humanist, November/December 1991
pp. 15-22, 42
Scitum est inter caecos luscum regnare posse.
(It is well known, that among the blind the one-eyed man is king.)
- Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536)
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created
free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are
told to deny our senses and subject them to the will of others? When people
devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted
authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt
to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Let your voice be heard, whether or not it is to the taste of every jack-in-
office who may be obstructing the traffic. By all means, render unto Caesar
that which is Caesar's -- but this does not necessarily include everything
that he says is his. - Denis Johnston (1901-1984)
_The Brazen Horn_
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities
are wrong. - Voltaire (1694-1778)
You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.
- Victor Cousin
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
- Charles De Gaulle (1890-1970)
Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory.
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign
in every free one. - James Madison (1751-1836)
Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the
tigers are getting hungry. - Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"While England Slept"
I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people
which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus
building a wall of separation between church and state.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
to the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association, 1802
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute --
where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how
to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote
-- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political
preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his
religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who
might elect him. - John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)
address to the Greater Houston Ministerial
Association, 12 September 1960
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is
that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them
together is certain death. - George Carlin (b.1937)
Once a ruler becomes religious, it [becomes] impossible for you to debate with
him. Once someone rules in the name of religion, your lives become hell.
- Colonel Moammar Qaddafi (b.1938)
October 1989
General People's Congress in Tripoli
Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect
in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire,
for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These
institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you,
affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of
minorities. There was never a country where the majority of people were in
their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"The Mysterious Stranger"
I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of
the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the
poor poorer. - William Henry Harrison (1773-1841)
If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the
Constitution. It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft.
Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory contain-
ing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word
"National". - George F. Will
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect.
Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.
- Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented
systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of
Governments to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one
are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
What government is the best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
_Spruche in Posa_, Part III
********************************************************************************
GRAVE
-----
The grave itself is but a covered bridge,
Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
_The Golden Legend_, v, 1851
The grave's a fine and private place,
but none, I think, do there embrace. - Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
_To His Coy Mistress_, c.1648
The rain has such a friendly sound to one who's six feet underground.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Mausoleum, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
The consumer's side of the coffin lid is never ostentatious.
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)
Worms'-Meat, n. The finished product of which we are the raw material. The
contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Granitarium. Worms'-
meat is usually outlasted by the structure that houses it, but "this too must
pass away." Probably the silliest work in which a human being can engage is
construction of a tomb for himself. The solemn purpose cannot dignify, but
only accentuates by contrast the foreknown futility.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
All that glisters is not gold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold. - William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
********************************************************************************
GRIEF
-----
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have
somebody to divide it with. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"Following the Equator", 1897
Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common
sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
- Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)
********************************************************************************
GUNS
----
1935 will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has
full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient
and the world will follow our lead into the future!
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street
with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy. However, 4 out of 5 U.S.
murders are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?
- Andrew Ford, forda@agcs.com
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise
the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness,
enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and
others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character
on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
********************************************************************************
HABIT
-----
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to
be broken. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring
the deadening effect of a habit. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Habit, n. A shackle for the free. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
- Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936)
"The Tragic Sense of Life", 1913
Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.
- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
_The Education of Henry Adams_, Ch.16
********************************************************************************
HAPPINESS
---------
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in height.
- Robert Frost (1875-1963)
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
[H]appiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether
you are happy or not. The cure is occupation.
- George Bernard Shaw (1871-1922)
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something
to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive
tendencies of the human frame. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their
condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
- Malcolm X (1925-1965)
It's interesting to live when you are angry.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b.1933)
May you live in interesting times. - Chinese curse
Where does one go from a world of insanity? /
Somewhere on the other side of despair.
- Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
- George Cornewall Lewis (1806-1863)
Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Amusement to an observing mind is study.
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
The mind ought sometimes to be amused, that it may the better return to
thought, and to itself. - Phaedrus (c.15 BC-AD c.50)
Pleasure is nature's test, her sign of approval.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Happiness is not something you experience, it's something you remember.
- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the
dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
- Thomas Szasz (b.1920)
Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
- Anatole France (1844-1924)
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our
institutions, great is our sin. - Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and
not on our circumstances. - Martha Custis Washington (1732-1802)
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's
happiness. - (Henry) Graham Greene (b.1904)
Unhappiness is the hunger to get; happiness is the hunger to give.
- William George Jordan
Joy and grief are never far apart. In the same street the shutters of one
house are closed while the curtains of the next are brushed by the shadows of
the dance. A wedding party returns from the church; and a funeral winds to
its door. The smiles and sadness of life are the tragi-comedy of Shakespeare.
Gladness and sighs brighten the dim mirror be he holds.
- Robert Eldridge Willmott
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish
to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe
others to be happier than they are. - Charles de Secondat Montesquieu
(1689-1755)
It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which
give happiness. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp,
but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
********************************************************************************
HASH HOUSE HARRIERS
-------------------
Hash House Harriers: A drinking club with a running problem.
- Hash slogan
If you have half a mind to hash, that's all you need!
- Hash motto
Hash, n. There is no definition for this word -- nobody knows what hash is.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
To one who, journeying through night and fog,
Is mired neck-deep in an unwholesome bog,
Experience, like the rising of the dawn,
Reveals the path that he should not have gone.
- Joel Frad Bink
I get my exercise being a pallbearer for those of my friends who believed
in regular running. - Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Go ahead and do it, it is easier to apologize than to get permission.
- Admiral Grace Hopper (b.1908)
(Advice to trespassing hares)
The Hare and the Hound: A hound started a hare from his lair, but after a long
run, gave up the chase. A goat-herd seeing him stop, mocked him, saying "The
little one is the best runner of the two." The hound replied, "You do not see
the difference between us: I was only running for a dinner, but he for his
life." - Aesop (b.620 BC)
Nicknames stick to people, and the most ridiculous are the most adhesive.
- Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865)
A good name will wear out; a bad one may be turned; a nickname lasts forever.
- Zimmerman (Bob Dylan or M.Z. or
Charles J. Zimmerman?)
A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated has not the art of getting
drunk. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
The difficulty of finding any given trail marker is directly proportional
to the importance of the consequences of failing to find it.
- Milt Barber
Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much
of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging
up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is
the next best thing to premature burial.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
No poems can please nor live long which are written by water-drinkers.
- Horace (65-8 BC)
What is the use of running when you are on the wrong road?
- Proverb
********************************************************************************
HATE
----
The work of the world is done on hate. All work done well is well done
only when persons hate work done shoddily. Justice can exist only when
injustice is hated, laws only when lawlessness is hated, and education
only when ignorance is hated. Every improvement this world has ever
known was brought about because someone hated intolerable conditions.
- Jane Dunlop (Adelle Davis)
_Exploring Inner Space: Personal
Experiences Under LSD-25_, p.106
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
It would seem that men always need some idiotic fiction in the name of which
they can hate one another. Once it was religion. Now it is the State.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and
children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot
be my disciple. - Jesus, Luke 14:26
********************************************************************************
HEAVEN
------
Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell
only to find it ridiculous. - George Santayana (1863-1952)
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing
hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think
the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
- Isaac Asimov (b.1920)
Probably no invention came more easily to man than when he thought up heaven.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742-1799)
There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that
raises us above ourselves. - Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-1881)
The Baptists believe in The Right to Life before you're born. They also
believe in Life After Death, but that is a privilege and you have to earn it
by spending the interim in guilt-ridden misery. At an early age I decided that
living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is
a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting
your money back at the end. - A. Whitney Brown
"The Big Picture"
What a pity that the only way to heaven is in a hearse!
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)
To everyone is given the key to heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.
- Ancient proverb
The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.
- Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)
No one blames a man for believing that his wife is beautiful, but it is
impossible to avoid disgust in the presence of one who believes that he has
an immortal soul of some vaguely gaseous nature and that it will continue to
exist four hundred million years after he has been shoveled away...
- Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
It is a curious thing...that every creed promises a paradise which will be
absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.
- William Seward Burroughs (b.1914)
********************************************************************************
HELL
----
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place, for where we are
is Hell, and where Hell is there must we ever be.
- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
"Doctor Faustus"
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Journal", 20 December 1822
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Christ believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really
profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Hell is paved with priests' skulls. - Saint John Chrysostom (c.345-407)
De Sacerdotio [c.390]
That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of god more abundantly,
they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in Hell.
- St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
(Nietsche, _On the Geneology of Morals_)
That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the
good old days when we wished we were dead.
- Samuel Beckett (b.1906)
_Embers_
********************************************************************************
HISTORY
-------
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.... Those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it.
- George Santayana (1863-1952)
_The Life of Reason_
The only surprises are the history you don't know.
- Harry S Truman (1884-1872)
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible
state of things. - Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments have
never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831)
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, historical facts and personages occur
as it were, twice. He forgets to add: the first time as tragedy, the second
as farce. - Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never
learn anything from history. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as
farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps,
and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
- Julian Barnes (b.1946)
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.
- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
And tomorrow will be like today, only more so.
- Isaiah 56:12 [NSV]
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9
It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order more
sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our
modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are
accustomed to think. - Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Discourse I
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831)
All those things which are now held to be of the greatest antiquity, were at
one time new; and what we today hold up by example, will rank hereafter as
precedent. - Cornelius Tacitus (c.56-c.120)
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
- Arthur Miller (b.1915)
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
- Henrik Tikkanen
Every means tends to become an end. To understand the tragedy of history
it is necessary to grasp that fact. Machines, which ought to be man's
instruments, enslave him, the state enslaves religion, parliament enslaves
democracy, institutions enslave justice, academies enslave art, the party
enslaves the cause, the dictatorship of the proletariat enslaves Socialism.
- Ignazio Silone (1900-1978)
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls
the past. - George Orwell (1903-1950), _1984_
Try to keep things in perspective. Fifty years from now, kids in history
classes will be yawning over what panics us today.
- Unknown
********************************************************************************
HONESTY
-------
This above all: to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night
the day thou cans't not then be false to any man.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an
honest man. - Richard Whately (1787-1863)
Archbishop of Dublin
The liar's punishment...is that he cannot believe anyone else.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no
longer believe you. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Take, for example, the act of lying. We hold the telling of truth as a value;
we are not supposed to lie. Yet if everyone told the truth all the time so
that one could have complete trust in what one is told, then the advantage
that would accrue to a single liar in society would be immense. This is not
a stable social situation. On the other hand, in a society of individuals in
which everyone lied all the time, society would be unworkable. The equilibrium
state seems to be one in which people tell the truth most of the time but
occasionally lie, which is how the world really seems to be. In a sense,
then, it is the liars among (and within) us that keep us both honest and
on our guard. This kind of scientific analysis of lying can help us under-
stand why we do it. - Heinz Rudolph Pagels (b.1939)
"The Dreams of Reason", pg. 330
A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the
last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security
or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion
respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium
for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy.
Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we
can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good
deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as
they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country,
or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to
be, surely it is in the interest of _honest_ persons to know this fact, because
the _dishonest_ are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge
practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to
those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that
an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties.
- Charles Tomlinson
Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks
published around 1850
It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.
- Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)
(43 BC-AD 18)
Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.
- Plato (428-348? BC)
The rulers of the State are the only ones who should have the privilege of
lying, whether at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of
the State. - Plato (428-348? BC), "The Republic"
They begin with making falsehood appear like truth, and end with making truth
itself appear like falsehood. - Shensione
We lie to you by not telling you things. We don't lie by telling you things
that aren't true. - U.S. official to Wash. Post 1/11/91
That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.
- Alexander Meigs Haig, Jr. (b.1924)
You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.
- Margaret Thatcher (b.1925), 1976
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent. - William H. Blake (1757-1827)
Pain forces even the innocent to lie. - Publilius Syrus (1st century BC)
He who conceals a useful truth is equally guilty with the propagator of an
injurious falsehood. - St. Augustine (340-430)
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint. The
affectation of sanctity is a blotch on the face of piety.
- Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801)
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
And it does matter. An honest man or woman is an honest man or woman more
because he or she is honest in the small, everyday things that "don't matter"
individually, but which make up a well-lived life, than because of some single
great temptation that was passed. A person who is concerned about individual
rights or about individual dignity makes his or her difference not because of
any sweeping great statement or action, but because of the accretion of small,
individually seemingly insignificant acts that spread that dignity and confirm
those rights through every action they take. It matters because every action
you take, and every action I take is an expression of the human spirit.
- William Oliver
********************************************************************************
HOPE
-----
While there's life, there's hope. - Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)
(c.190-159 BC)
For where no hope is left is left no fear.
- John Milton (1608-1674)
Paradise Regained, book 3, line 206
Hope is like the cork to the net, which keeps the soul from sinking in
despair; and fear is like the lead to the net, which keeps it from floating
in presumption. - Watson
The basis of optimism is sheer terror. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
He who has never hoped can never despair.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Hope is the lease of submission. - Raoul Vaneigem (b.1934)
There is hope, but not for us. - Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.
(Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.) - Alighieri Dante (1265-1321)
The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness
of our life is gone, shadows of the evening fall around us, and the world
seems but a dim reflection itself--a broader shadow. We look forward into
the coming lonely night; the soul withdraws itself. Then stars arise, and
the night is wholly. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
All human wisdom is summed up in two words: wait and hope.
- Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
_The Count of Monte Cristo_
********************************************************************************
HUMILITY
--------
Humility does not thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it
mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom of thinking of
yourself at all. - William Temple (1881-1944)
I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel
that they have not said enough. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
********************************************************************************
HUMOR
-----
I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating
a dead horse. - Woody Allen (b.1935)
Entropy isn't what it used to be. - anonymous
Pizza is a lot like sex. When it's good, it's really good. When it's bad,
it's still pretty good. - anonymous
A signature always reveals a man's character--and sometimes even his name.
- Evan Esar
I didn't claw my way to the top of the food chain just to eat leaves!
- Michael Rivero
Eschew obfuscation. - anonymous
Suppose you're in a hypothetical situation...
- Steve Wechsler
Where would we be without rhetorical questions?
- anonymous
Know what I hate most? Rhetorical questions.
- Henry N. Camp
Illiterate? Write for help! - anonymous
Non-sequiturs make me eat lampshades. - unknown
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice,
there is. - Chuck Reid
You can observe a lot by just watching.
- Yogi Berra (b.1925)
A billion here, a billion there - pretty soon it adds up to real money.
- Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen
(1896-1969)
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why
people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
- Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)
See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron,
My God! Perhaps I am! - "Eugenics Review", July 1929, 86/2
I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play
or not. - Fran Lebowitz (b.1951)
Lotto fever hit New York again this week, and like the old saying goes,
`You gotta be in it to win it...but first, you gotta have a dead-end job
so pathetic you're willing to kill five hours standing in line for a 1 in
25 million chance.' - Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update
It's a control freak thing. I wouldn't let you understand.
- S.H. Underwood
It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four
times bigger then the previous record. - John Blasik
...an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension.
- Roger M. Knutson
_Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common
Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways_
An Academic speculated whether a bather is beautiful if there is none in the
forest to admire her. He hid in the bushes to find out, which vitiated his
premise but made him happy. Moral: Empiricism is more fun than speculation.
- Sam Weber
By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to
suspect "Hungry." - Gary Larson (b.1950)
I cannot say that I don't disagree with you.
- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and nearly kills Captain Kirk.
- TV Guide, describing the Star Trek episode "Amok Time"
Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite
nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
goddamn these haikus
I'm so sick of seeing them
when will it all end? - Curtis Galloway (curtisg@sco.COM)
When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year.
I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.
- Steven Wright (b.1955)
I think that all good, right thinking people in this country are sick and
tired of being told that all good, right thinking people in this country
are fed up with being told that all good, right thinking people in this
country are fed up with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not, and I'm
sick and tired of being told that I am.
- Monty Python
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the
headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM.
- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
There was a young girl from Peru
Whose limericks stopped at line two.
- unknown
There was a young man from Verdunn... - unknown
The limerick from a Mr. Nero could not be located.
- unknown
Scariest sentence in the English language: "We'll be in the air momentarily."
- Pieter Hazewindus
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742-1799)
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different
speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
- Clive James
********************************************************************************
IDENTITY
--------
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
- Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you
cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
- Thomas a' Kempis (1380-1471)
Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses
all fear. - Isa Upanishad
Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.
- Baba Ram Dass (b.1931)
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
- Frank Leahy (b.1908)
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
- Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971)
I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others
to take an example of himself. - Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)
(c.190-159 BC)
Behavior is a mirror in which every one displays his image.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper
due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place
to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family
with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder
the task. - Sydney J. Harris
The thrush in my back yard sings down his nose in liquid runs of melody, over
and over again, and I have the strongest impression that he does this for his
own pleasure. It is a meditative, questioning kind of music, and I cannot
believe that he is simply saying 'thrush here.'
- Lewis Thomas (b.1913)
A bird does not sing because it has an answer...it sings because it has a song.
- Ancient Chinese proverb
This is perhaps the most distinctive Buddhist teaching, that suffering is the
product of 'the craving of the passions, the craving for existence, the craving
for nonexistence.' It is, however, far from an obvious truth. Certain cases
of suffering are plainly due to craving, namely, those that are due to frus-
trated desires. Desires may be eased by satisfaction or extirpation; and one
may allow that if one stopped desiring, it would amount to preventing all the
suffering due to frustration. But this does not prove the general case....
Body, feelings, perception, mentality, and consciousness are separate sets of
graspings. There is nothing that _does_ the grasping. _We_ are the aggregate
of the graspings, not something, apart from them, that does the grasping.
This is an interesting and startling thought.
- Arthur Coleman Danto (b.1924)
(Proposed in _Mysticism and Morality: Oriental
Thought and Moral Philosophy_, 1972, p.67)
The configuration of my nervous system, like the configuration of the stars,
happens of itself, and this 'itself' is the real 'myself.' From this stand-
point -- and here language reveals its limitations with a vengeance -- I find
that I cannot help doing and experiencing, quite freely, what is always
'right,' in the sense that the stars are always in their 'right' places.
- Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
"Beat Zen, Square Zen, Zen"
_This is It_, p.88
********************************************************************************
IGNORANCE
---------
Let's not be too tough on our own ignorance. It's the thing that makes America
great. If America weren't incomparably ignorant, how could we have tolerated
the last eight years? - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
1 Feb. 1989
Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
- Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
********************************************************************************
IMAGINATION
-----------
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of
humor to console him for what he is. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
- Jules de Gaultier (b.1858)
[H]appiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
********************************************************************************
IMMORTALITY
-----------
To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake.
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
If a man carefully examines his thoughts, he will be surprised to find how
much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature
is probably immortal. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but
every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.
Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even
cannibalism. - Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
_The Brothers Karamazov_, Pt 1, Bk i, Ch 6
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of
immortality. - Hannah Arendt, speech 5 December 1977
********************************************************************************
INDIVIDUALITY
-------------
There is one characteristic of the present direction of public opinion
peculiarly calculated to make it intolerant of any marked demonstration
of individuality. The general average of mankind are not only moderate
in intellect, but also moderate in inclinations; they have no tastes or
wishes strong enough to incline them to do anything unusual, and they
consequently do not understand those who have, and class all such with
the wild and intemperate who they are accustomed to look down upon.
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
_On Liberty_
The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism,
monarchy, monogamy - and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there
is only one right way to live - only one right way to regulate religious,
political, sexual, medical affairs - is the root cause of the greatest threat
to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security,
and sanity. - Thomas Szasz (b.1920)
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
- William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night,
and in between he does what he wants to do.
- Bob Dylan (b.1941)
The nail that sticks out must be hammered down.
- Chinese saying
It is a blessed thing that in every age someone has had the individuality
enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.
- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as
well as if a promitory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
- John Donne (c.1572-1631)
Meditation XVII
A man and still more the woman, who can be accused either of doing 'what
nobody does,' or of not doing 'what everybody does,' is...in peril of a
commission de lunatico. - John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem
those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only
individuals. - Charley Reese (b.1937)
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
- Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
"Song of Myself" part 1
_Leaves of Grass_, 1855
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes). - Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
"Song of Myself" part 51
_Leaves of Grass_, 1855
My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care?
A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! My manner
of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my
existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were
it, I'd not do so. - Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade
(1740-1814)
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything
that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up
to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are
heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into
certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-
stamps. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
The test of maturity, for nations as well as individuals, is not the increase
of power, but in the increase of self-understanding, self-control, self-
direction, and self-transcendence. For in a mature society, man himself
and not his machines or his organizations is the chief work of art.
- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety
prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the
rear window of their automobiles. - Paul Fussell (b.1924)
Everyone wants to be Cary Grant...*I* want to be Cary Grant.
- Archibald Leech (1904-1986)
He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing
anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Independent self-reliant people (would be) a counterproductive anachronism in
the collective society of the future [...] (where) people will be defined by
their associations. - John Dewey (1859-1953)
educational philosopher, proponent of
modern public schools. 1896
"The Tyranny of Government Schooling", John Gatto, 1992
Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculed in the country,
as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts.
There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its
congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since
all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for,
from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies
only upwards, not downwards. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
Surely every human being ought to attain to the dignity of the unit. Surely
it is worth while to be one, and to feel that the census of the universe
would be incomplete without counting you. Surely there is grandeur in knowing
that in the realm of thought you are without a chain; that you have the right
to explore all heights and all depths; that there are no walls or fences, or
prohibited places, or sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that
your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that you hold
all in fee, and upon no condition, and by no tenure, whatsoever; that in the
world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation, and from the
ignorant tyranny of majorities. Surely it is worth something to feel that
there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods,
to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. Surely it
is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigotry can devise no prison,
no dungeon, no cell in which for one instant to confine a thought; that ideas
cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, nor burned with
fire. Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that
within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all worlds
and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself.
- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"The Free Soul"
There is no ache more deadly than the striving to be oneself.
- Yevgeniy Vinokurov
We tend to see our own experiences as the normal process, so we are often
amazed that anyone could have taken a different path. But when we do meet
up, it's always fascinating to compare notes about the different ways to get
there. - Daniel Gilly
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Those Who Bemoan The Death Of Democracy
------------------------------------------
You are undergoing by accident and by your own fault a spiritual journey which
many would consciously purchase at great price, but cannot buy. Your picture
of yourself, your self-illusion, is in process of being broken. This places
you in an unusual position, very close to the truth, and that proximity is part
of your pain.
You describe your grief as a system. Indeed it is, a defensive system of
mutually supporting falsehoods instinctively produced to defend your old
egoistic self-image which you cannot bear to lose, you cannot bear its death
which seems so like your own. Your endless talk of dying is a substitute for
the real needful death, the death of your illusions. Your "death" is a pretend
death, simply the false notion that somehow, without effort, all your troubles
could vanish. This is where you are, and here a religious believer would pray;
you must try to find your own equivalent of prayer. The word "will" rarely
describes anything perceptible, but an act of will is needed here, an act of
well-intentioned _concentration_.
I'm not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it truthfully.
Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to its survival
as a successful liar. _Recognise_ lies and reject them at every point. You
want to unhappen what has happened, you feel anger and hate at what prevents
this, and which you see as the cause of your "loss of honour." These old deep
"natural" desires appear to you to be irresistible. Check them, see them to
be illusions and lies. Move beyond them into an open and quiet area which you
will find to be an _entirely new place_.
You say you live in pain. Let it be the pain of the death of the old false
self, and the life-movement of the new real truthful self. We are all wrapped
in silky layers of illusion which we instinctively feel to be necessary to our
existence. Often these illusions are harmless, in the sense that we can still
go on being reasonably good and reasonably happy. Sometimes, because of a
catastrophe, a bereavement or some total loss of self-esteem, our falsehoods
become pernicious, and we are forced to choose between some painful recognition
of truth and an ever more frenzied manufacturing of lies.
Live at peace with despair. Live quietly with your sense of guilt. Sit beside
it, as it were, and regard the frightful wound to your self-esteem as the
removal of deep illusions which existed before and which this chance has torn.
If you keep checking any lie and resisting the anger which deforms the world,
you will gradually realise that the poor old wounded self, with its furious
whining and its hatred of itself and everything else, is not you at all. That
self is dying, but another self is watching it die.
- Iris Murdoch (b.1919)
_The Good Apprentice_ (p.70 et seq)
********************************************************************************
INDOCTRINATION
--------------
What are our schools for if not indoctrination against Communism?
- Richard Milhous Nixon (b.1913)
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in
the human head if only you begin to inculate it before the age of five,
by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from
happening. [...] The average American (should be) content with their humble
role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
- William Torrey Harris (1835-1909)
U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889
_The Tyranny of Government Schooling_, by John Gatto, 1992
As far as I can see, the greater amount of education which a part of the
working class has employed for some years past, is an evil. It is dangerous
because it makes them independent. - J. Geddes (1865)
[British glassworks owner]
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it
must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be
created only by education. - John Dewey (1859-1953)
In what he called the 'great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells,'
Reagan reproached the movies, television and young parents for failing to
indoctrinate American youth in 200-proof patriotism, the way they did in his
day. 'If we forget what we did,' said the man who still can't remember trading
arms for hostages, 'we won't know who we are.' The section ended with this
weird passage: 'And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what
it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a
very American thing to do.' - Hendrik Hertzberg (b.1943)
********************************************************************************
INQUIRY
-------
Inquiry is fatal to certainty. - Will Durant (1885-1981)
Do not worship, revere, or be afraid of any person, group, space, or reality.
An investigator, an explorer, has no room for such baggage.
- John Cunningham Lilly (b.1915)
The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters
over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away.
It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.
- Terence McKenna (paraphrase) (b.1946)
We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song if their
pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask
why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens.... The
diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden
in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never
be lacking in fresh nourishment. - Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
********************************************************************************
INTELLECT
---------
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course,
powerful muscles, but no personality. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of
intelligence. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares
not, is a slave. - William Drummond (1585-1640)
"Academical Questions"
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with
sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course,
powerful muscles, but no personality. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
********************************************************************************
JEST
----
When a woman in the front row complained that he was trivializing "the issues"
by making jokes of them, Abbie Hoffman replied, "Sometimes when I'm funny I'm
most serious. That was the Yippies' contribution.... We crossed the false
dichotomy between struggling for a good cause and having a good time."
- from Herb Pintler
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
- Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976)
A jest often decides matters of importance more effectively and happily than
seriousness. - Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 BC)
********************************************************************************
JUSTICE
-------
There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact
between men. - Epicurus (341-271 BC)
Justice is incidental to law and order.
- John Edgar Hoover (1895-1972)
You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contra-
dictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.
- Edwin Meese III (b.1931)
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
Our judgements judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses,
more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
The laboring people found the prisons always open to receive them, but the
courts of justice were practically closed to them.
- John Peter Altgeld (1847-1902)
********************************************************************************
KNOWLEDGE
---------
There are things on heaven and earth, Horatio, Man was not meant to know.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
"Hamlet"
It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.
- Epictetus (c.55-c.135)
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
- Confucius (551-479 BC)
Dare to be naive. - Richard Buckminster Fuller (1894-1983)
...true knowledge is the discerning of pattern, and wisdom in its right
interpretation. - Robert Coover (b.1932)
Knowledge is power. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
There is no knowledge that is not power.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Knowledge is power if you know it about the right person.
- Ethel Mumford (1878-1940)
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be
out of danger? - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a
problem, to solve it and then to apply it. The restriction of knowledge
to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual
impoverishment. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow. - Ecclesiastes 1:18
It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward
an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible
(and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy
tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater
articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to
the development of our consciousness. - Paul Karl Feyerabend (b.1924)
...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone
who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain,
must be exceedingly simple-minded... - Plato (427?-348? BC), "Phaedrus"
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection
of authority. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
Es ist nicht genug zu wissen, man muss auch anwenden.
Es ist nicht genug zu wollen, man muss auch tun.
(It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it.
It is not enough to have wishes, one must also accomplish.)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.
- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it
seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear
of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after
rational knowledge. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an
islet in the midst of in illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business
in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.
- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
- Irving Howe
The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate
knowledge of its ugly side. - James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987)
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.
- Susan Sontag (b.1933)
_Esquire_, July 1968
********************************************************************************
LANGUAGE
--------
Language is a virus from outer space. - William Seward Burroughs (b.1914)
All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to
nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may
give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they
will never give the inner meaning of the original.
- Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1941)
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a
living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
- Leo Calvin Rosten (b.1908)
The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish,
and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten.
The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits.
When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas.
When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words?
He is the one I would like to talk to.
- Chuang-tzu (c.369-c.286 BC)
...exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fulness
of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since
no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his
conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like a cracked
cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we
are trying to move the stars to pity. - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
_Madame Bovary_, ch. 12
Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the
strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
- George Eliot (1819-1880)
Middlemarch XI, 1872
Grammar is not a vice (though excessive picking at it can be). And non-
standard words/grammar can be used to good effect -- but no one can do that
without knowing _how_ they're deviating.
- Randy Clark
Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.
- unknown
W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name,
the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman
alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some
simple Greek word, like _epixoriambikos_. Still, it is now thought by the
learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have
been concerned in the decline of "the glory that was Greece" and the rise
of "the grandeur that was Rome." There can be no doubt, however, that by
simplifying the name of W (calling it "wow," for example) our civilization
could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.
- Lily Tomlin (b.1939)
That phrase "hocus-pocus" started out as "hocus-pocus dominocus", and was,
in the beginning, a mocking imitation of the holy incantations of the
Catholic Church's Latin liturgy. So say the Lexicologists.
- The Informed Source
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which we will not
put. - Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak
it to? - Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is
not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
- Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
- Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if only words were
taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things
themselves. - John Locke (1632-1704)
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of
party, faction, and division of society.
- John Adams (1735-1826)
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the
pedigrees of nations. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no
laconism can reach it: 'tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great
deal in a little room. - Jeremy Collier (1650-1726)
It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.
- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 BC)
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are
slippery and thought is viscous. - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
"The Education of Henry Adams", 1907
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased
either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which
will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which"
and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y"
replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for
all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing
awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and
the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali
bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast
a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th"
rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl,
kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
********************************************************************************
LAST WORDS
----------
Decay is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.
- Buddha (c.563-c.483 BC)
Now comes the mystery. - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
8 March 1887
...the fog is rising. - Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Vae, puto deus fio. (Woe is me, I think that I am becoming a god.)
- Vespasian (9-79 AD)
in Suetonius _Vespasian_ 23, 4
Said when he was fatally ill
This is it. I'm going. I'm going. - Al Jolson (1886-1950)
Oh God, here I go... - Max Baer (1909-1959)
God bless...God damn. - James Grover Thurber (1894-1961)
I am perplexed. - (Edward) Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
The paper burns, but the words fly free.
- Ben Joseph Akiba (c.50-135)
Burned at the stake,
when the Torah was also burned.
I've got to get to the top of the hill...
- John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913)
I have a long journey to take, and must bid the company farewell.
- Raleigh, Sir Walter (1554-1618)
in Edward Thompson _Sir Walter Raleigh_
Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
- George Saunders
Friends applaud, the comedy is over. - Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827)
I am going to seek the great perhaps... Pull down the curtain, the farce
is ended. - Francois Rabelais (1494?-1553)
Macht doch den zweiten Fensterladen auch auf, damit mehr Licht hereinkomme.
(Open the second shutter, so that more light can come in.)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
(Commonly just given as `Mehr Licht!')
Put out the light. - Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark.
- O. Henry [William Sydney Porter]
(1862-1910)
quoting a popular song, 5 June 1910
in C.A. Smith _O. Henry_ ch. 9
I wish I'd drunk more champagne. - Lord John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.
- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
- Pancho Villa (1877-1923)
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a
conventional thing to happen to him. - John Barrymore (1882-1942)
I offer my body as a torch
To dissipate the dark
To waken love among men
To give peace to Vietnam - Nhat Chi Mai (?-1967)
Vietnamese student
suicide note, he burnt himself to death
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I am leaving you with your
worries. Good luck. - George Sanders (1906-1972)
(suicide note)
And now, in keeping with Channel 40's policy of always bringing you the latest
in blood and guts, in living color, you're about to see another first--an
attempted suicide. - Chris Hubbock
who shot herself during a broadcast
They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist....
- John Sedgwick (1813-1864)
Civil War General
In response to a suggestion that he should not show himself
over the parapet during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House
I feel great. - Pete Maravitch (basketball player)
Moments before he collapsed,
lost consciousness and died
I'm fine. Go away. - Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
Mind your own business. - Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957)
When his nurse asked him about the
state of his bowels on his deathbed
Why yes, a bulletproof vest! - James W. Rodgers (?-1960)
final request before the firing squad
A lot of people, on the verge of death, utter famous last words or stiffen
into attitudes, as if the final stiffening in three days' time were not
enough; they will have ceased to exist three days' hence, yet they still
want to arouse admiration and adopt a pose and tell a lie with their last
grasp. - Henri de Montherlant (1896-1972)
_Explicit Mysterium_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is quoted with permission from _A_Garage_Sale_of_the_Mind_, by
W. Edward Harris, minister emeritus of All Souls Unitarian Church, Indianapolis.
Thoreau on his deathbed and sinking fast was asked by his aunt who'd long
worried about her nephew, "Have you made your peace with your God?" Thoreau,
still alert, replied, "I never quarreled with my God." This is one of the
great deathbed quotes if we excuse any put-down element in it. But the story
does not end there. There's an addition which seems, to me, even better.
Thoreau's aunt pursued the matter, asking, "But aren't you concerned about the
next world?" Thoreau, impatient now, said, "One world at a time."
This is an entire sermon, an entire religion, an entire philosophy condensed
into one short sentence. This world, this life. It is enough. It is of
cosmic relevance.
********************************************************************************
LAW
---
What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which
no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to
be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had
warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on
him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months.
Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of
their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or
so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised
before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessane changes that no man who
knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.
- The Federalist, No. 62
It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.
- Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria
(1738?-1794)
We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them.
- Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854-1939)
"Instead of a Book"
The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
- Cornelius Tacitus (c.56-c.120)
The greater the number of laws, the greater the number of offenses against
them. - Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some
ordinance under which you can be booked.
- Robert D. Sprecht (Rand Corp)
Bad law is more likely to be supplemented than repealed.
- Dalin B. Oaks
We bury men when they are dead, but we try to embalm the dead body of laws,
keeping the corpse in sight long after the vitality has gone. It usually takes
a hundred years to make a law, and then, after the law has done its work, it
usually takes another 100 years to get rid of it.
- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
It is of more importance to the community that innocence should be protected
than it is that guilt should be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent
in the world that all of them cannot be punished, and many times they happen
in such a manner that it is not of much consequence to the public whether they
are punished or not. But when innocence itself is brought to the bar and
condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'It is immaterial to
me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if
such a sentiment as this should take place in the mind of the subject there
would be an end to all security whatsoever.
- John Adams (1735-1826)
To live outside the law you must be honest.
- Bob Dylan (b.1941)
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will like them only entangle and hold
the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
- Anacharsis (c.600 BC)
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 (1844-1924)
In every society where property exists there will ever be a struggle between
rich and poor. Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected; they
will either be made by the members to plunder the few who are rich, or by the
influence to fleece the many who are poor.
- John Adams (1735-1826)
I think people believe that the only strategy we have is to put a lot of police
officers on the street and harass people and make arrests for inconsequential
kinds of things. Well, that's part of the strategy, no question about it.
- Daryl Francis Gates (b.1926)
I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them.
- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
Who will protect the public when the police violate the law?
- Ramsey Clark (b.1927)
Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the
land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"Ideas and Opinions", 1954
What is termed "disrespect for law" in fact may only be the manifestation of
a burning desire for justice. Order, like law, to be respected, must deserve
respect. Disrespect for an order that does not deserve respect ought not to
be condemned as degeneration, but commended as a healthy regeneration. What
I am concerned about is that lawyers and judges too often regard "order" as
a shield for the protection of privilege.
- James Chalmers McRuer (b.1890)
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle
that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape
all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our
obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's
conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no
matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral
code. - Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
in the introduction to Frances G. Wickes'
"Analysis der Kinderseele"
(The Inner World of Childhood), 1931
In our society, sometimes you have to penalize (innocent) people for the good
of everybody else. - a Pittsburgh cop 10/16/93
...and we must consider, that since -- unfortunately -- we are forced to live
together, the most important thing for us to remember is that the only way in
which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible. I
see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of
a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of
obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its
civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion. There is no conceivable
law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses
to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent him from setting them -- just
as there is none to force his employer to accept them. The freedom to agree
or disagree is the foundation of our kind of society....
- Austen Heller
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Politics"
Laws are made for us; we are not made for the laws.
- William Milonoff
1993 Vice-President of the Executive
Committee, Free Democratic Party, Russia
Laws don't work, unless they merely codify generally accepted behavior, in
which case they are probably unnecessary.
- tom@genie.slhs.udel.edu
In a Democracy only those laws which have their bases in folkways or the
approval of strong groups have a chance of being enforced.
- Abraham Myerson
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of
nature! - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
One Law for the Lion and Ox is oppression.
- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to
them. - Matthew VII, 12
Sze-Kung asked, saying, "Is there one word which may serve as a rule of
practice for all one's life?" The Master said, "Is not Reciprocity such
a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."
- Confucius (551-479 BC)
_Who Said What When_
Hippocrene Books, 1991
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love
under will. - (Edward) Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
Love and do what thou wilt. - St. Augustine (340-430)
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.
- Hassan I Sabbah
To despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful;
it is rebellion against God's will. - Leo XIII (1810-1903)
The highest duty is to respect authority.
- Leo XIII (1810-1903)
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little
of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking,
and from that to incivility and procrastination.
- Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859)
It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law.
Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that
human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no
distinction between good and evil. - unknown
There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.
No artist ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
- Jean Giraudoux
********************************************************************************
LEGISLATURE
-----------
We can no more blame our loss of freedom on congressmen than we can
prostitution on pimps. Both simply provide broker services for their
customers. - Dr. W. Williams
In our last congressional elections, there was less turnover in the House of
Representatives than there was in the Soviet Politburo: 98.5% of the incumbents
were reelected! - John McCormick, "Self-Made In America"
In short, members of the United States Congress enjoy more job security than
members of the Supreme Soviet. - CNN: 7 Nov 1990, 12:15 AM EST
Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.
- Frank McKinney Hubbard (1868-1930)
No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.
- Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)
Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.
- unknown
********************************************************************************
LIBERTY
-------
[Freedom is] the power to live as you will. Who then lives as he wills?
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood: the
person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it to
the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that person's
liberty. Are you free? - Andrew Ford
gtephx!forda@asuvax.eas.asu.edu
There is but one element of government, and that is THE PEOPLE. From this
element spring all governments. "For a nation to be free, it is only necessary
that she wills it." For a nation to be slave, it is only necessary that she
wills it. - John Adams (1735-1826)
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the
law free. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Live Free or Die; Death is not the worst of evils.
- General John Stark, 1809
(1728-1822)
Mejor morir a pie que vivir en rodillas.
(Better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees.)
- Dolores Ibarruri Gomez (1895-1989)
La Pasionaria
In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the
Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to
them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then
Athens ceased to be free. - Edward Gibbon (1734-1794)
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching
consequence of submission to authority.
- Stanley Milgram
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that
ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives... When liberty is taken
away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily
by default it can never be recovered. - Dorothy Thompson (1894-1961)
American journalist, author
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me
to tremble for the safety of my country.... Corporations have been enthroned,
an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the
country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices
of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic
is destroyed. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
quoted in Jack London, _The Iron Heel_
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty will be charged to dangers,
real or imagined, from abroad. - James Madison (1751-1836)
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to
gain ground. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the
argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
- William Pitt (1756-1806)
speech on the India Bill
18 November 1783
Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out
caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control people's lives. And
no country can do that part way. I tried it and failed. Nor can any country
do it all the way either. I tried that, too, and it failed.
- Herman Goering (1893-1946), 1946
"Healing Our World", Dr. Mary Ruwart, 1992
Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature
them for execution. An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties,
could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose not
merely a temporary combination between the legislature and the executive, but
a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a
combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be preserved in,
and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative
body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it
presumable that every man the instant he took his seat in the national Senate
or House of Representatives would commence a traitor to his constituents and to
his country? Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man discern-
ing enough to detect so atrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to
apprise his constituents of their danger? If such presumptions can fairly be
made, there ought to be at once an end of all delegated authority.
- Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)
the Federalist Papers, #26
Power...offers a choice of servitudes but calls this choice liberty.
- Raoul Vaneigem (b.1934)
_The Revolution of Everyday Life_
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively,
in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-
protection. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised
over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent
harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient
warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will
be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the
opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good
reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him,
or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with evil in
case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired
to deter him must be calculated to produce evil in someone else. The only
part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that
which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his inde-
pendence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind,
the individual is sovereign. - John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
"On Liberty", 1859
...there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species...
should be equal amongst one another without subordination or subjection...
- John Locke (1632-1704)
Liberty consists in doing what one desires.
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by law.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society,
must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
- Samuel Hendel
Obedience to Law is Liberty.
- Etched into the facade of the Worcester County Courthouse
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength. - George Orwell (1903-1950), _1984_
There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty,
Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Father-
land. - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
- Will Durant (1885-1981)
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit
of justice is no virtue. - Barry Morris Goldwater (b.1909)
acceptance speech,
Republican convention 16 June 1964
I remind you, sir, that extreme patriotism in the defense of liberty is no
vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Our government...teaches the whole people by its example. If the government
becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to
become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
- Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941)
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
- Will Durant (1885-1981)
In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because
I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and
by that time no one was left to speak up.
- Pastor Martin Niemoller
(1892-1984)
When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not
concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic,
and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions
and industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned.
Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church--and there was nobody left
to be concerned. - Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)
14 October 1968
Congressional Record p. 31636
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from
opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will
reach himself. - Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when
the government's purpose is beneficient. Men born to freedom are naturally
alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest
dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning
but without understanding. - Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941)
dissenting, Olmstead vs. United States,
277 U.S. 479 (1928)
Every law is an infraction of liberty. - Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
- Henry David Thoreau, 1847 (1817-1862)
Authority and liberty are two incompatible ideas.... Liberty diminishes in
proportion as man progresses and becomes civilized.
- Antonio de Oliveira Salazar
(1889-1970)
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act.
- Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.
- Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)
Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission
for their action only from their own conscience and reason, and to be deter-
mined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be respon-
sible only to themselves, and then to the society to which they belong, but
only insofar as they have made a free decision to belong to it.
- Mikhail A. Bakunin (1814-1876)
Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924)
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
- Edward Roscoe Murrow (1838-1923)
Increase of freedom in the State may sometimes promote mediocrity, and give
vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful legislation, diminish the
capacity for war, and restrict the boundaries of Empire.... A generous spirit
prefers that his country should be poor and weak, and of no account, but free,
rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.
- Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
(1834-1902)
Of what use is political liberty to those who have no bread? It is of value
only to ambitious theorists and politicians.
- Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793)
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but
nothing to choose from. - Peter Alexander Ustinov (1871-1945)
I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my
life, the way I want to. - Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970)
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is
responsible for everything he does. - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
...so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish
to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote
themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put
shackles upon sleeping men. - Voltarine de Cleyre (1866-1912)
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Many politicians...are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident
proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their
freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool..who resolved not to go into the
water till he had learned to swim. - Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is
the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
- Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
(1834-1902)
The remedy in the United States is not less liberty but real liberty -- an
end to the brutal intolerance of churchly hooligans and flag-waving corpora-
tions and all the rest of the small but bloody despots who have made the word
Americanism a synonym for coercion and legal crime.
- Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
- Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas
(1898-1980)
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep
thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the
same act as the destroyer of liberty. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of
restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation
of the individual within that system of necessary restraints.
- Justice Abe Fortas
The tendency of all strong Governments has always been to suppress liberty,
partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in
innovation. - J.A. Hobson (1858-1940)
There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions
to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
We have not tried to suppress true, legitimate liberty; on the contrary, we
have tried to preserve it. We are for liberty, but liberty with order, the
kind of liberty which will not threaten the basic principles of our nation,
nor threaten its faith and unity. - Francisco Franco (1892-1975)
What good is it to me, after all, if there is an authority always busy to
see to the tranquil enjoyment of my pleasures and going ahead to brush all
dangers away from my path without giving me even the trouble to think about
it, if that authority, which protects me from the smallest thorns on my jour-
ney, is also the absolute master of my liberty and of my life?
- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Democracy in America
If you believe there is a God, a God that made your body, and yet you think
that you can do anything with that body that's dirty, then the fault lies with
the manufacturer. - Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Liberty wasn't guaranteed by the Constitution. It was only given a chance.
- Stephen Chapman
Chicago Tribune
********************************************************************************
LIFE
----
In the morning when we rise from bed, although surprised to find ourselves
still alive, we are even more amazed to find everything just as we left it
the night before. - Tommaso Landolfi
Woke up this morning and found myself dead.
- anonymous
The whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of death.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
The life which is unexamined is not worth living.
- Plato (428-348? BC)
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose
pain. - William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Afraid of death? One should be afraid of life, not death.
- Marlene Dietrich (b.1904)
Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.
- Annie Lennox (b.1954)
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because
we are not the person involved. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)
The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life
and having no time. It is, rather, born of a vague fear that we are wasting
our life. - Eric Hoffer (b.1902)
To live long, it is necessary to live slowly.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
_Beyond Good and Evil_
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
- George Santayana (1863-1952)
"War Shrines"
All of the animals excepting man know that the principal business of life is
to enjoy it. - Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals
that know nothing. - Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!
(Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!)
- Horace (65-8 BC)
I don't really believe there is a 'meaning' to life. I think life is simply
a fact which we have to accept, for better or worse. It is up to us to provide
meanings implicitly through our work and our behavior and our affections and
our pleasures. Sometimes they seem enough, sometimes they don't. It is,
above all, a question of patience. - Al Alverez (b.1929)
Life may at times be boring, but is it more fun to be dead?
- Alcor Life Extension Foundation
Living is not breathing but doing. - Rousseau
Let us work without theorizing; it is the only way to make life endurable.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we
call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
- Herman Melville (1819-1891)
"Moby Dick"
It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; as soon as we
sober again we see that it is all a delusion, and a stupid one!
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Every age is fed on illusions, lest man should renounce life early and the
human race come to an end. - Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
_Victory_
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life, you
would have received further instructions as to what to do and where to go.
You may or may not be issued an actual life later.
- unknown
Dead people are cool. - anonymous
Lif is too short. - Bart Gold
If only Mama Cass shared that ham sandwich with Karen Carpenter, they both
might be alive today. - anonymous
We're all in this alone. - Jane Wagner
Life is just one damned thing after another.
- Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another -- it's one damn
thing over and over. - Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Those who will not reason /
Perish in the act: /
Those who will not act /
Perish for that reason. - Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
Shorts
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.
- Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
"Little Gidding"
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered
whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
- Douglas Adams (b.1952)
_The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is
little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
- Pedro Calderon de la Barca
"Life is a Dream"
The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the
mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are
such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is
possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up
to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things
which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons,
plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges
can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to
maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.
- Freeman Dyson
_Infinite in All Directions_
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he
who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"Maine Woods," `Chesuncook'
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be
serious when people laugh. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
- Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976)
Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life.
- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in the petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way of dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. - William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Macbeth, Act V, Scene V
For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise...
and step into the shadow now without complaint.
- Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922)
For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are
thousands or millions that perish. There is an enormous random scattering for
every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human
design. "If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge thousands of
guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a
locked room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if,
in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other
houses to wind and weather - assuredly no one would call such proceedings
purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings
a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence."
- J.W.N. Sullivan
Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary,
and adopt a new form. The phrase "being born" is used for beginning to be
something different from what one was before, while "dying" means ceasing
to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this,
yet the sums of things remains unchanged.
- Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)
(43 BC-AD 18), Metamorphoses
Obviously, you are too young and naive to have realised the utter futility of
life. We are here because our parents had a few moments of meaningless lust
that they did not enjoy. Our parents did not raise us because they love us,
for who can love a mewling, puking infant? They did because they were
genetically programmed to. Once we are grown, we will have our meaningless
lusts with someone we do not love, someone who does not love us, or both. We
will probably have children who do not love us either and will leave home at
the earliest opportunity. We'll work in meaningless jobs, and our work will
not affect anybody's lives, except to slightly annoy someone. When we die,
only those we owe money to will mourn our being dead before we returned their
money. - Eric Murray, alt.angst
Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ.
I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves
you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried,
you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five
years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke,
your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and
speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabili-
tation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one
day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by
a city bus and then you die. Maybe. - Denis Leary
Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who
have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are
parts of the same Great Adventure. - Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of
a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the
grass and loses itself in the sunset. - Crowfoot (Sahpo Muxika, c.1836-1890)
Blackfoot warior and orator, 1890
People find life entirely too time-consuming.
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)
Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished:
If you're alive, it isn't. - Richard Bach, _Illusions_
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and
tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls
a butterfly. - Richard Bach, _Illusions_
a stopped clock
tells our story
with its frozen
hands.
it is right twice
a day.
we are right twice
a lifetime
we'er born
we'er dead
nothing
else
matters. - bhikku
Time runs backwards, at the end /
You turn into a child again /
Then you're dust. - Robyn Hitchcock
Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childish-
ness, and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
It's all so painfully empty and lonesome.... I don't think I can stand any
more of it...the whole dreadful way we are born, die, and are never missed.
The fact there is _nobody_...nobody really.... We come out of a yawning tomb
of flesh and sink back finally into another tomb. What is the point of it
all? Who thought up this sickening circle of flesh and blood? We come into
the world bleeding and cut and our bones half-crushed only to emerge and suffer
more torment, mutilation, and then at the last lie down in some hole in the
ground forever. Who could have thought it up, I wonder?
- James Purdy
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the
of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
_Existentialism is a Humanism_
Often it is fatal to live too long. - Jean Racine (1639-1699)
Mourn not the dead...
But rather mourn the apathetic throng --
The cowed and meek
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong,
And dare not speak. - Ralph Cahplin (1887-1961)
Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and
looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years
later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their death-
beds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, "So. What
did you think?" - Steven Wright (b.1955)
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
_Journals_
Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
"Coningsby" 1844
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the
masks are dropped. - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic
of life is its coerciveness; it is always urgent, "here and now," without any
possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank.
- José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)
A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds
left undone. - Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe
(1811-1896)
Excess of grief for the deceased is madness; for it is an injury to the
living, and the dead know it not. - Xenephon (c.430-c.355 BC)
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
- Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
Life is to the universe as rust is to iron. We are, in the final judgement
(on a planetary scale, certainly), nothing more than an advanced form of
corrosion, just one more way for the universe to wear itself out a little
faster. - Solomon Short
Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the
miracle. - Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
If we don't know life, how can we know death?
- Confucius (551-479 BC)
Birth, copulation and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks;
Birth, copulation and death. - Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
Sic transit gloria mundi.
[So passes away the glory of this world]
- Thomas a' Kempis (1380-1471)
Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? ...
Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand.
But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle,
is beyond all human wisdom. - Alan Paton (1903-1988)
"Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that
they may live. - Socrates (470?-399 BC)
When people are starving, life is no longer meaningless.
- John Gardner
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside
us while we live. - Norman Cousins
Life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly
inflict on someone else. - Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)
If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.
- John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have
a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will
be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old
day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful:
a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.
- the 14th Dalai Lama
interview in "Time", 11 April 1988
Once you accept your own death all of a sudden you are free to live. You no
longer care about your reputation...you no longer care except so far as your
life can be used tactically -- to promote a cause you believe in.
- Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972)
The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of
them.... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of
years, but on your will. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
1580
When one has great gifts, what answer to the meaning of existence should one
require beyond the right to exercise them?
- Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant
of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been
all of these. - George Washington Carver (1864-1943)
No one imagines that symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or
that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music
is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same,
I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in
improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
- Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
"This Is It"
Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.
- Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
There is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than the death of men:
that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they show at
their death.... Were I a composer of books, I would keep a register,
commented of the diverse deaths, which in teaching men to die, should
after teach them to live. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
- William James (1842-1910)
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a
light in the darkness of mere being. - Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
_Memories, Dreams, Reflections_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is thy hour, O Soul;
Thy free flight into the wordless
Away from books, from art.
The day erased; the lesson done.
Thee fully forth emerging,
Silent, gazing...
Pondering the themes thou lovest best:
Night, sleep, death, and the stars. - Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ah, but the choice of dreams to live,
there's the rub.
For all dreams are not equal,
some exit to nightmare
most end with the dreamer
But at least one must be lived...and died.
- unknown
********************************************************************************
LITERATURE
----------
Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and
perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme
and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in
pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or
at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at
command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines--not to
be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed
more often in thought than in reality.
- Robertson Davies (b.1913)
Tempest-Tost
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a
reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills
reason itself. - John Milton (1608-1674)
Aeropagitica
I wonder how so insupportable a thing as a bookseller was ever permitted to
grow up in the Commonwealth. Many of our modern booksellers are but needless
excrements, or rather vermin. - George Wither (1588-1667)
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical
instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without
this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Never judge a book by its movie. - J.W. Eagan
Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark
to read. - Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
- unknown
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Damn all expurgated books; the dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
- Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.
- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
To read without reflecting, is like eating without digesting.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some to be chewed and
digested. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished,
so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.
- Dr. I. Watts
Talking is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental
constitution of the man who devours many books. A full mind must have talk,
or it will grow dyspeptic. - William Matthews
The fullest instruction, and the fullest enjoyment are never derived from
books, till we have ventilated the ideas thus obtained, in free and easy
chat with others. - William Matthews
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Every burned book enlightens the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
I cannot live without books. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1815
I have somewhere seen it observed, that we should make the same use of a
book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does
not harm it. - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books,
I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.
- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
Ordinary people know little of the time and effort it takes to learn to read.
I have been eighty years at it, and have not reached my goal.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
(1803-1873), _Richelieu_, 1838
The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
- Muhammad (c.570-632)
The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Science fiction is to the totalitarian state what Aesop's fables were to the
institution of slavery in the sixth century BC. It is, of course, subversive.
By taking ideas too seriously, it ridicules people. But it depends, for its
subversive power, on people who are smart enough to be afraid of laughter.
Modern history, especially as it expresses itself in the totalitarian hockey
puck, has an excess of almost everything except a genuine appreciation of the
ludicrous. - John Leonard, New York Times (1982)
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the
living of a single life. - Nadine Gordimer
"Selecting my Stories"
While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance;
and when he is dead, we rate them by his best.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
_Works_, Vol IX
********************************************************************************
LOVE
----
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956)
Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
- William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food;
sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.
- Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
- Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)
When you're in love it's the most glorious two and a half days of your life.
- Richard Lewis
Love is what we call the situation which occurs when two people who are
sexually comptatible discover that they can also tolerate one another in
various other circumstances. - Marc Maihueird
If you blow chunks and she comes back, she's yours. If you spew and she
bolts, it was never meant to be. - Wayne, "Wayne's World" (?)
Relationships are complex because they are part real, part imaginary.
- Martin F. Terman
Is not absence death to those who love?
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind
blows out candles and fans fire. - Francois La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
_Reflections; or, Sentences and Moral
Maxims_ [1678], maxim 276
And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour
of separation. - Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the
species. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
"A Writer's Notebook" 1949
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.
- e.e. cummings (1894-1963)
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts
dead. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
The unity that binds us together, that makes this earth a family and all
men brothers and sons of God, is love. - Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900-1938)
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.
- Sophocles
It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and per-
severing courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless
that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even
generations. - Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
********************************************************************************
LUCK
----
A physicist visits a colleague and notice a horseshoe hanging on the wall
above the entrance. "Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?"
he asks. "No", replies the colleague, "but I've been told that it works
even if you don't believe in it." - Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
(favorite story)
What are we to make of _luck_ in our methodology of science? In the inductive
view, luck strikes me as completely inexplicable; it can arise only from the
gratuitous obtrusion of something utterly unexpected upon the senses; it is
like winning a prize in a lottery in which we did not buy a ticket.
- Peter Brian Medawar (1915-1987)
"Pluto's Republic"
********************************************************************************
MADNESS
-------
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
_Problemata,30,1
There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
"On Tranquility of the Mind", 17,10
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
- John Dryden (1631-1700)
Absalon and Achitophel
Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.
- Bergen Evans (1904-1978)
American lexicographer
The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
- Horace Walpole (1717-1797)
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
The Devils of Loudun
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the
mental institution of the universe. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
If other worlds are inhabited, this world must be their lunatic asylum.
- George Bernard Shaw (1871-1922)
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
- Krishnamurti
Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
- Leo Calvin Rosten (b.1908)
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Journal", 20 December 1822
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.
- James Graham Ballard (b.1930)
_Running Wild_
Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo-social realities.
- Ronald David Laing (1927-1989)
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not
conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the
conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short,
unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials
destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this
present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his
own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught
he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to
him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against
the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the
innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
There is a pleasure sure / In being mad, which none but madmen know.
- John Dryden (1631-1700)
The Spanish Friar, Ii, i
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is
and not as it should be! - Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
_Don Quixote_
Sanity is a madness put to good uses, waking life is a dream controlled.
- George Santayana (1863-1952)
Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.
- Ronald David Laing (1927-1989)
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.
- Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands
explained. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, people, and
times, it is the rule. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.
- Horace (65-8 BC)
Be prepared to go mad with fixed rule and method.
- Horace (65-8 BC)
It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion.
- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 BC)
The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane.
- Phaedrus (c.15 BC-AD c.50)
The only people for me are the mad ones -- the ones who are mad to live, mad
to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones
who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous
yellow Roman candles. - Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
"On the Road"
Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.
- Henrik Tikkanen
It is his reasonable conversation which mostly frightens us in a madman.
- Anatole France (1844-1924)
There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
- Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Sanity is a cozy lie. - Susan Sontag (b.1933)
"Against Interpretation"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad, you're
mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
_Alice_In_Wonderland_
********************************************************************************
MANKIND
-------
The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.
- Claude Levi-Strauss
"Tristes Tropiques" 1955
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of
water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would
still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies
and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing
of this. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
_Pensees_, No. 200
Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of
those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest
of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware
that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.
- Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
_Memories, Dreams, Reflections_
Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea,
and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.
- Pliny The Elder (AD 23-79)
A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not
survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to
break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted.
But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and destroy his mind.
- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
It is inconceivable that a judicious observer from another solar system would
see in our species -- which has tended to be cruel, destructive, wasteful,
and irrational -- the crown and apex of cosmic evolution. Viewing us as the
culmination of _anything_ is grotesque; viewing us as a transitional species
makes more sense -- and gives us more hope.
- Betty McCollister, "Our Transitional Species",
Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object
which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher
animals, directly follows. - Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
A man is a god in ruins. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
_Nature_
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
- Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.
- Richard Bach
I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most
of them are trash. - Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are,
and of things that are not that they are not.
- Protagoras (c.485-c.410 BC)
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, disect, and immediately you
come to machinery. - Paul Ambroise Valery (1871-1945)
The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Playboy Interview - March 1963
What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter
which lie close together to keep each other warm.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all
in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely
far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are
impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally in-
capable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite
in which he is engulfed. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive
what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body
should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and
yet it is his very being. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Pensees (II,72)
Man is nature's sole mistake. - William Schwenck Gilbert
(1836-1911)
The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called
man. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the
care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate,
which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law
that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not
from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills."
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
October 1776
The individual is like a wave in a vast ocean which, while it lasts, has an
individual form, but in itself is nothing but ocean and so need not fear
falling back into itself, where it has always been anyway.
- Buddhist analogy
It is either through the influence of narcotic potions, of which all primitive
peoples and races speak in hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring,
penetrating with joy all of nature, that those Dionysian stirrings arise, which
in their intensification lead the individual to forget himself completely....
Not only does the bond between man and man come to be forged once again by the
magic of the Dionysian rite, but alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature again
celebrates her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The Birth of Tragedy
"Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more
desire to throw a stone than you had."
"Satan!"
"Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed
by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and
its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the
noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.
The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-
hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive
and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One
kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps
in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that
ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of
witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics
in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted
prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart
into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and
wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make
the most noise -- perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a
determined front will do it -- and in a week all the sheep will wheel and
follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end."
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"The Mysterious Stranger"
...The Universe is thronged with fire and light,
And we but smaller suns, which, skinned, trapped and kept
Enshrined in blood and precious bones, hold back the night.
- Ray Bradbury
In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for
moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of trancendence
over the world of existence. - Vaclav Havel (b.1936)
playwright and Czech president
That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh
is a fool. - George Santayana (1863-1952)
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
- George Santayana (1863-1952)
You've no idea of what a poor opinion I have of myself, and how little I
deserve it. - William Schwenck Gilbert
(1836-1911)
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties;
in form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel;
in apprehension, how like a god; the beauty of the world -- the paragon of
animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
...the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from other
animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we
can only call "inhuman." - Raphael Aloysius Lafferty
I would go so far as to suggest that, were it not for our ego and concern to
be different, the African apes would be included in our family, the Hominidae.
- Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (b.1944)
The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"Journal", 26 September 1859
A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he
take it ill to be railed at by a man in a fever. Just so should a wise man
treat all mankind, as a physician treats a patient, and look upon them only
as sick and extravagant. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
An Animal that knows who it is, one that has a sense of his own identity, is
a discontented creature, doomed to create new problems for himself for the
duration of his stay on this planet. Since neither the mouse nor the chip
knows what is, he is spared all the vexing problems that follow this discovery.
But as soon as the human animal who asked himself this question emerged, he
plunged himself and his descendants into an eternity of doubt and brooding,
speculation and truth-seeking that has goaded him through the centuries as
relentlessly as hunger or sexual longing. The chimp that does not know that
he exists is not driven to discover his origins and is spared the tragic
necessity of contemplating his own end. And even if the animal experimenters
succeed in teaching a chimp to count one hundred bananas or to play chess, the
chimp will develop no science and he will exhibit no appreciation of beauty,
for the greatest part of man's wisdom may be traced back to the eternal
questions of beginnings and endings, the quest to give meaning to his
existence, to life itself. - Selma Fraiberg
_The Magic Years_, pg. 193
But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up
excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three,
therefore, can do anything whatever toward saving the human race from
reciprocal suicide. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two
great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that
our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world-
system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.... The second was when biological
research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially
created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.
- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts
against God's command.... From the standpoint of the Church, which represents
authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this
is the beginning of human freedom. - Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited
in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as some-
thing separated from the rest...a kind of optical delusion of his conscious-
ness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal
desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to
free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace
all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Art may make a suit of clothes: but Nature must produce a man.
- David Hume (1711-1776)
_Essays: The Epicurean_ No. xv
I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal,
not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because
he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
- William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Nobel Prize Speech, 1950
What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos,
what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, helpless earthworm,
depository of truth, sink of uncertainty and error. Glory and scum of the
universe. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
_Pensees_ No. 131
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more
intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New
York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about
in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always
believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the
same reasons.
Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of
the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but
most of their communications were misinterpreted....
- Douglas Adams (b.1952)
_The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy_
********************************************************************************
MARRIAGE
--------
It [marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and
those within despair of getting out. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with
the ideal never goes unpunished. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage.
- Dr. Karl Bowman (1888-1973)
Love, n - A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious
dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
- A.P. Herbert
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with
the ideal never goes unpunished. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane,
most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear
that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition
continuously until death do them part. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Unable to abolish love, the Church has decided at least to disinfect it,
and has invented marriage. - Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
********************************************************************************
MAXIMS
------
It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-AD 65)
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a
sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in
all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too,
shall pass away." - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
...And yet the true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention.
- Plato (427?-347 BC)
"The Republic"
********************************************************************************
MEDIA
-----
First of all, I don't think anyone could claim to be media literate if he or
she didn't understand that one of the principle functions of commercial media
is not so much the provision of information or entertainment, but the segmen-
tation and packaging of audiences for delivery and sale to advertisers....
It's the audience which is the real product of the media, and not the programs.
- Len Masterman
The daily press and the telegraph which in a moment spreads inventions over
the whole world, fabricate more myths...in a day than could have formerly been
done in a century. - Karl Marx (1818-1883)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have
disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syn-
dicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there
is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by
the state. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media
of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship
by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of
a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government
propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat
could possibly approve.
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free
press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it
might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in
our Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass commun-
ications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false,
but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they
failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
...Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are con-
stantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively
by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part
of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future,
but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of
mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the enroach-
ments of those who would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition,
suppression and rationalization -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish
to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored,
the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests
of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be
better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine
these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now
threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential
to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic
institutions. - Aldous Huxley, 1958 (1894-1963)
_Brave New World Revisited_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today [1988] fifty corporations own most of the output of daily newspapers
and most of the sales and audience in magazines, broadcasting, books, and
movies. The fifty men and women who head these corporations would fit in a
large room. They constitute a new Private Ministry of Information and culture.
Each citizen's fate is shaped by powerful forces in distant places. The
individual now depends on great machines of information and imagery that
inform and instruct. The modern systems of news, information, and popular
culture are not marginal artifacts of technology. They shape the consensus
of society. It is a truism among political scientists that while it is not
possible for the media to tell the population what to think, they do tell the
public what to think about. What is reported enters the public agenda. What
is not reported may not be lost forever, but it may be lost at a time when it
is most needed. More than any other single private source and often more than
any other government source, the fifty dominant media corporations can set the
national agenda.
Americans, like most people, get images of the world from their newspapers,
magazines, radio, television, books, and movies. The mass media become the
authority at any given moment for what is true and what is false, what is
reality and what is fantasy, what is important and what is trivial. There
is no greater force in shaping the public mind; even brute force triumphs
only by creating an accepting attitude toward the brutes.
- Ben Bagdikon
_Media Monopoly_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...most of the press were vultures descending on the scene for curious America
aplomb. Cameras inside the coffin interviewing worms.
- James Douglas Morrison (1943-1971)
The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must
put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.
- Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson
(1892-1954)
Some people may think that leaders of the free press would perhaps accomplish
more if their claims of constitutional right were less expansive. I do not
agree with this. I say it is their duty to fight like tigers right down the
line and not give an inch. This is the way our freedoms have been preserved
in the past, and it is the way they will be preserved in the future.
- Harold R. Medina (1888-?)
U.S. Senior Circuit Judge
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism
in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with
the ignorance of the community. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
They say it's the responsibility of the media to look at government --
especially the president -- with a microscope. I don't argue with that,
but when they use a proctoscope, it's going too far.
- Richard Milhous Nixon (b.1913)
What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.
- anonymous
When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is
news. - Charles Anderson Dana (1819-1897)
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Free press, n. One hundred men imposing their prejudices on 100 million.
- Leonard L. Levinson
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
- Abbott Joseph Liebling (1904-1963)
Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's
prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.
- Hannen Swaffer (1879-1962),
in conversation with Tom Driberg, c.1928
Newspapers should have no friends. - Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911)
The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow.
Bigness means weakness. - Eric Sevareid
There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't.
I believe democracy flouriches when the government can take legitimate steps
to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it
knows. - Katherine Meyer Graham (b.1917)
owner of _Washington Post_
He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry attacks
democracy itself. - William S. Paley, chairman of CBS
Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that
rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
- Erwin Knoll (b.1931)
I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens
who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known
something of what has been passing in their time.
- Harry S Truman (1884-1872)
An ambassador is a man of virtue sent to lie abroad for his country; a
newswriter is a man without virtue who lies at home for himself.
- Henry Wotton (1568-1639)
Reliquae Wottonianae
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails will be
filled with good people. - Daniel P. Monynihan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The media get most of their news from "official," "expert," corporate-owned,
and other established and generally conservative sources -- mainly the public
information offices of corporations and government these sources are considered
respectable and reliable, and they also can most easily afford to pour out new
to the media, without charge or much effort on the media' part.
In 1975, a Senate intelligence committee found that the CIA owned outright more
than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazine, and book publishing complexes and
subsidized many more....
"a study of some 2,500 guest on the ABC "Nightline" news program...showed
officials predominating and unofficial and dissenting groups virtually absent
-- including labor, consumer, and environmental advocates; peace activists;
the working class; the American opposing U.S. foreign policy. "If you want to
critique U.S. foreign policy," the show's host said, "you don't bring on the
opponents of U.S. foreign policy and let them speak, their mind, " he said
displaying his keen understanding of democracy the role of the Free Press,
"what you do is bring on the architects of US foreign policy and hold them
to account" (Spoken like a _Pravda_ editor) in the sense that the mass media
have been "holding them to account" year after year....
[FAIR study on PBS, biz coverage, not matched by programs about groups such
as labor unions, available online in labor.resources --harelb@igc.org]
- Professor Patricia Cayo Sexton
_The War on Labor and the Left.
Understanding America's Unique Conservatism_
Chapter 16 (The Media)
Westview Press -- Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford
ISBN 0-8133-1062-8, ISBN 0-8133-1063-6 (pbk)
********************************************************************************
MEDICINE
--------
Cure the disease and kill the patient. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
If a person (a) is poorly, (b) receives treatment intended to make him better,
and (c) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can
convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.
- Peter Brian Medawar (1915-1987)
The Art of the Soluble
Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.
- Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 BC)
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical
profession. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
********************************************************************************
MIND
----
Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental
Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work
efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like
the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless
but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable
amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the
dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.
- Robertson Davies (b.1913)
_Tempest-Tost_
All I ask of my body is that it carry around my head.
- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Facts are to the mind the same thing as food to the body. On the due
digestion of facts depends the strength and wisdom of the one, just as
vigor and health depend on the other. The wisest in council, the ablest
in debate, and the most agreeable in the commerce of life, is that man
who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest number of facts.
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
It is said that the Limbic system of the brain controls the four F's:
Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction.
- unknown
Vivere est cogitare.
(To think is to live.) - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more
even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and
terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and
comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.
Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief
glory of man. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our
pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs
and tears.... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires
us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness,
inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are
contrary to habit.... - Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 BC)
The Sacred Disease
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as
our own. - James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936)
What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind. - Thomas Hewitt Key (1799-1875)
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making
use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
- William James (1842-1910)
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it. - Aristotle (384-322 BC)
********************************************************************************
MODERATION
----------
To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
- St. Augustine (340-430)
Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is
always a vice. - Thomas Paine (paraphrase?) (1737-1809)
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...for we never know what is
enough until we know what is more than enough.
- William Blake (1757-1827)
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring
the deadening effect of a habit. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest,
about thirty years after date. - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
********************************************************************************
MORALITY
--------
Morality is the herd-instinct of the individual.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word
or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price
has to be paid at last. - James Anthony Froude (1818-1894)
I believe the moral losses of expediency always far outweigh the temporary
gains. - Wendell Lewis Willkie (1892-1944)
********************************************************************************
MORTALITY
---------
Life is eating us up. We all shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will
be all one a hundred years hence. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
********************************************************************************
MURPHY'S LAW
------------
If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can
result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.
- Edward A. Murphy, Jr.
********************************************************************************
MUSIC
-----
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both lend utility to their
conditions. - George Santayana (1863-1952)
Without music life would be a mistake. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Alas for those who never sing but die with all their music in them.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I see music as the augmentation of a split second of time.
- Erin Cleary
Architecture in general is frozen music.
- Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854)
Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they
would ordinarily. - David Byrne (b.1952)
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
- Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868)
Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own
punishment with it, and that a very severe one.
- Hannah Moore (1745-1833)
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking,
"*I* am listening to this music," you are not listening. To understand joy
or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are
calling it names and saying, "*I* am happy," or "*I* am afraid," you are not
being aware of it. Fear, pain, sorrow, and boredom must remain problems if
we do not understand them, but understanding requires a single and undivided
mind. This, surely, is the meaning of that strange saying, "If thine eye be
single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
- Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
Making music should not be left to the professionals.
- Michelle Shocked (b.1962)
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
A wave of vulgar, filthy and suggestive music has unundated the land. Nothing
but ragtime prevails, and the cake-walk with its obscene posturings, its lewd
gestures.... Our children, our young men and women, are continually exposed
to its contiguity, to the monotonous attrition of this vulgarizing music. It
is artistically and morally depressing and should be suppressed by press and
pulpit. - Musical Courier, 1899
The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer
is that he be dead. - Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)
********************************************************************************
NATIONALISM
-----------
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his
own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
"Notes on Nationalism" (1945)
I have no country to fight for: my country is the earth, and I am a citizen
of the world. - Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926)
********************************************************************************
NATURE
------
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only
surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble
eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a
velvet surface. He, however, who would study nature in its wildness and
variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem
the torrent, and dare the precipice. - Washington Irving
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into
you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into
you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
- John Muir (1838-1914)
We cannot command nature except by obeying her.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Nature is a revelation of God;
Art a revelation of man. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
_Hyperion_, Book iii, ch. 5
********************************************************************************
NEEDS
-----
Where necessity ends, curiosity begins; and no sooner are we supplied with
every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial
appetites. - Johnson
Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.
- Socrates (470?-399 BC)
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly
alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must
hunger after them. - George Eliot (1819-1880)
********************************************************************************
NEUROSIS
--------
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
- Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
Work and love - these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
- Dr. Theodor Reik (1888-1969)
_Of Love and Lust_, 1959
********************************************************************************
PARANOIA
--------
You know how it is when you go to be the subject of a psychology experiment,
and nobody else shows up, and you think maybe that's part of the experiment?
I'm like that all the time. - Steven Wright (b.1955)
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to
frighten you. - Eric Hoffer
"The Faber Book of Aphorisms", 1964
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that you don't have enemies.
- Henry Alfred Kissinger (b.1923)
********************************************************************************
PATRIOTISM
----------
Naturally the common people don't want war...but after all it is the leaders
of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag
the people along.... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to
danger. It works the same in any country.
- Hermann Goering, 1936 (1893-1946)
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a
continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national
emergency.... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up
if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums
demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened,
seem never to have been quite real. - Gen. Douglas MacArthur, 1957
(1880-1964)
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that
goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
7 April 1775
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious
to illuminate his name.
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort
of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened by inferior lexi-
cographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
To derail concern over whether you should _support_their_policy_, the PR system
focuses attention on whether you _support_our_troops_ -- meaningless words, as
empty as the question of whether you support the people of Iowa.
That of course, is just the point: to reduce the population to gibbering
idiots, mouthing empty phrases and patriotic slogans, waving ribbons, watching
gladiatorial contests and the models designed for them by the PR industry, but,
crucially, not thinking or acting. - Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928)
"Post War Teach-In," _Z_, April 1991
Un-American, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Speculations and loans in foreign fields are likely to bring us into war....
The war-for-profit group has counterfeited patriotism.
- Charles Lindberg Sr., 1915 (1902-1974)
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness
towards anyone. - Edith Cavell (d.1915)
Last words on date of execution
"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying
except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by
prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is
only one example of many in recent history.
- American Bar Association task force on flag burning
Love your country but never trust its government.
- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania
Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
- George Jean Nathan (1882-1958)
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the
human race. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
********************************************************************************
PESSIMISM
---------
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and
the pessimist fears this is true. - James Branch Cabell (1879-1958)
"The Silver Stallion", Ch.26, 1926
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist
fears it is true. - Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)
You have to kill a pessimist. Optimists usually take care of themselves.
- unknown
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
"The Dance of Life", 1923
********************************************************************************
PHILOSOPHY
----------
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral
philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for
selfishness. - John Kenneth Galbraith (b.1908)
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has
first experienced their desolations. - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
_Collected Essays_
The only difference between graffiti and philosophy is the word fuck.
- anonymous
Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo pilosophorum.
(Nothing so absurd can be said, that some philosopher has not said it.)
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
I must invent my own philosophical systems, or else be enslaved by other mens'.
- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth of philosophy
bringeth a man's mind about to religion.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn
not to be frightened by absurdities. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.
- Epictetus (c.55-c.135)
Philosophy has the task and the opportunity of helping banish the concept
that human destiny here and now is of slight importance in comparison with
some supernatural destiny. - John Dewey (1859-1953)
Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
To teach men how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed
by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing philosophy can still do.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?
- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which
isn't there.... A theologian is the one who finds it.
- Unknown
Removing philosophy from philosophy of science leaves you nothing.
- John M. Allen
This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742-1799)
The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means
of language. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (attributed)
********************************************************************************
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
---------------------
Dean Kagan, distinguished faculty, parents, friends, graduating seniors, Secret
Service agents, class agents, people of class, people of color, colorful peo-
ple, people of height, the vertically constrained, people of hair, the
differently coeffed, the optically challenged, the temporarily sighted, the
insightful, the out of sight, the out-of-towners, the Eurocentrics, the
Afrocentrics, the Afrocentrics with Eurailpasses, the eccentrically inclined,
the sexually disinclined, people of sex, sexy people, sexist pigs, animal
companions, friends of the earth, friends of the boss, the temporarily
employed, the differently employed, the differently optioned, people with
options, people with stock options, the divestiturists, the deconstructionists,
the home constructionists, the homeboys, the homeless, the temporarily housed
at home, and, God save us, the permanently housed at home....
- Garry Trudeau (b.1948)
From the opening of his Class Day speech at Yale
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
African, n. A nigger that votes our way.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social
and political equality of the white and black races -- I am not, nor ever have
been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to
hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
(First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 21 August 1858)
********************************************************************************
POLITICS
--------
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
The more you observe politics, the more you've go to admit that each party
is worse than the other. - Will Rogers (1879-1935)
A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.
- Harry S Truman (1884-1872)
How can a man of integrity get along in Washington?
- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
Lean too much on the approval of people, and it becomes a bed of thorns.
- Tehyi Hsieh
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed
by those who are dumber. - Plato (427?-348? BC)
We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented
in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are
weak-kneed, political time-servers who are more concerned with their personal
vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to
suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free
debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes
before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply at
any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern
for the vital social problems of today. Nor indeed do we intend that viewers
should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry
legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual prac-
tices which some people might find offensive. We are sorry if this impression
has come across. - Monty Python
A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.
- Thomas Brackett Reed (1839-1902)
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he
could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored
by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in
bandages of self-illusion. - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence
is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
- Simon Cameron (1799-1889)
However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is
no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There
is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God,
or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful
weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The
religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their
religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into
following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious
groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a
loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political
preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a
moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D." Just who do they think
they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their
moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure
the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right
to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today:
I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral
convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism."
- Barry Morris Goldwater (b.1909)
Congressional Record, 16 Sept. 1981
The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment.
To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
The wise prince must foment some emnity so that by suppressing it he will
augment his greatness. - Italo Bombolini
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so
that they will believe they are as clever as he.
- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
********************************************************************************
PORNOGRAPHY
-----------
[Pornography] causes premarital intercourse, perversion, masturbation in boys,
wantonness in girls.... Attention is given to sensationalists such as Kinsey
and Eberhard...who, finding fellow travelers in erstwhile respectable media,
manage to disseminate, directly and indirectly, their absurd and dirty bleat-
ings and pagan ideas. It seems strange to me that we credit -- I should say
that our mass media credit -- the unestablished generalities of a few so-
called experts, but ignore the overwhelming testimony of the true experts
like J. Edgar Hoover.
- Charles H. Keating, Jr., former anti-porn activist,
the financier behind the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal
(his anti-porn organization got in trouble in 1962 (!)
for spending over 90% of the funds they raised)
I know it when I see it [pornography].
- Justice Potter Stewart, 1964
Here is the problem: for many years, the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue
of pornography, until finally Associate Justice John Paul Stevens came up with
the famous quotation about how he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it
when he saw it. So for a while, the court's policy was to have all the sus-
pected pornography trucked to Justice Stevens' house, where he would look it
over. "Nope, this isn't it," he'd say. "Bring some more." This went on until
one morning when his housekeeper found him trapped in the recreation room under
an enormous mound of rubberized implements, and the court had to issue a ruling
stating that it didn't know what the hell pornography was except that it was
illegal and everybody should stop badgering the court about it because the
court was going to take a nap. - Dave Barry, "Pornography"
My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want
to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again
as long as I live. - Erica Jong (b.1942)
Playboy Interview - September 1975
********************************************************************************
POWER
-----
Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- First Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
(1834-1902)
Letter, 5 April 1887
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them [public offices], a rottenness
begins in his conduct. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1799
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed
by those who are dumber. - Plato (427?-347 BC)
It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more true that power
attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things
than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits.
The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
- David Brin (b.1950)
_The Postman_
The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are perpetrated
by individuals abusing positions of trust.
- Lawrence Dalzell
Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
There is just one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power
what you said in Opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the
other fellows have found impossible. - John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other
men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any
presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as
the power increases. - Lord Acton (1834-1902)
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character,
give him power. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world
are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the governer of the
Bank of England, another will think he is the king, and yet another will think
he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure
language, lead to professorships of philosophy, and if expressed by emotional
men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
No one is fit to be trusted with power.... No one.... Any man who has lived
at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of.... And if he does
know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to
decide a single human fate. - Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980)
The Light and the Dark
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
- Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
"Quotations from Chairman Mao", 1966
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact
amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will
continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
suppress. - Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of
himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?"
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the
dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own
hide -- as, I think, he will. Until and unless you discover that money is
the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases
to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools
of men. Blood, whips, and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there
is no other -- and your time is running out.
- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Francisco d'Anconia, _Atlas Shrugged_
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PREJUDICE
---------
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine
on it, the more it will contract. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
And I have no desire to get ugly. / But I cannot help mentioning that the door
of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of
facts upon it is to close it more snugly.
- Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
_Seeing Eye to Eye Is Believing_
There is no more evil thing on earth than race prejudice, none at all. I write
deliberately -- it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and
holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of
error in the world. - Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
I think [a black]...could scarcely be found capable of tracing and
comprehending the investigations of Euclid.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
"Notes on Virginia", 1787
We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do
want them as brothers. - Booker Taliaferro Washington
(1856-1915)
To divest one's self of some prejudices, would be like taking off the skin to
feel the better. - Grenville
The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of
his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land
are involved. - Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911)
[Sole dissent, Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)]
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem
those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices
once in a while. - Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
Might I go so far as to argue that being oppressed often *leads* to bigotry?
If someone is raised in an environment of blatant oppression, where there is
always a clearly defined "us" and "them", it becomes very difficult to learn
to be tolerant. If oppression is all one knows, it can become the only thing
one knows how to do oneself. - Anthony Berno
A great many people think they are thinking when they are only rearranging
their prejudices. - William James (1842-1910)
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PROGRESS/CHANGE
---------------
There is nothing permanent except change.
- Heraclitus (c.540-c.480 BC)
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what
no one else has thought. - Albert von Nagyrapolt Szent-Gyorgyi
(1893-1986)
One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you
only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993), 1979
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it can never forgive the
preaching of a new gospel. - Frederic Harrison (1831-1923)
Experience teaches that men are often so much governed by what they are
accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improve-
ments, in the most ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation,
reluctance, and by slow gradations. Men would resist changes, so long as
even a bare support could be ensured by an adherence to ancient courses,
and perhaps even longer. - Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or
more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a
new order to things. - Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
A new system is a hard thing to put into place, it is opposed by those that
would be disadvantaged by the new system and it receives no support from
those that would benefit. - Niccolo Machievelli (1469-1527)
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in
those who would gain by the new ones. - Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is
violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident.
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by
ignoring them. - Ursula Kroeber LeGuin (b.1929)
_The Dispossessed_
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885)
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making
them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new
generation grows up that is familiar with it.
- Max Planck (1858-1947)
_Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers_, 1949
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at
children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end,
which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games which
it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named
(by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The
players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have
to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait
until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. Then they go and do
something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is
great fun. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
- Confucius (551-479 BC)
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from
age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
_The Devils of Loudun_
The tendency to believe that things never change, the inertia of daily
existence, is a staple of living. It has always been a delusion.
- Donald Allen Wollheim (1914-1990)
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
- Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesman and philosophers and divines.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long.
- Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
Abroad in the world today is a monstrous falsehood, a consummate fabrication,
to which all social agencies have loaned themselves and into which most men,
women, and children have been seduced..."the Eleventh Commandment"; for such,
indeed, has become the injunction: You Must Adjust.
- Robert M. Lindner (1914-1956)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on
the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all
response is the desire to control environment.
- John Dewey (1859-1953)
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
- Charles H. Duell
Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899
Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further
development. - Julius Frontinus (c.40-103)
To speak of "limits to growth" under a capitalistic market economy is as
meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The
moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists,
are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative.
Capitalism can no more be "persuaded" to limit growth than a human being
can be "persuaded" to stop breathing. Attempts to "green" capitalism, to
make it "ecological", are doomed by the very nature of the system as a
system of endless growth. - Murray Bookchin (b.1941)
_Remaking Society_, 1990
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
- Alphonse Karr (1808-1890)
"Les Guepes", January 1849
The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual
conviction of the need for change in those mental attitides and values which
shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at
changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in
material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution
in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would
continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform
and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and
human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the
struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the
corrupting influences of desire, ill-will, ignorance, and fear.
- Aung San Suu Kyi
Burmese Dissident
1991 Nobel Peace Prize Winner
The work of the world is done on hate. All work done well is well done
only when persons hate work done shoddily. Justice can exist only when
injustice is hated, laws only when lawlessness is hated, and education
only when ignorance is hated. Every improvement this world has ever
known was brought about because someone hated intolerable conditions.
- Jane Dunlop (Adelle Davis)
_Exploring Inner Space: Personal
experiences under LSD-25_, p.106
...insidious is the cry for 'revolution,' at a time when not even the germs of
new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political consciousness that
could lead to a basic modification of social life. If there will be a 'revolu-
tion' in America today, it will no doubt be a move towards some variety of
fascism. We must guard against the kind of revolutionary rhetoric that would
have had Karl Marx burn down the British Museum because it was merely part of
a repressive society. It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and
inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree
of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed insti-
tutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order. One who
pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loud-
ly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of
some new system of repression. - Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928)
_American Power and the New Mandarins_
pp. 17-18
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards. - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
_Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow_, 1956
Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to
experience it. - Max Frisch (1911-1991)
`Homo Faber'
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative
that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the
duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties,
but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just
because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.
- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
In ecology, as in economics, TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free
Lunch) is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. Failure to
recognize the 'no free lunch' law causes the buffalo-hunter mentality syndrome
--the unthinking assumption that there will always be plenty because there
always has been plenty. - Dr. Robert W. Prehoda
None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary
to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert -- because no one
ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a
job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing
forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient
he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a
state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the
"expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.
- From Henry Ford Sr. (1863-1947)
_My Life and Work_, p.86 (1922)
All progress is based upon the universal innate desire on the part of every
organism to live beyond its income. - Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
_Note Books_
All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more
and more strongly the truths that come from on high and are contained in the
sacred writings. - John Frederick Herschel (1792-1871)
History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge,
periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them
asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at
intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another.... Truly the imago
state of Man seems to be terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained.
- Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)
"Origin of the Species"
The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor im-
movable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philo-
sophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.
- Roman Congregation decision against Galileo
The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What
is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, *different*, is evil, dangerous, or
subversive. - Henry Miller (1891-1980)
Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant.
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
Speech on 20 October 1867
They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
- Confucius (551-479 BC)
(Goldsmith, _Citizen of the World_, No. 123)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I differ profoundly from the more alarmist ecologists, like Paul Ehrlich, and
where I fight with Barry Commoner, though we are very close friends. I always
tell them that in my opinion, the danger is not that we will all be killed by
pollution and overpopulation. What is going to happen is that we are going
to accept the situation, and make some kind of adjustment to it. We may in
the long run suffer physically as well, but the immediate danger is that we
are losing our sense of what the environment could and should be....
[What then can be done?]
I cannot give you a single answer. I doubt whether adults can change their
way of life. By the time you are adult you are conditioned by your past, you
have made all sorts of commitments, you are almost a prisoner. So even though
people may protest against environmental degradation, they won't do anything
to change it -- which doesn't mean they aren't aware that something is wrong.
But I am mush more optimistic when I consider the young people. The very
young, around seventeen, are immensely aware of what is going on. They have
not lost interest at all; if anything their interest has continued to increase,
and they have become more articulate and better informed. But they do not have
the power to act, and the people who do, those who manage the world, will not
do anything to change it until we have a disaster.
- Rene Dubos, in _Philosophers of the Earth_, by Anne Chisholm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and
the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless
different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward
one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of
society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly
irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just
as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed
one way or the other.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the
High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places
with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim--for it is an abiding
characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more
than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives--is to
abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines
recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely
in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose
either their belief in themselves, or their capacity to govern efficiently,
or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their
side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As
soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into
their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a
new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them,
and the struggle begins over again.
- Emmanuel Goldstein
"The Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism"
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PROPAGANDA
----------
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
- Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928)
For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be
nonexistent.... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated
believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.
- Herbert I. Schiller (b.1919)
You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.
- William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)
To Frederic Remington
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made
to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most
wretched sort of life as paradise. - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
"Mein Kampf"
The intelligence of the masses is small, their forgetfulness is great. They
must be told the same thing a thousand times.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Workers are stupid. You have to tell them something a million times for them
to understand. - David Duke
If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its
laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most
of the time. - George Gerbner (b.1919)
Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.
- Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928)
If you have a weak candidate and a weak platform, wrap yourself up in the
American flag and talk about the Constitution.
- Matthew Stanley Quay (1833-1904)
It seems the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.
- Frank McKinney Hubbard (1868-1930)
Let's cut through the demagoguery. America is #1.
- George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924)
The Russian soldier is our friend. He is here to protect us.
- First sentence in an English textbook seen
in Bulgaria (printed in Moscow) (c.a. 1967)
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never
be uprooted. - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924)
Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands
and at whom it is aimed. - Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Speech, 19 April 1923
It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public
opinion. - Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945)
It is true that liberty is precious - so precious that it must be rationed.
- Nikolai Lenin
The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the
vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived
than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of
their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than to a small one, for
they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf"
The broad mass of a nation...will more easily fall victim to a big lie than
to a small one. - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf"
Food and houses and clothes can be produced by human labor, but when
they are produced they can be stolen... What you do to a horse or a bee,
you can also do to a man or a woman or a child. You can get the upper
hand of them by force, or trickery of any sort, or even by teaching them
that it is their religious duty to sacrifice their freedom to ours.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring
about a change of their political attitude quicker than any other method.
The basis of Communism and socialistic influence is education of the people.
- Harold Velde (Illinois Congressman)
speaking before the House opposing mobile
library service in rural areas, March 1950.
[Quote found in Howard Zinn's book, "Declarations of Independence" p. 260.
Published by Harper Collins, New York, 1990.]
I also believe that academic freedom should protect the right of a professor
or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any other minority
viewpoint -- no matter how distasteful to the majority.
- Richard Milhous Nixon (b.1913)
What are our schools for if not indoctrination against Communism?
- Richard Milhous Nixon (b.1913)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Few are willing to undertake the tedious task of refuting the regular flood
of lies; they have little access to the public in any event, and they can
always be dismissed by the charge that they are apologists for the enemy and
its actual crimes. This standard device is sometimes used consciously as a
technique to preserve the crucial Right to Lie in the Service of the State; or,
for the more deeply indoctrinated, it may simply be impossible to conceive of
criticism of the Holy State as anything but support for its official enemies,
principled criticism of the divine institution being unimaginable. In either
case, the discussion shifts to the evil deeds of the official enemy and the
critic can be dismissed as an apologist for these crimes, as having a "double
standard," etc.: the Holy State and the Right to Lie in its service are secure.
The device was, and still is, used with tiresome regularity with reference to
the Indochina wars: a critic of the US attack against South Vietnam must be a
"supporter of Hanoi," so one can respond to the criticism by producing true or
false charges against Hanoi, and if the critic refutes false charges, that just
proves that he or she is an apologist for Hanoi as originally claimed and there
is no need to consider the original criticism of the state one serves. The
same device is now constantly used in the case of Central America.
One would think that the transparent silliness of the procedure would embarrass
its practitioners, but evidently this is not the case.
- Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928)
_Turning the Tide. U.S. Intervention in
Central America and the Struggle for Peace_,
page 78. 1985, South End Press, Boston.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble
the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass
imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much
about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient and, in an age of ad-
vanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really
efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive
of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves
who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make
them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to
ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and school teachers.
...[such propagandists] accomplish their greatest triumphs, not by doing some-
thing, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from
a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning
certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much
more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations,
the most compelling of logical rebuttals.
- Aldous Huxley
_Brave New World_ (1946, revised forward)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another error against which I want to caution is to ignore the spiritual and
religious meaning and motivation of actually destructive and cruel acts. Let
us consider one drastic example, the sacrifice of children, as it was practiced
in Canaan at the time of the Hebrew conquest and in Carthage down to its
destruction by the Romans, in the third century BC Were these parents
motivated by the destructive and cruel passion to kill their own children?
Surely this is very unlikely. The story of Abraham's attempt to sacrifice
Issac, a story meant to speak against sacrifice of children, movingly empha-
sizes Abraham's love for Issac; nevertheless Abraham does not waver in his
decision to kill his son. Quite obviously we deal here with a religious
motivation which is stronger than even the love for the child. The man in
such a culture is completely devoted to his religious system, and he is not
cruel, even though he appears so to a person outside this system.
It may help to see this point if we think of a modern phenomenon which can
be compared with child sacrifice, that of war. Take the first World War.
A mixture of economic interests, ambition, and vanity on the part of the
leaders, and a good deal of blundering on all sides brought about the war.
But once it had broken out (or even a little bit earlier), it became a
"religious" phenomenon. The state, the nation, national honor, became the
idols.... Surely they were loved by their parents. Yet, especially for
those who were most deeply imbued with the traditional concepts, their love
did not make them hesitate in sending their children to death, nor did the
young ones who were going to die have any hesitation.... In the case of
war, those who are responsible for it know what is going to happen, yet
the power of the idols is greater than the power of love for their children.
- Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
_The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness_
********************************************************************************
PUNISHMENT
----------
The seeds of our own punishment are sown at the same time we commit sin.
- Hesiod (c.700 BC)
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I
think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.
- Chuang-tzu (c.369-c.286 BC)
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward,
then we are a sorry lot indeed. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments - there are consequences.
- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.
- Nancy Davis Reagan (b.1923)
Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.
- Senator Orrin Grant Hatch (b.1934)
In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices
any nation has to make to achieve law and order.
- Idi Amin Dada, 1976
********************************************************************************
REALITY
-------
Appearances often are deceiving. - Aesop (620-560 BC)
Things are not always what they seem. - Phaedrus (c.15 BC-AD c.50)
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as
it is, infinite. - William H. Blake (1757-1827)
...the scientific view of life contains truth, but it only represents half
of reality, only its material, quantifiable parts. All of the personal,
social, and spiritual dimensions that cannot be described in physical or
chemical terms, which include the most important characteristics of that
which is living, are absent. - Albert Hofmann (b.1906)
Few people have the imagination for reality.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
- Jules de Gaultier (b.1858)
Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.
- Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
"Four Quartets: Burnt Norton"
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the
world. - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
"Studies in Pessimism"
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
- Anais Nin (1903-1977)
External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.
- Jaron Lanier (b.1961?)
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if
physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer...we have to
remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to
our method of questioning. - Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976)
We tend to view Nature through a tiny slot from a narrow angle; others see
it from another angle and describe it in a different language. It sounds
different, but it is not. The universe is so rich in diversity that almost
anything one says about it is correct, provided one takes a broad enough view.
- Itzhak Bentov
A man with a watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches isn't so sure.
- anonymous
Up until the twentieth century, 'reality' was everything humans could touch,
smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the
electromagnetic spectrum...humans have learned that what they can touch, smell,
see, and hear is less than one millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of
all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using
instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller
(1894-1983)
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain.
This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means
that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
- Annie Dillard (b.1945)
It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power
of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
- C.W. Leadbeater
It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be
to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
- Marvin Lee Minsky (b.1927)
The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical
tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the super-
ficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
- Stephen Jay Gould (b.1941)
"The Mismeasure of Man"
Nothing we look at is ever seen without some shift and flicker - that constant
flaking of vision which we take as imperfections of the eye or simply the
instability of attention itself; and we ignore this illusory screen for the
solid reality behind it. But the solid reality is the illusion; the shift and
flicker is all there is. - Samuel Ray Delany (b.1942)
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Sensations are rapid dreams. - George Santayana (1863-1952)
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered
whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
- Douglas Adams (b.1952)
_The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
Indeed, the first noble truth of Buddhism, usually translated as `all life
is suffering,' is more accurately rendered `life is filled with a sense of
pervasive unsatisfactoriness.' - M.D. Epstein
Cogito, ergo sum. - Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
There is no objectively correct idea of a thing's appearance, only an
infinite number of subjective impressions of it.
- Steen Eiler Rasmussen (b.1898)
A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has
nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin
surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water
itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes
vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth,
clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of
what is and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see.
- Karen Joy Fowler
_Sarah Canary_
The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the
fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience which in
its very nature transcends linguistics.
- Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966)
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the relevation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937)
"The Call of Cthulhu"
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow
sharper. - Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)
Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the
cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious
as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the
universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute
continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller
(1894-1983)
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory;
a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine
more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of
total reality can such an apparatus let through?
- Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they
serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have not
legitimacy. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all
in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely
far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are
impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally in-
capable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite
in which he is engulfed. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature
exposed to our method of questioning. - Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976)
What happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we
observe it. - Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976)
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but
queerer than we *can* suppose. - John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
(1892-1964)
"On Being the Right Size"
in the (1928) book _Possible Worlds_
Reality is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
- (My Life With The) Thrill Kill Cult
"Nervous Xians"
Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks:
He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose
for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance.
The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to them-
selves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence
of the human mind. - Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the
physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phatasm
real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.
- Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz
(1646-1716)
Man is by nature metaphysical and proud. He has gone so far as to think that
the idealistic creations of his mind, which correspond to his feelings, also
represent reality. - Claude Bernard (1813-1878)
Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
- Henry Miller (1891-1980)
_Tropic_Of_Capricorn_
All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation
suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a
certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can
never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's
Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Turski's Truth Theorem--
all have the flavour of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that `To seek
self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which...will always be incomplete,
cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.
- Douglas R. Hofstadter
These are lessons which I learned in part walking with my dogs and wondering
how the world looks without a fovea and very few retinal cells for colour
vision but with a huge neural processing and sensory area for smells. The
eyes made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of
passive vision. - Donna Haraway
It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who
want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to
do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no
matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
What people have been reduced to are mere 3-D representations of their own
data. - Arthur Miller (b.1915)
The assimilation of the external world, which is at first biological, sub-
sequently social and therefore human, occurs as an organization of the raw
material of nature in an effort to satisfy needs; cognition, which is a factor
in the assimilation, cannot evade this universal determinism. To ask how an
observer would see a world whose essence was pure thinking and consciousness
of which was defined exclusively by a disinterested cognitive effort, is to
ask a barren question, for all consciousness is actually born of practical
needs, and the act of cognition itself is a tool designed to satisfy these
needs. - Leszek Kolakowski
_Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth,
Marxism and Beyond: On Historical Understanding and
Individual Responsibility_, 1968
In every human soul as it confronts the world there is a sense of the
portentous. Our existence, our being here at all, our being in the world,
is the really portentous fact for us; it is the sense of the unfamiliar, the
strange, the threatening, the sense of not being at home in the world, even
when there are no special threats...all technology is the overcoming of the
portentousness in things. The bare knowing, the classifying of things by
means of laws and general interrelationships, represents a repression of their
demonic depths, of their incomprehensibility, of their strangeness, their
threat to human existence. - John Luther Adams
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
The flashlight, seeing light in every direction it looks, concludes there is
light everywhere. - Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
- Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982)
Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.
- Cyril Connolly
_The Unquiet Grave_
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REASON
------
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it
seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear
of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after
rational knowledge. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or
give up existence. - Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)
_Anti-Duhring_, Pt. III
It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to
remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines,
the accumulated evil of centuries -- to remain human, since the human is the
rational.... Those who cry loudest about their disillusionment, about the
failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic -- are those
who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas that they
preached.... In such a world, the best have to turn against society and have
to become its deadliest enemies.... What complaint do they now have to make?
That the universe is irrational? Is it?
- Hugh Akston
Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend
to any other office than to serve and obey them.
- David Hume (1711-1776)
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our
thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
_Orthodoxy_
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RELIGION
--------
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
- Psalms 111:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom
and instruction. - Proverbs 1:7
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal
punishment to buttress; you need religion if you are terrified of death.
- Gore Vidal (b.1925)
Where there is fear, there is no religion.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Religion is the soul of soulless conditions, the heart of a heartless world,
the opium of the people. - Karl Marx (1818-1883), 1844
"Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right"
There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
- Marie Henri Beyle Stendhal (1783-1842)
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -
that is why they invented hell. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the
power. - Joseph M. McCabe (1867-1957)
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish,
appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave
mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented
systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of
Governments to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one
are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity;
the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a
military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and
private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion;
and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who
could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.
- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794)
_The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_
It is not worldly ecclesiastics that kindle the fires of persecution, but
mystics who think they hear the voice of God.
- George Santayana (1863-1952)
I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when
you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous
nonsense! - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"The Devil's Disciple"
Vique's Law: A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.
Parasitic memes have been strongly selected to fit the strange quirks that
developed in human mental systems as they evolved. For example, the ability
to plan into the future confers a strong survival advantage, especially since
the introduction of farming. But being able to think about the future (and
past) generates troubling problems when this ability is applied to questions
such as where-was-I-before-birth or where-will-I-go-after-death. The attract-
iveness of religious belief systems largely stems from providing 'plausible'
answers to questions that would not be asked except for the hyperdevelopment
of this mental skill. - H. Keith Henson
Singularity No. 3
Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave
belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism,
and the limited role of reason, in human affairs.
- Thomas Szasz (b.1920)
Anytime I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to
myself, there goes a person who cannot stand being so goddamned lonely
anymore. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b.1922)
I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the
noblest driving force behind scientific research.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no
god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman
church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church,
nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish,
appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave
mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the
manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty,
which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms [-]
it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious
attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious
experience essential to sanity. - Rene Debos
Who, I ask you, can take - dare take - on himself the rights, the duties,
the responsibilities of another human soul?
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a
single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped
anything but himself. - Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890)
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love,
one another. - Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature
of the Unknowable. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Worship, n. Homo Creator's testimony to the sound construction and fine finish
of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
- William James (1842-1910)
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, But depth in philosophy
bringeth men's minds about to religion.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness,
generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate.
- Mike Hermann (hermann@cs.ubc.ca)
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will
fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The religion that is afraid of science dishoners God and commits suicide.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned --
I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you
exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to
share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
_The Real Frank Zappa Book_
While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possession,
conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge,
we must ask how one differentiates "real transcendence" from neuropathies that
produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of
cosmic unity. When accounts of sudden religious conversions in TLEs [temporal-
lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the epiphanous revelations of the religious
tradition, the parallels are striking. The same is true of the recent spate
of alleged UFO abductees. Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits,
demons, or extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice.
- Barry L. Beyerstein
"Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession",
The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255
He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them,
needs religion. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
- George Santayana (1863-1952)
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only
opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at
rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge
a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the
church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to
liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere,
the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social
theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery,
as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
Our schizophrenic societies progress by knowledge but survive on inspiration
derived from the very beliefs which that knowledge erodes. I suggest that the
paradox can be at least intellectually resolved, not all at once but eventually
and with consequences difficult to perfect, if we pay due attention to the
sociobiology of religion. Although the manifestations of the religious
experiences are resplendent and multidimensional and so complicated that
the finest of psychoanalyst and philosophers get lost in their labyrinth, I
believe that religious practices can be mapped onto the two dimensions of
genetic advantage and evolutionary change.
- Edward Osborne Wilson (b.1929)
_On Human Nature_
Take any religious mystery, any theological proposition: expressed in ordinary
terms it will read like sheer nonsense to the outsider, from the ritualistic,
symbolic eating of human flesh and blood practiced by all the Christian sects
to the outright cannibalism practiced by some savages.
- Major Whitey Ardmore
Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like all
dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred
to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made
a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it
short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other
children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other
children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice
and invented hell -- mouths mercy and invented hell -- mouths Golden Rules, and
forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who frowns
upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then
tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honor-
ably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether
divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"The Mysterious Stranger"
We may not be able to persuade Hindus that Jesus and not Vishnu should govern
their spiritual horizon, nor Moslems that Lord Buddha is at the center of their
spiritual universe, nor Hebrews that Mohammed is a major prophet, nor Christ-
ians that Shinto best expresses their spiritual concerns, to say nothing of the
fact that we may not be able to get Christians to agree among themselves about
their relationship to God. But all will agree on a proposition that they
possess profound spiritual resources. If, in addition, we can get them to
accept the further proposition that whatever form the Deity may have in their
own theology, the Deity is not only external, but internal and acts through
them, and they themselves give proof or disproof of the Deity in what they do
and think; if this further proposition can be accepted, then we come that much
closer to a truly religious situation on earth.
- Norman Cousins
_Human Options_
When one studies the biographies of the founders and leaders of the various
religions, one cannot help but be struck by the psychotic -- or at least ex-
tremely abnormal -- behavior that has characterized so many of them. Luther,
Wesley, and Loyola had hallucinations ("visions"). St. Theresa almost certain-
ly was a hysteric. The book "The Psychotic Personality", by Leon J. Saul and
Silas L. Warner, devotes considerable space to the psychotic personalities
of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science), Joseph Smith (founder of
Mormonism), Mohammed, and the Rev. Jim Jones.... It seems significant that
the founder of Christianity itself, St. Paul, also suffered from epilepsy.
- Frank Zindler
"Religiosity as a Mental Disorder,"
American Atheist magazine, April 1988
Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
- Anatole France (1844-1924)
That's the problem with religion: you beat your way past the clerics, fight
your way through the demons, stand before the holy of holies, and when you
rip away the veil, there's nothing there but a mirror.
- Owen Rowley
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything
but live for it. - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
_The Lacon_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to
safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster
the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a
source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity.
Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the
world and of tranquillity amongst it's peoples.... The greater the decline of
religion, the more grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but
lead in the end to chaos and confusion.
- Baha'Allah (1817-1892)
selection from the Baha'i scripture
********************************************************************************
REVENGE
-------
Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have
thy cloak also. - Matthew V, 39
********************************************************************************
REVOLT
------
Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing
social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative
adopts them. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I never dared be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative
when old. - Robert Frost (1875-1963)
Who is not liberal when young, does not have a heart. Who is not conservative
when old, does not have a brain. - Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
- Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989)
saepe intereunt aliis meditantes nacem.
(Those who plot the destruction of others often destroy themselves.)
- Bruno McManmon
A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is an age of advertisement and
publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.
In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such
an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence
of our times. On the other hand a political virtuoso might bring off a feat
as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at
which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully
worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself he would
be able to create such an impression that his audience had rebelled, after
which, they would all go quietly home -- having spent a very pleasant evening.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
'The Present Age'
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from
the support of a cause we believe to be just.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Any movement in history which attempts to perpetuate itself, becomes
reactionary. - Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980)
Avoid revolution or expect to get shot. Mother and I will grieve, but we will
gladly buy a dinner for the National Guardsman who shot you.
- Dr. Paul Williamson
father of a Kent State student
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing...
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
It is advocacy of revolution by force and violence to write: "I hold a little
rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world
as storms in the physical." Out go the works of Thomas Jefferson. It is ad-
vocacy of change of government by assassination to say, "The right of nation
to kill a tyrant in cases of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a
robber, or kill a flea." Jefferson is followed by his old antagonist, John
Adams, the author of the Sedition Law of 1798.
- Zechariah Chafee (1885-1957)
The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
- Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas
(1898-1980)
Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For
example, every person who has mastered a profession is a sceptic concerning
it, and consequently a revolutionist. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
It is interesting to hear certain kinds of people insist that the citizen
cannot fight the government. This would have been news to the men of Lexington
and Concord, as well as the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The citizen most cer-
tainly can fight the government, and usually wins when he tries. Organized
national armies are useful primarily for fighting against other organized
national armies. When they try to fight against the people, they find them-
selves at a very serious disadvantage. If you will just look around at the
state of the world today, you will see that the guerillero has the upper hand.
Irregulars usually defeat regulars, providing they have the will. Such
fighting is horrible to contemplate, but will continue to dominate brute
strength. - Jeff Cooper
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails
of the last priest. - Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
"Dithrambe sur la fete de rois"
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable. - John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)
12 March 1962
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who
want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar
of its many waters. - Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
- Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885)
When a woman in the front row complained that he was trivializing "the issues"
by making jokes of them, Abbie Hoffman replied, "Sometimes when I'm funny I'm
most serious. That was the Yippies' contribution.... We crossed the false
dichotomy between struggling for a good cause and having a good time."
- from Herb Pintler
...Harlem is a city occupied by an oppressive army serving what amounts to
an outside power. In Harlem there are more rats than people and more cock-
roaches than rats. Its inhabitants are brutalised at every moment of their
lives by police, poverty and indignity. If in any country in the world city
after city rose up for days on end, taking to the streets, battling with the
police, barricading boulevards and smashing shops, it would rightly be called
a rebellion or revolution. In the United States it is called a black riot.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
in a letter of March 31, 1965, affirming
support for imprisoned Harlem Negro leaders
Whilst we have prisons it matters little who occupies the cells.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
_Maxims for Revolutionists_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love
or rules for happiness, BUT there are rules for radicals who want to change
their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics
that operate regardless of the scene or the time.
...These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being
a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police
"pig" or "white fascist racist" or "motherfucker" and has so stereotyped him-
self that others react by saying, "Oh, he's one of those," and then promptly
turn off.
This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of
communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the
fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of [their]
audience -- and gives full respect to the other's values -- would have
ruled out attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would
have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while
the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America's hopes and
aspirations, and [they] would have conveyed this message to [their] audience.
- Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972)
_Rules for Radicals, A Pragmatic
Primer for Realistic Radicals_ 1971
********************************************************************************
RIGHTS
------
Transient majorities operating on the basis of misinformation should not be
able to restrict individual rights.
- from BCLU position paper on drug testing
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
- Ramsey Clark (b.1927)
former U.S. attorney general
America is a stronger nation for the ACLU's uncompromising effort.
- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)
The ACLU has stood foursquare against the recurring tides of hysteria that
from time to time threaten freedoms everywhere... Indeed, it is difficult
to appreciate how far our freedoms might have eroded had it not been for the
Union's valiant representation in the courts of the constitutional rights of
people of all persuasions, no matter how unpopular or even despised by the
majority they were at the time. - Earl Warren (1891-1974)
Supreme Court Chief Justice
Do not speak of what men deserve. For we each of us deserve everything, every
luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us
deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while
another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the
virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns
reward. Free your mind of the idea of *deserving*, of *earning*, and you will
begin to be able to think. - Ursula Kroeber LeGuin (b.1929)
_The Dispossessed_
(Odo, The Prison Letters)
Do what you wanna, do what you will;
Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill.
And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
"You Are What You Is"
Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all
times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their
power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights
and duties, and to take none of them from us.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1816
The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each
citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do
his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
[The United States] can't be so fixed on our desire to preserve the rights
of ordinary Americans....
- President William Jefferson Clinton (b.1946),
3/2/93 during a press conference in Piscataway, NJ
Every person has the right to suffer at their own hands. The function of
society is not to protect the individual from himself but to protect the
individual from society. - Eric Praetzel (praetzel@maxwell.uwaterloo.ca)
There is one right, which man is generally thought to possess, which I am
confident he neither does, nor can, possess: a right to subsistence when his
labour will not fairly purchase it. Our laws indeed say that he has this
right, and bind the society to furnish employment and food to those who cannot
get them in the regular market; but in so doing, they attempt to reverse the
laws of nature. - Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)
We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals
should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
********************************************************************************
SARCASM
-------
Labeling something as sarcasm utterly undercuts the effect. The whole point
about sarcasm is that it's risky; it depends on your hearer getting the literal
meaning and then seeing that you can't mean *that* so you must mean something
else and working out what that other thing must be. Your hearer has to do some
interpretive work, and that work *is* the effect.
- Arnold Zwicky
********************************************************************************
SCIENCE
-------
Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man
needs both. -Fritjof Capra
...Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find
their soul's health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose
that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the
place of Rationalism today, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned
with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its _Satanism_
(it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) - then nothing can
hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with
hands as mere auxiliaries. - Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)
Twilight of the Evening Lands
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the
shoulders of giants. - Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human
race. - Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most
pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with
technicians. - Georges Pompidou (1911-1974)
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making
them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new
generation grows up that is familiar with it.
- Max Planck (1858-1947)
_Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers_, 1949
We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be
logical, natural, and desirable.... Advancing science has now discovered
that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by over-
specialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general
adaptability.... Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and
confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving
responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds
biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord,
which, in turn, leads to war. - Richard Buckminster Fuller (1894-1983)
In the world of human thought generally, and in physical science particularly,
the most important and fruitful concepts are those to which it is impossible to
attach a well-defined meaning. - Hendrik Anthony Kramers (1894-1952)
Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with
rules and no objectives. - anonymous
You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.
- Hermann Weyl (1885-1955)
The progress of science is often affected more by the frailties of humans and
their institutions than by the limitations of scientific measuring devices.
The scientific method is only as effective as the humans using it. It does
not automatically lead to progress. - Steven Stanford Zumdahl (b.1942)
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked
at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
- Poul William Anderson (b.1926)
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what
the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be
replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another
which states that this has already happened.
- Douglas Adams (b.1952)
_The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
- Steven Weinberg (b.1933)
May every young scientist remember...and not fail to keep his eyes open for
the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent
results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery.
- Patrick Stuart Blackett (1897-1974)
It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing
that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that's happened in
his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It's
startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one's
own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there.
A great shock, and a great, great joy. - Leo Philip Kadanoff (b.1937)
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein
logic. - David Russell
So far as modern science is concerned, we have to abandon completely the
idea that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the ultimate
foundations of the universe. I believe we can abandon this idea without any
regret. The universe is infinite in all directions, not only above us in the
large but also below us in the small. - Emil Wiechert
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of
science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy,
but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his
own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that
always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's
frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude
differs from a nude by Manet. - Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
The Act of Creation
London, 1970, p. 253
Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues
and encyclopedias. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.
- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
to a young physicist
The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated
about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy
of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the
question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that
it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
- Professor Edsger Dijkstra
at the ACN South Central Regional Conference
Austin, Texas, 16 to 18 November 1984
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they
mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with
the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena.
The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that
it is expected to work. - John von Neumann (1903-1957)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source
of all true art and science. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
contribution to _Living Philosophies_, Vol. 7
In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years
ago, General David Sarnoff [head of RCA] made this statement: "We are too prone
to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who
wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad;
it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is the voice
of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself
neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value."
...There is nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it
ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus
style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a
new technical form.... It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any
technology could do anything but _add_ itself on to what we already are.
- (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
_Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (1964)
I...reject the argument put forth by many fundamentalists that science has
nothing to do with religion because God is not among the things making up the
universe in which we live. Surely if a necessity for a god-concept in the
universe ever turns up, that necessity will become evident to the scientist.
- Ralph Asher Alpher (b.1921)
"Theology of the Big Bang,"
Religious Humanism, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (Winter 1983), pg. 12
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will
fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
In research, you must remember not to fool yourself, for you are the easiest
person to fool. - Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking
the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from
the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.
- George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984)
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he
has common sense on the ground floor. - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
Science is about skepticism. - Eugene Miya
Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.
- Stan Kelly-Bootle
"Computer Language", Oct 90
Science makes godlike -- it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes
scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden.
Science is the *first* sin, the *original* sin. *This alone is morality.*
'Thou shalt not know' -- the rest follows.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small
topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the
beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can
see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel
my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which
I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is
belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart
from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is
the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery
to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any
artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of
it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but
if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
- Edward Abbey (b.1927)
...But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual
capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If
intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to
us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their
distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the
debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theo-
logians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether
a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
- Stephen Jay Gould (b.1941)
"Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"
A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the
existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes
the destruction of human life. - Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877-1947)
Alas! can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to
civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall
beat the drums for its retreat? - Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon,
however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon
or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in
the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account.
The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), 1930
The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that
it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere
effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science
would explain the origin of life on earth at once -- and there is every reason
to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that
gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient
inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a
gratuitous and preposterous dignity. - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), 1930
Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open
the way to the next better one. - Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903-1989)
I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a
limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical
universe. - Ken Jenkins
Sir Isaac Newton secretly admitted to some of his friends: "I understand
how gravity behaves, but not how it works!"
- Lily Tomlin (b.1939)
********************************************************************************
SECURITY
--------
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only
real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge,
experience, and ability. - Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem
more afraid of life than death. - James F. Byrnes (1879-1972)
Security is death. - Robert Fripp (b.1946)
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the
alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
You have all eternity to be cautious in when you're dead.
- Lois Platford
Security is mostly a superstition. Security does not exist in nature, nor
do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer
in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or
nothing. - Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968)
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
- John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that
it will last; but nothing in this world is certain but death and taxes.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
"Letter to M. Leroy," 1798
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
- James Grover Thurber (1894-1961)
The desire for security stands against every great and noble enterprise.
- Cornelius Tacitus (c.56-c.120)
********************************************************************************
SELF-DEFENSE
------------
Self-defense is nature's oldest law. - John Dryden (1631-1700)
I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in
which these things would be by me unavoidable.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may
offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate -
and quickly. - Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Time Enough For Love_
********************************************************************************
SEX
---
Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he
has left it out of his heaven. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Even them Christians who are born again /
Go out 'n' get pooched every now 'n' then.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (b.1940)
If homosexuality were normal, God would have created Adam and Bruce.
- Anita Jane Bryant (b.1940)
At the moment of climax, there is a oneness with you and your husband and God.
When you come together, it's like when the church is brought up to meet Christ
in the air. - Anita Jane Bryant (b.1940)
Playboy Interview - May 1978
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the
epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
- Quentin Crisp (b.1908)
Sometimes in my dreams there are women.... When such dreams happen,
immediately I remember, 'I am a monk.'...It is very important to analyze 'What
is the real benefit of sexual desire?' The appearance of a beautiful face or
a beautiful body - as many scriptures describe - no matter how beautiful, they
essentially decompose into a skeleton. When we penetrate to its human flesh
and bones, there is no beauty, is there? A couple in a sexual experience is
happy for that moment. Then very soon trouble begins.
- The Dalai Lama (b.1935)
I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-
genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
- John Edgar Hoover (1895-1972)
The only unnatural sexual act is that which you cannot perform.
- Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894-1956)
Filling out job applications is so depressing. I was filling one out the
other day and I got to the part that says "Sex?" Well, I prefer to 'F', but
I'm usually alone, so I had to circle 'M'.
- Patrick Dockhorn
dockhorn@probitas.cs.utas.edu.au
One of the most devastating enemies of the family is radical sex education
in the public school. It is more explicit than necessary for the good of the
child. Too much sex education too soon causes undue curiosity and obsession
with sex. - Beverly LaHaye
President, Concerned Women for America,
in her newsletter, 4/81
(quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For
Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet)
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill
the world with surprise and horror. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands
for masturbation. - Lily Tomlin (b.1939)
When it comes to exploring the sea of love, I prefer buoys.
- Andrew G. Dehel
In America, sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.
- Marlene Dietrich (b.1904)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
God built a compelling sex drive into every creature, no matter what style
of fucking it practiced. He made sex irresistibly pleasurable, wildly joyous,
free from fears. He made it innocent merriment.
Needless to say, fucking was an immediate smash hit. Everyone agreed, from
aardvarks to zebras. All the jolly animals -- lions and lambs, rhinoceroses
and gazelles, skylarks and lobsters, even insects, though most of them fuck
only once in a lifetime -- fucked along innocently and merrily for hundreds of
millions of years. Maybe they were dumb animals, but they knew a good thing
when they had one. - Alan Sherman, "The Rape of the A*P*E*"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One day the President and Mrs. Coolidge were visiting a government farm. Soon
after their arrival they were taken off on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge
passed the chicken pens she paused to ask the man in charge if the rooster
copulates more than once each day. "Dozens of times," was the reply. "Please
tell that to the President," Mrs. Coolidge requested.
When the President passed the pens and was told about the roosters, he asked
"Same hen every time?" "Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time."
The President nodded slowly, then said, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."
- G. Bermant (1976)
"Sexual behavior: Hard times with the Coolidge Effect"
In M.H. Siegel & H.P. Zeigler (Editors),
_Psychological Research: The inside story_,
pp. 76-103. New York: Harper & Row.
********************************************************************************
SIN
---
Mahatma Gandhi's (1869-1948) Seven Sins:
1. Wealth without work.
2. Pleasure without conscience.
3. Knowledge without character.
4. Commerce without morality.
5. Science without humanity.
6. Worship without sacrifice.
7. Politics without principle.
Hate the sin and love the sinner. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
...it is not through sin that he opposes God. The Devil's strategy for our
times is to make trivial human existence and to isolate us from one another
while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands,
or economic anxieties. - Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be
indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
********************************************************************************
SLAVERY
-------
Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it
as the final horror has lost its manhood...there are many things more horrible
than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them.
- Padraic Henry Pearse (1879-1916)
How perilous it is to free a people who prefer slavery.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge
that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.
It is useless to expiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater
evil to the white than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly
enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former.
- Robert E. Lee (1807-1870)
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it
tried on him personally. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
********************************************************************************
SLEEP
-----
Sleep...oh! how I loathe those little slices of death....
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
********************************************************************************
SPIRITUALITY
------------
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis
pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by
a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic,
dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new
consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing
ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all
of creation. - Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906)
Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded,
dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God,
bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!
- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what
lies within us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force,
that thoughts rule the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
_Progress of Culture_.
********************************************************************************
STATE
-----
While the State exists, there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there
is no State. - Nikolai Lenin
Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they
cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The
decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them
regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential;
our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual
to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks
and factories? We socialize human beings.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
to Herman Rauschning, pre-WWII
"Why Does Socialism Continue to Appeal to Anyone?",
Robert Hessen
********************************************************************************
STUFF
-----
The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the
arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to
foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bank-
rupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC
(106-43 BC)
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is
writing a book. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have
only one course of action. - Frank Herbert (b.1920)
Weather, n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of conversation among
persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to
chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The
setting up official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove
that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the
jungle. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they wouldn't reach
any conclusion. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Even when pursued the butterfly is never in a hurry.
- Japanese saying
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
"The Hammer of God"
Almost everything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
you do it. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Abruptness is eloquence in parting, when spinning out the time is but the
weaving of new sorrow. - John Suckling (1609-1642)
There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize
when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means
leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in
our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an
entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may
be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding
action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts
of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned
back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And
when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully.
- Ellen Goodman (b.1941)
As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world is
connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that this mesh of a net
is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a net
because it is made up of a series of interconnected meshes, and each mesh
has its place and responsibility in relation to other meshes.
- Buddha (c.563-c.483 BC)
Muir's Law: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched
to everything else in the universe.
Coincidences are spiritual puns. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the
stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?
- Anaximenes (d.c.500 BC)
All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche,
and all claim supreme authority for themselves.
- Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you,
say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
- David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that
startled us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
_Candide_, Ch. 1.
So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be. - Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
"In Memoriam," Sec. lxxiii.
Omnio fieri possent.
(Everything may happen.) - Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
_Epistuloe ad Lucilium_
Epistle LXX, 9
********************************************************************************
STUPIDITY
---------
Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens.
(Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.)
- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
(1759-1805)
It is occasionally possible to charge Hell with a bucket of water but against
stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
- Doris Fleeson (1901-1970)
American syndicated columnist
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.
If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people
for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of
power. - P.J. O'Rourke (b.1947)
Common sense is the most evenly distributed quantity in the world. Everyone
thinks he has enough. - Rene Descartes (1596-1650), 1637
Common sense is the deposit of prejudice laid down in the mind before the
age of eighteen. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
- Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885)
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe.
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
- Harlan Jay Ellison (b.1934)
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
- Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)
The stupid are deaf to the truth; they hear, but think that the wisdom applies
to someone else. - Heraclitus (c.540-c.480 BC)
There's a sucker born every minute. - Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891)
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really
clever who has not found that he is stupid.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
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SUFFERING
---------
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
- unknown
Indeed, the first noble truth of Buddhism, usually translated as `all life
is suffering,' is more accurately rendered `life is filled with a sense of
pervasive unsatisfactoriness.' - M.D. Epstein
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each
man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intellegnece and a deep
heart. The really great men must, I think, have great saddness on Earth.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our
illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have
put in place of reality. - Daniel J. Boorstin
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
- Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
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SUICIDE
-------
The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage
is to be made across many a bad night. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough
to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To
wait. - Erica Jong (b.1942)
Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always
carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always
making a choice. - Lina Wertmuller (b.1929)
Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself without desparation. before taking
the step he delibarates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with
thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide,
since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die *with*
deliberation, but *from* deliberation. - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king --
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
- Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your
obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter
night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds
and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed
suicide. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
We have no power to prevent ourselves being born: but we can rectify this
error - for it is sometimes an error. When one _does away with_ oneself one
does the most estimable things possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"Gotzen-Dammerung"
********************************************************************************
SUPERSTITION
------------
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not
when it misses. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarified to
nothing by the pump of unbelief; in which the panting breast expires, vainly
and convulsively gasping for breath. - Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
(1763-1825)
The only thing that separates us from the animals is superstition and mindless
rituals. - Daniel Klein
********************************************************************************
TAXES
-----
You cannot really help men by having the government tax them to do for
them what they can and should do for themselves.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
...to force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an
addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the state is doing.
- Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854-1939)
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe
the people with their own money.
- Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel de Tocqueville
(1805-1859)
If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our
drink, in our necesseries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements,
for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like
them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of
fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the
sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now,
on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mis-
managers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves
to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.... The bulk of
society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensi-
bilities left but for sinning and suffering.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
(July 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval)
Nowadays a citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except
that the fine is generally much lighter.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the
producers. To free itself - for a while - from the limits set by reality,
the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private
manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is
to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tommorrow, which is to be
repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on. This
is known as "deficit financing." It is made possible by the fact that the
government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money,
which is used as a claim check on actually eisting goodss - but that money is
not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing.
It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid
by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production.
- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Philosophy: Who Needs It
"Egalitarianism and Inflation"
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
- Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Time Enough For Love_
A good prince will tax as lightly as possible those commodities which are
used by the poorest members of society; e.g., grain, bread, beer, wine,
clothing, and all other staples without which human life could not exist.
- Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536)
Still one more thing, fellow citizens: a wise and frugal government, which
shall refrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise
free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not
take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good
government. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
********************************************************************************
TECHNOLOGY
----------
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic.
- Arthur Charles Clarke (b.1917)
"Profiles of the Future", 1962
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the
work of one extraordinary man. - Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)
...technical advance could actually be an impediment to utopia: unlike in
previous centuries, technology in the twentieth century has made necessity
increase rather than diminish. - Cristovam Buarque
The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague
that will sweep away and destroy civilization, man will have to rise against it
sooner or later. - George Moore (1852-1933)
_Confessions of a Young Man_
Men have become the tools of their tools.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Men have become fools with their tools.
- Thomas Elisha Stewart (b.1963)
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage (1792-1871)
Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything,
except over technology. - John Tudor
Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to
experience it. - Max Frisch (1911-1991)
`Homo Faber'
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about
war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
- General Omar Nelson Bradley (1893-1981)
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to
develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to
be our executioner. - General Omar Nelson Bradley (1893-1981)
********************************************************************************
TELEVISION
----------
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go
into the other room and read a book. - Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Television: chewing gum for the eyes. - Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy.
- Richard Milhous Nixon (b.1913)
The problem is not that television presents us with entertainining subject
matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.
- Neil Postman
Television is democracy at its ugliest.
- Paddy Chayefsky (1923-1982)
Television is the first truly democratic culture -- the first culture available
to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrify-
ing thing is what the people do want. - Clive Alexander Barnes (b.1927)
"New York Times," 1969
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living
room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
- David Frost (b.1939)
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it,
as well as contributing to the need for it.
- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
98% of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2%
have to generate their own sex and violence.
- Franklin P. Jones
Cable is not a luxury, since many areas have poor TV reception.
- The mayor of Tucson, Arizona, 1989
If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its
laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people
most of the time. - George Gerbner (b.1919)
When will I learn? The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a
bottle. THEY'RE ON TV! - Homer, The Simpsons
"There's No Disgrace Like Home"
Writing for television is a debilitating exercise. How can you inspire an
audience to their best when every fourteen minutes someone interrupts to tell
them that they're unfit to live with? The ultimate purpose of commercial
television is to convince the viewer that he smells bad.
- Solomon Short
Watching television, you'd think we lived at bay, surrounded on all sides by
human-seeking germs. We are instructed to spray disinfectant everywhere, into
the air of our bedrooms and kitchens and with special energy into bathrooms.
In real life, however, disease occurs so infrequently that it has a freakish
aspect. - Lewis Thomas (b.1913)
********************************************************************************
TEMPTATION
----------
What makes resisting temptation difficult, for many people, is that they don't
want to discourage it completely. - Franklin P. Jones
When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried
before. - Mae West (1893-1980)
in "Klondike Annie" 1936
********************************************************************************
THEOLOGY
--------
Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it.
The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.
- Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)
RELIGION
********************************************************************************
TIME
----
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science,
the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must
fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall
pretend that time is Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always
been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her
proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward
as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger
at Nought really sets off _in medias res_. No retrospect will take us to the
true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a
fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.
- George Eliot (1819-1880)
_Daniel Deronda_
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist
in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
- Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973)
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest
poison is time. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Society and Solitude"
So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
- Psalms 90:10
Time is the chrysalis of eternity. - Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
(1763-1825)
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
- Theophrastus (c.372-c.287 BC)
You must have been warned about letting the golden hours slip by; but
some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
- James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937)
Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the
most precious of human goods and to squander it is the most delicate form of
dissipation in which man can indulge. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
"The Bum"
********************************************************************************
TRANSCENDENCE
-------------
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so
monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to
transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been
one of the principal appetites of the soul.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
_The Doors of Perception_, p.62
In whatever country we may be, I believe that we are for ever immersed in the
spiritual world; but most of us cannot perceive it on account of the unrefined
nature of our physical bodies. Through meditation and physical training one
can come to see the spiritual world and its beings. We pass into the spirit
realm at death and come back into the human world at birth; and we continue to
reincarnate until we have overcome all earthly desires and mortal appetites.
Then the higher life is open to our consciousness and we cease to be human;
we become divine beings. - reported to W.Y. Evans-Wentz, found in
_The Fairy Faith in Celtic Contries_
********************************************************************************
TRUST
-----
Who does not trust enough will not be trusted.
- Lao-Tzu (6th century BC)
Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts
its life to one hole only. - Titus Maccius Plautus (254?-184 BC)
********************************************************************************
TRUTH
-----
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
It is treason to sacrifice love of truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the
laws and methods of the mind, to any other interests, including those of one's
country. Whenever propaganda and conflict of interests threatens to devalue,
distort, and do violence to the truth...it is our duty to resist and save the
truth, since that is the supreme article of our creed. The scholar who knowing-
ly speaks, writes, or teaches falsehood, who knowingly supports lies and
deceptions, notngnly violates organic principles. He also, no matter how
things may seem at the given moment, does his people a grave disservice.
- Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
_Magister Ludi_
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Truth is lived, not taught. - Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
_Words_
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' -
that is all / Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know. - John Keats (1795-1821)
"Ode on a Grecian Urn
Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not truth,
Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love... - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993)
Logic is just our excuse for doing the things we want to do.
- anonymous
Logic -- an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.
- Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
Facts are stubborn things. - John Adams (1735-1826)
Facts are stupid things. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911),
1988 Republican convention
...[I]t seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled
for in a form which destroys their ideals.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Learning is most intense and effective when it has an emotional, not just
an intellectual, component, when there are no explicit rules and the organism
is thrown upon its basic resources for survival. These need not be negative
emotions; Plato saw the erotic as an essential component of any real
education. Our emotional life lies outside the framework of reason (although
it can be examined by reason), and at its most intense we realize that there
are no rules or regularities to guide us into new territory. This is an
opportunity for creativity, and we often emerge from an emotional crisis
with newly learned rules and values." - Heinz Rudolph Pagels (b.1939)
"Tci Dreams of Reason", pg. 327
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it
contains. - Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881)
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where
were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity
and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"Walden," the Conclusion
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
All great truths begin as blasphemies. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"Annajanska"
Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second.
- Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
_Essays in Appreciation_
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth,"
and so it goes away. Puzzling. - Robert Maynard Pirsig (b.1928)
quoted in _Zen To Go_, by Jon Winokur
Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
- Andre Gide (1869-1951)
We lie about the truth, that's what ruins us here. And do you know why we lie
about the truth? Not because we like to, but because we are scared to death of
it. If we looked the truth in the eye nine out of ten of us would run to the
graveyard and demand to be buried at once.
- Babbaluche the cobbler
Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
- Andre Gide (1869-1951)
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses
or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not
change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
- Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as
a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
- Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926)
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie,
and even to murder, with the truth. - Alfred Adler (1870-1937)
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have
been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
- Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
(quoted in Brewster's _Memoirs of Newton_,
Vol. 2, Ch. 27)
********************************************************************************
TYRANNY
------
Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or an enemy,
must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.
- Aesop (620-560 BC)
The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into
greatness.... This and no other is the root from which tyranny springs.
- Plato (428-348? BC), "The Republic"
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Throughout the history of mankind there have been murderers and tyrants;
and while it may seem momentarily that they have the upper hand, they have
always fallen. Always. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. - Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985)
When democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this
was bound to happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists
never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have
declared openly that we used the democratic methods only to gain power and
that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any
consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition.
- Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945)
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
- Harry S Truman, 1959
There are three sorts of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over
the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the
despot who tyrannizes over the soul *and* body alike. The first is called
the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
********************************************************************************
VIOLENCE
--------
Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself,
he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack,
he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse
himself, he kills for the sake of killing.
- Josef de Maistre
_Considerations sur la France_
The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when
you kill them. - William Clayton
Beware the fury of a patient man. - John Dryden (1631-1700)
********************************************************************************
VIRTUE
------
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject
to the regulation of conscience. - Adam Smith (1723-1790)
********************************************************************************
WAR
---
There never was a good war or a bad peace.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
(It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.)
- Horace (65-8 BC)
Every good citizen makes his country's honor his own, and cherishes it not
only as precious but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense
and is conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.
- Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after
a war it seems more like astrology. - Rebecca West (1892-1983)
[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed
during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who
are killed in war. - Isaac Asimov (b.1920)
War is just to those to whom war is necessary.
- Titus Livius (59 BC-AD 17)
Men must either be caressed or annihilated and the injury must be such that
the victim cannot pay you back for it. Whoever acts otherwise is obliged to
stand forever with a knife in his hand.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Men must either be caressed or annihilated. They will revenge themselves for
small injuries, but they can't do so for great ones. The harm the leader does
must be such that he need not fear revenge.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Deceit in the conduct of war outweighs valor and is worthy of merit.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves,
only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that
there may be something to them [which] we are missing.
- Gamel Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)
War, n. A by-product of t. arts of peace. The most menacing political
condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has
not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible
to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is
commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end --
that change is the one immutable and eternal law -- but that the soil of peace
is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germin-
ation and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had decreed his "stately pleasure
dome" -- when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in Xanadu --
that he heard from afar Ancestral voices prophesying war.
One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it
was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less
of "hands across the sea," and a little more of that elemental distrust that
is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night;
professions of eternal amity provide the night.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded
state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war
is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight,
nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable
creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the
exertions of better men than himself. - John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.
When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
- Desiderius Erasmus (1465-1536)
It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it.
- Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870)
December 1862
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they
kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the
soil of love. - George Santayana (1863-1952)
He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my
contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the
spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should
be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all
this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds
than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under
the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV
will be fought with sticks and stones.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they
killed, there would be no more wars. - Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989)
Nuclear weapons, if used properly, can wipe out all life on the earth.
- David Byrne (b.1952)
Bush has it backwards -- abortion is surgical; bombing is murder.
- sign at anti-war march
War...is something that occurs not between man and man, but between States.
The individuals who become involved in it are enemies only by accident.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who
have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who
cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
- William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891)
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is
all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look
upon war with horror. - William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891)
As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their
destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever
be the vice of the most exalted characters.
- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794)
Where is it written in the Constitution that you may take children from their
parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles
of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?
- Daniel Webster, 1814 (1782-1852)
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war,
and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy.
- Louise-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961)
You can march them off a cliff, you can send them to certain death in some
god-forsaken land, but for some reason you can't slap them.
- Grandpa in "Bart the General"
The Simpsons
...But when he [the people's champion] has disposed of foreign enemies by
conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always
stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
- Plato (427?-347 BC)
"The Republic"
Preparation for war is a constant stimulus to suspicion and ill will.
- President James Monroe (1758-1831)
The master class has always brought a war and the subject class has always
fought the battle. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose,
and the subject class has had all to lose and nothing to gain.
- Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926)
The capitalist can only make a whole people go to war -- want war, clamor
for war as, again and again, we have seen whole peoples doing -- by capturing
the popular will. The only prophylactic against that situation is to make the
public aware of the way in which it is being misled.
- Norman Angell (1872-1967)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who
are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the
hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
April 16, 1953
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.
- A senior Pentagon official, explaining why they
refused to release video footage of fleeing Iraqi
soldiers being cut in half by helicopter cannon
fire, February 1991.
In Lisbon when heretics were publicly burned, it sometimes happened that one of
them, by particularly edifying recantation, would be granted the boon of being
strangled before being put into the flames. This would make the spectators
so furious that the authorities had great difficulty in preventing them from
lynching the penitent and burning him on their own account. The spectacle
of the writhing torments of the victims was, in fact, one of the principal
pleasures to which the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat drab
existence. I cannot doubt that this pleasure greatly contributed to the
general belief that the burning of heretics was a righteous act. The same
sort of thing applies to war. People who are vigorous and brutal often find
war enjoyable, provided that it is a victorious war and their is not too much
interference with rape and plunder. This is a great help in persuading people
that wars are righteous. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
"Unpopular Essays", 1950
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than
the destruction of millions of our fellow human beings.
- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
Works, Vol.X
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the
second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent
ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
- Ernest Miller Hemingway (1898-1961)
Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam. (The sinews of war, unlimited money.)
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The
highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy.
- Ancient Chinese warlord
To use violence is to already be defeated.
- Chinese proverb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of
the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the
Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave
people. Also we saw Caesar invade Britain -- "not that those barbarians had
done him any harm, but because he wanted their land, and desired to confer the
blessings of civilization upon their widows and orphans," as Satan explained.
Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review before us,
and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through those ages,
"leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake, and other signs of the
progress of the human race," as Satan observed.
And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars -- all over Europe,
all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families,"
Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the
aggressor for any clean purpose -- there is no such war in the history of the
race."
"Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present, and you
must confess that it is wonderful -- in its way. We must now exhibit the
future."
He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more
devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen.
"You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress. Cain did his
murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords;
the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military
organization and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gunpowder; a
few centuries from now he will have so greatly improved the deadly effective-
ness of his weapons of slaughter that all men will confess that without
Christian civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to
the end of time." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"The Mysterious Stranger"
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WEALTH
------
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate one and love the other,
or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and riches.
- Matthew 6:24
'Tis strange the miser should his cares employ
To gain the riches he can ne'er enjoy.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, another cannot gain.
Hence that common opinion seems to be very true, "the rich man is unjust, or
the heir to an unjust one." Opulence is always the result of theft, if not
committed by the actual possessor, than by his predecessor.
- St. Jerome (340?-420)
Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them.
- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own,
resembling the affection of authors for their poems, or of parents for their
children...and hence they are very bad company, for they talk of nothing but
the praises of wealth. - Plato (428-348? BC)
There is fast forming in this country an aristocracy of wealth, the worst form
of aristocracy that can curse the prosperity of a nation.
- Peter Cooper (1791-1883)
If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave
it to. - Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
There are those who argue that everything breaks even...I suppose that be-
cause the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the
winter things are breaking even for both.
- Bat Masterson
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WISDOM
------
The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.
- Socrates (470?-399 BC)
Be wiser than other people, if you can, but do not tell them so.
- Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...for we never know what is
enough until we know what is more than enough.
- William Blake (1757-1827)
There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
It takes a wise man to recognize a wise man.
- Xenophanes (c.570 - c.475 BC)
From the conscious mind comes intellect; from the unconscious, wisdom.
- anonymous
(found in _Exploring Inner Space_, p.69)
In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou has attained it
thou art a fool. - Simon Ben Azzai
2nd century AD Jewish scholar
If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that
went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
"The Collected Essays, Journalism
and Letters of George Orwell"
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage
to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
sermon, 1934
Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the options.
- Abba Eban (b.1915)
[Wisdom] is a tree of life to those laying hold of her, making happy each
one holding her fast. - Proverbs 3:18 [NSV]
A prudent question is one-half wisdom. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does
know, but of many things that he does not know; and will gain more credit by
his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pendant by his awkward attempt
to exhibit his erudition. - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
From the errors of others a wise man corrects his own.
- Publilius Syrus (1st century BC)
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings
wisdom. - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
Prejudices, Third Series", 1922
For every proverb that confidently asserts its little bit of wisdom, there
is usually an equal and opposite proverb that contradicts it.
- Richard Boston
The conviction of wisdom is the plague of man.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?
- Norman Douglas (1868-1952)
Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to
laugh, and too self-ful to seek other than itself.
- Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Probabilia...sapientis vita regeretur.
(Probabilities direct the conduct of the wise man.)
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC
_De Natura Deorum_, Book I, ch. 5, sec. 12
Life is a festival only to the wise. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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WIT
---
Wit is educated insolence. - Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Wit is the epitaph of an emotion. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
No great wit without madness intermixed.
- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
Wit, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual
cookery by leaving it out. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Impropriety is the soul of wit. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
The man who sees the consistency in things is a wit, the man who sees the
inconsistency in things is a humorist.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty.
- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
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WONDER
------
Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
- Socrates (c.470-399 BC)
quoting Plato
He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
- Maurits Corneille Escher (1898-1970)
The foolish man wonders at the unusual; the wise man at the usual.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
- Ralph W. Sockman (b.1889)
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WORK
----
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss
and work 12 hours a day. - Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level
of incompetence. - Laurence Johnston Peter (1919-1990)
In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetance.
- Laurence Johnston Peter (1919-1990)
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.
- Bob Black
There's a lot of rot talked about the sufferings of the working class. I'm
not so sorry for the proles myself.... The prole suffers phisically, but he's
a free man when he isn't working. But in every one of those little stucco
boxes there's some poor bastard who's _never_ free except when he's fast
asleep. - George Orwell, 1939 (1903-1950)
I do not like work even when someone else does it.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914)
_The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he's supposed to
be doing at that moment. - Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
one's work is terribly important. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon
life but upon the transformation of life into work.
- Raoul Vaneigem (b.1934)
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances
are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better
explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such
significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who
are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by
the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated
to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so
atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded
phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families
they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into
politics, culture, and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from
people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in every-
thing. They're used to it. - Bob Black
_The Abolition of Work_
Whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the
rank of slaves. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
...the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where
labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required.
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by
their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a
few simple operations...has no occasion to exert his understanding....
He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human
creature to become. - Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Work is the only dirty four-letter word in the language.
- Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989)
Harpers magazine, 1970
...there's nothing of any importance in life -- except how well you do your
work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's
the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram
down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece
people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality
that's on a gold standard. - Francisco d'Anconia
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work. - Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
It's only work if somebody makes you do it.
- Bill Watterson (Calvin)
Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable
existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible
with continuing to exist at all. - Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)
English poet and essayist
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is
evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful for the sake
of something else. - Aristotle (384-322 BC)
A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool
as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
- George Jean Nathan
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new
wearer of clothes. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle
is complete. - Raoul Vaneigem (b.1934)
_The Revolution of Everyday Life_
Ch. 7, sect. 2 (1967; tr. 1983)
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