KGB Report

(The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: "Nooney Tunes")

If you've been irritated for years by Peggy Noonan's self-serving, pompous blatherings, boy, do I have something for you.

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Categories: Daily Show; Jon Stewart; Peggy Noonan

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(91 years later, and this sermon is probably even more valid today.)

Harry Emerson Fosdick (May 24, 1878 - October 5, 1969) was an American pastor. Fosdick became a central figure in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy within American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s and was one of the most prominent liberal ministers of the early 20th Century. Although a Baptist, he was guest preacher in New York City at First Presbyterian Church on West Twelfth Street and then at the historic, interdenominational Riverside Church. (Click for full Wikipedia article).

"Shall the Fundamentalists Win?": Defending Liberal Protestantism in the 1920s

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Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. "Liberal" Protestants sought to reconcile faith and science and to slow what they saw as the reactionary tendencies of fundamentalism. Harry Emerson Fosdick's influential 1922 sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?," called for an open-minded, intellectual, and tolerant "Christian fellowship." Though the sermon cost him his post at New York's First Presbyterian Church, his views represented those of an influential Protestant minority, and Fosdick enjoyed a long career at Riverside Church, built for him by John D. Rockefeller. Following the Scopes trial and a well-publicized scandal involving well-known pastor Aimee Semple McPherson and a mysterious lover, fundamentalists began to lose the prominence they enjoyed in the 1920s. But religious fundamentalism would remain a vital political force in American life.

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This morning we are to think of the fundamentalist controversy which threatens to divide the American churches as though already they were not sufficiently split and riven. A scene, suggestive for our thought, is depicted in the fifth chapter of the Book of the Acts, where the Jewish leaders hale before them Peter and other of the apostles because they had been preaching Jesus as the Messiah. Moreover, the Jewish leaders propose to slay them, when in opposition Gamaliel speaks "Refrain from these men, and let them alone; for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be overthrown; but if it is of God ye will not be able to overthrow them; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God."...

Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the Fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. I speak of them the more freely because there are no two denominations more affected by them than the Baptist and the Presbyterian. We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.

The Fundamentalists see, and they see truly, that in this last generation there have been strange new movements in Christian thought. A great mass of new knowledge has come into man's possession— new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which the ancient peoples used to think in matters of religion and the methods by which they phrased and explained their spiritual experiences; and new knowledge, also, about other religions and the strangely similar ways in which men's faiths and religious practices have developed everywhere...

Now, there are multitudes of reverent Christians who have been unable to keep this new knowledge in one compartment of their minds and the Christian faith in another. They have been sure that all truth comes from the one God and is His revelation. Not, therefore, from irreverence or caprice or destructive zeal but for the sake of intellectual and spiritual integrity, that they might really love the Lord their God, not only with all their heart and soul and strength but with all their mind, they have been trying to see this new knowledge in terms of the Christian faith and to see the Christian faith in terms of this new knowledge.

Doubtless they have made many mistakes. Doubtless there have been among them reckless radicals gifted with intellectual ingenuity but lacking spiritual depth. Yet the enterprise itself seems to them indispensable to the Christian Church. The new knowledge and the old faith cannot be left antagonistic or even disparate, as though a man on Saturday could use one set of regulative ideas for his life and on Sunday could change gear to another altogether. We must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms.

There is nothing new about the situation. It has happened again and again in history, as, for example, when the stationary earth suddenly began to move and the universe that had been centered in this planet was centered in the sun around which the planets whirled. Whenever such a situation has arisen, there has been only one way out— the new knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination. Now, the people in this generation who are trying to do this are the liberals, and the Fundamentalists are out on a campaign to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship. Shall they be allowed to succeed?

It is interesting to note where the Fundamentalists are driving in their stakes to mark out the deadline of doctrine around the church, across which no one is to pass except on terms of agreement. They insist that we must all believe in the historicity of certain special miracles, preeminently the virgin birth of our Lord; that we must believe in a special theory of inspiration—that the original documents of the Scripture, which of course we no longer possess, were inerrantly dictated to men a good deal as a man might dictate to a stenographer; that we must believe in a special theory of the Atonement— that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner; and that we must believe in the second coming of our Lord upon the clouds of heaven to set up a millennium here, as the only way in which God can bring history to a worthy denouement. Such are some of the stakes which are being driven to mark a deadline of doctrine around the church.

If a man is a genuine liberal, his primary protest is not against holding these opinions, although he may well protest against their being considered the fundamentals of Christianity. This is a free country and anybody has a right to hold these opinions or any others if he is sincerely convinced of them. The question is— Has anybody a right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him on such points and to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship? The Fundamentalists say that this must be done. In this country and on the foreign field they are trying to do it. They have actually endeavored to put on the statute books of a whole state binding laws against teaching modern biology. If they had their way, within the church, they would set up in Protestantism a doctrinal tribunal more rigid than the pope's.

In such an hour, delicate and dangerous, when feelings are bound to run high, I plead this morning the cause of magnanimity and liberality and tolerance of spirit. I would, if I could reach their ears, say to the Fundamentalists about the liberals what Gamaliel said to the Jews, "Refrain from these men and let them alone; for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be everthrown; but if it is of God ye will not be able to overthrow them; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God."

That we may be entirely candid and concrete and may not lose ourselves in any fog of generalities, let us this morning take two or three of these Fundamentalist items and see with reference to them what the situation is in the Christian churches. Too often we preachers have failed to talk frankly enough about the differences of opinion which exist among evangelical Christians, although everybody knows that they are there. Let us face this morning some of the differences of opinion with which somehow we must deal.

We may well begin with the vexed and mooted question of the virgin birth of our Lord. I know people in the Christian churches, ministers, missionaries, laymen, devoted lovers of the Lord and servants of the Gospel, who, alike as they are in their personal devotion to the Master, hold quite different points of view about a matter like the virgin birth. Here, for example, is one point of view that the virgin birth is to be accepted as historical fact; it actually happened; there was no other way for a personality like the Master to come into this world except by a special biological miracle. That is one point of view, and many are the gracious and beautiful souls who hold it. But side by side with them in the evangelical churches is a group of equally loyal and reverent people who would say that the virgin birth is not to be accepted as an historic fact... So far from thinking that they have given up anything vital in the New Testament's attitude toward Jesus, these Christians remember that the two men who contributed most to the Church's thought of the divine meaning of the Christ were Paul and John, who never even distantly allude to the virgin birth.

Here in the Christian churches are these two groups of people and the question which the Fundamentalists raise is this— Shall one of them throw the other out? Has intolerance any contribution to make to this situation? Will it persuade anybody of anything? Is not the Christian Church large enough to hold within her hospitable fellowship people who differ on points like this and agree to differ until the fuller truth be manifested? The Fundamentalists say not. They say the liberals must go. Well, if the Fundamentalists should succeed, then out of the Christian Church would go some of the best Christian life and consecration of this generation—multitudes of men and women, devout and reverent Christians, who need the church and whom the church needs.

Consider another matter on which there is a sincere difference of opinion between evangelical Christians: the inspiration of the Bible. One point of view is that the original documents of the Scripture were inerrantly dictated by God to men. Whether we deal with the story of creation or the list of the dukes of Edom or the narratives of Solomon's reign or the Sermon on the Mount or the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, they all came in the same way, and they all came as no other book ever came. They were inerrantly dictated; everything there— scientific opinions, medical theories, historical judgments, as well as spiritual insight— is infallible. That is one idea of the Bible's inspiration. But side by side with those who hold it, lovers of the Book as much as they, are multitudes of people who never think about the Bible so. Indeed, that static and mechanical theory of inspiration seems to them a positive peril to the spiritual life...

Here in the Christian Church today are these two groups, and the question which the Fundamentalists have raised is this— Shall one of them drive the other out? Do we think the cause of Jesus Christ will be furthered by that? If He should walk through the ranks of his congregation this morning, can we imagine Him claiming as His own those who hold one idea of inspiration and sending from Him into outer darkness those who hold another? You cannot fit the Lord Christ into that Fundamentalist mold. The church would better judge His judgment. For in the Middle West the Fundamentalists have had their way in some communities and a Christian minister tells us the consequences. He says that the educated people are looking for their religion outside the churches.

Consider another matter upon which there is a serious and sincere difference of opinion between evangelical Christians: the second coming of our Lord. The second coming was the early Christian phrasing of hope. No one in the ancient world had ever thought, as we do, of development, progress, gradual change as God's way of working out His will in human life and institutions. They thought of human history as a series of ages succeeding one another with abrupt suddenness. The Graeco-Roman world gave the names of metals to the ages— gold, silver, bronze, iron. The Hebrews had their ages, too— the original Paradise in which man began, the cursed world in which man now lives, the blessed Messianic kingdom someday suddenly to appear on the clouds of heaven. It was the Hebrew way of expressing hope for the victory of God and righteousness. When the Christians came they took over that phrasing of expectancy and the New Testament is aglow with it. The preaching of the apostles thrills with the glad announcement, "Christ is coming!"

In the evangelical churches today there are differing views of this matter. One view is that Christ is literally coming, externally, on the clouds of heaven, to set up His kingdom here. I never heard that teaching in my youth at all. It has always had a new resurrection when desperate circumstances came and man's only hope seemed to lie in divine intervention. It is not strange, then, that during these chaotic, catastrophic years there has been a fresh rebirth of this old phrasing of expectancy. "Christ is coming!" seems to many Christians the central message of the Gospel. In the strength of it some of them are doing great service for the world. But, unhappily, many so overemphasize it that they outdo anything the ancient Hebrews or the ancient Christians ever did. They sit still and do nothing and expect the world to grow worse and worse until He comes.

Side by side with these to whom the second coming is a literal expectation, another group exists in the evangelical churches. They, too, say, "Christ is coming!" They say it with all their hearts; but they are not thinking of an external arrival on the clouds. They have assimilated as part of the divine revelation the exhilarating insight which these recent generations have given to us, that development is God's way of working out His will...

And these Christians, when they say that Christ is coming, mean that, slowly it may be, but surely, His will and principles will be worked out by God's grace in human life and institutions, until "He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied."

These two groups exist in the Christian churches and the question raised by the Fundamentalists is— Shall one of them drive the other out? Will that get us anywhere? Multitudes of young men and women at this season of the year are graduating from our schools of learning, thousands of them Christians who may make us older ones ashamed by the sincerity of their devotion to God's will on earth. They are not thinking in ancient terms that leave ideas of progress out. They cannot think in those terms. There could be no greater tragedy than that the Fundamentalists should shut the door of the Christian fellowship against such.

I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to succeed. Nobody's intolerance can contribute anything to the solution of the situation which we have described. If, then, the Fundamentalists have no solution of the problem, where may we expect to find it? In two concluding comments let us consider our reply to that inquiry.

The first element that is necessary is a spirit of tolerance and Christian liberty. When will the world learn that intolerance solves no problems? This is not a lesson which the Fundamentalists alone need to learn; the liberals also need to learn it. Speaking, as I do, from the viewpoint of liberal opinions, let me say that if some young, fresh mind here this morning is holding new ideas, has fought his way through, it may be by intellectual and spiritual struggle, to novel positions, and is tempted to be intolerant about old opinions, offensively to condescend to those who hold them and to be harsh in judgment on them, he may well remember that people who held those old opinions have given the world some of the noblest character and the most rememberable service that it ever has been blessed with, and that we of the younger generation will prove our case best, not by controversial intolerance, but by producing, with our new opinions, something of the depth and strength, nobility and beauty of character that in other times were associated with other thoughts. It was a wise liberal, the most adventurous man of his day— Paul the Apostle— who said, "Knowledge puffeth up, but love buildeth up."

Nevertheless, it is true that just now the Fundamentalists are giving us one of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance that the churches of this country have ever seen. As one watches them and listens to them he remembers the remark of General Armstrong of Hampton Institute, "Cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy." There are many opinions in the field of modern controversy concerning which I am not sure whether they are right or wrong, but there is one thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.

As I plead thus for an intellectually hospitable, tolerant, liberty-loving church, I am, of course, thinking primarily about this new generation. We have boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools, and because we love them we may well wonder about the church which will be waiting to receive them. Now, the worst kind of church that can possibly be offered to the allegiance of the new generation is an intolerant church. Ministers often bewail the fact that young people turn from religion to science for the regulative ideas of their lives. But this is easily explicable.

Science treats a young man's mind as though it were really important. A scientist says to a young man, "Here is the universe challenging our investigation. Here are the truths which we have seen, so far. Come, study with us! See what we already have seen and then look further to see more, for science is an intellectual adventure for the truth." Can you imagine any man who is worthwhile turning from that call to the church if the church seems to him to say, "Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results."

My friends, nothing in all the world is so much worth thinking of as God, Christ, the Bible, sin and salvation, the divine purposes for humankind, life everlasting. But you cannot challenge the dedicated thinking of this generation to these sublime themes upon any such terms as are laid down by an intolerant church.

The second element which is needed if we are to reach a happy solution of this problem is a clear insight into the main issues of modern Christianity and a sense of penitent shame that the Christian Church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great needs. If, during the war, when the nations were wrestling upon the very brink of hell and at times all seemed lost, you chanced to hear two men in an altercation about some minor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could you restrain your indignation? You said, "What can you do with folks like this who, in the face of colossal issues, play with the tiddledywinks and peccadillos of religion?" So, now, when from the terrific questions of this generation one is called away by the noise of this Fundamentalist controversy, he thinks it almost unforgivable that men should tithe mint and anise and cummin, and quarrel over them, when the world is perishing for the lack of the weightier matters of the law, justice, and mercy, and faith...

The present world situation smells to heaven! And now, in the presence of colossal problems, which must be solved in Christ's name and for Christ's sake, the Fundamentalists propose to drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly!

Well, they are not going to do it; certainly not in this vicinity. I do not even know in this congregation whether anybody has been tempted to be a Fundamentalist. Never in this church have I caught one accent of intolerance. God keep us always so and ever increasing areas of the Christian fellowship; intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant, not with the tolerance of indifference, as though we did not care about the faith, but because always our major emphasis is upon the weightier matters of the law.

Source: Harry Emerson Fosdick, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" Christian Work 102 (June 10, 1922): 716–722.

(From History Matters)

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Categories: Harry Emerson Fosdick; Religion

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Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 - May 23, 1906) was a major Norwegian playwright, theater director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney.

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.

Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of iron or of gold.

Castles in the air- they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too.

Do you know what we are... those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

Don't use that foreign word "ideals." We have that excellent native word "lies."

I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

It is no use lying to one's self.

It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never right until it does right.

Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

Many a man can save himself if he admits he's done wrong and takes his punishment.

One's life is a heavy price to pay for being born.

People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it.

Really to sin you have to be serious about it.

The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.

The majority is always wrong. The minority is rarely right.

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom- these are the pillars of society.

The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

To live is to war with trolls.

What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

When you've sold yourself once for the sake of others, you don't do it second time.

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

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Categories: Henrik Ibsen; Quotes of the day

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I've been tweaking the blog to reduce the page load and link generation times. The biggest change is that the categories and archives links no longer appear on every page. They've been relocated to the "about" page.

Fixing one thing generally breaks a half-dozen others, so please let me know if you come across something that doesn't work.

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Categories: KGB Blog News

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A linear projection into the future of any science or technology is like a form of propaganda- often persuasive, almost always wrong.
-Pamela McCorduck

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
-Bill Gray

A successful technology creates problems that only it can solve.
-Alan Kay

All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.
-Neil Gaiman

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
-David Ross Brower

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-James Klass

Cheese in an aerosol can is the greatest advance in technology since fire.
-James Angove

Each fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, football fans cheer for their favorite irrational number: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine!"
-Bruce Watson

Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth. (From Engineers Explained)
-Unattributed

Even though today's technology provides us with mountains of data, it is useless without judgment.
-Felix G. Rohatyn

Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
-Carl Sagan

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
-Clive James

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
-Alice Kahn

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard P. Feynman

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
-Buckminster Fuller

I may be just an empty flesh terminal relying on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that, everything that makes me a unique human being, is still out there, somewhere, safe in the theoretical storage space owned by giant multi-national corporations.
-Stephen Colbert

If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't be able to stop things now. (re: regulation of information technology.)
-Carlo de Benedetti

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
-Freeman Dyson

If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.
-Ed Turner

In the long run, everything is a toaster. (on innovative technologies)
-Bruce Greenwald

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
-Douglas Adams

[Information Technology] people are so hypnotized by the technology they don't look for real results.
-Peter Drucker

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
-Bruce Sterling

Let's be frank, the Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven.
-Bill Bryson

Levitt's First Law of Information Technology: If it's free, adopt it.
-Unattributed

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.
-A.C. Grayling

[N]either technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.
-James Gleick

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-Stewart Brand

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
-Albert Einstein

Some technologies do their job perfectly and tend to stick around. The spoon is one example, the lawn-roller another. Paper may well be a third. (From The Economist)
-Unattributed

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
-Aldous Huxley

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.
-Max Frisch

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
-Alan Kay

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
-Unattributed

Technology is really civilization, let's face it.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.
-John Tudor

Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive.
-Laurie Anderson

The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-Roger Levian

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself-either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.
-Max Born

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
-E.O. Wilson

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology- the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
-Robert Pirsig

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
-Neil Postman

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
-Douglas Adams

We have lots of information technology. We just don't have any information. (New Yorker cartoon caption)
-Sydney J. Harris

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
-Carl Sagan

While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
-Lee Gomes

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law, newspapers, periodicals, radio, television, all electronic media, and technologies yet to be developed. (Cartoon caption in The New Yorker)
-Unattributed

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Categories: Quotes of the day

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Alexander Pope (May 21, 1688 - May 30, 1744) was an English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. (Click here for full Wikipedia article.)

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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.

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.

Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear.

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie; for an excuse is a lie guarded.

At every word a reputation dies.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

Coffee, which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

Genuine religion is not so much a matter of feeling as a matter of principle.

Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.

For, as blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

He who tells a lie, is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.

Here am I, dying of a hundred good symptoms. (Response to his physician's statement that he was better. He died later that day.)

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
(from "Eloisa to Abelard")

I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring out.

Order is heaven's first law.

Our passions are like convulsion-fits, which, though they make us stronger for the time, leave us the weaker ever after.

Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few.

Some old men, by continually praising the time of their youth, would almost persuade us that there were no fools in those days; but unluckily they are left themselves for examples.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool.

The Scripture in time of disputes is like an open town in time of war, which serves indifferently the occasions of both parties.

There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.

Therefore they who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients, may as well say our faces are not our own, because they are like our Fathers: And indeed it is very unreasonable, that people should expect us to be Scholars, and yet be angry to find us so.

To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.

Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown;
O grant an honest fame, or grant me none!

Virtues and vices are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.

Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time,
And make two lovers happy.

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Categories: Alexander Pope; Quotes of the day

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Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. (Click for full Wikipedia article).

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman.

A mother, who is really a mother, is never free.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea.

A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without love, without virtue, without sex.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Discretion is the best form of calculation.

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Glory is the sun of the dead.

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Manners are the hypocrisy of nations.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Our most cruel enemies are our nearest in blood!... Kings have neither brothers, nor sons, nor mothers.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within.

Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self- denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

The fact is that love is of two kinds- one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.

True love is eternal, infinite, always like unto itself; it is equable, pure, without violent demonstration; white hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.

Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings.

What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.

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Categories: Honoré de Balzac; Quotes of the day

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(A curmudgeon's review of "Star Trek: Into Darkness")

Star Trek: Into Darkness is aggressively, egregiously, purposefully, intentionally, maliciously stupid.

A certain suspension of disbelief is necessary in order to watch science fiction of any kind, and Star Trek is no exception. But Star Trek generally limited itself to extrapolations of existing technology and scientific theory, and the techno-babble whatsits still had to function within a known universe with well-defined laws of physics.

(Warning: there are spoilers ahead.)

One wonders if those responsible for this abomination took a copy of the script from Star Trek II, a script rejected from Lost in Space, shuffled them together, and filmed the result.

J.J. Abrams' original 2009 reboot also contained major errors, but that film was entertaining enough that the gaffes didn't come to mind until you were in your car, on your way home from the theater.

The plot holes is this stinker dragged me out of the movie in the very opening scene, and from that point on, things just got worse.

The movie starts on the planet Nibiru, which is also the name of the fictional planet that was supposed to kill us all during the Mayan Apocalypse.

"Hi, I'm J.J. Abrams, and we're starting off by naming this planet 'Nibiru' just to let you know we're deliberately thumbing our nose at science in general and Star Trek in particular, which we never liked. The whole movie is like this. This is one colossal in-joke. Don't forget to visit the concession stand."

They have to lower a guy on a rope into a volcano because some kind of magnetic interference from the volcano messes with the transporter. The rope breaks, and the guy and the doohickey that's going to turn off the volcano fall into the crater. The guy and the doohickey survive. Why not just drop the doohickey into the volcano in the first place and be done with it?

In the 23rd century, humans apparently have developed the ability to jump and/or fall 50-100 foot distances without sustaining injuries. They are also all long-distance runners.

The Enterprise is a space ship. Roddenberry's explicit design requirements were "no fins or rockets."

This Enterprise has more flaming ports than a busload of tourists eating at a Taco Bell.

It's probably safe to assume Roddenberry didn't envision starships and shuttlecraft would be interchangeable with submarines, either.

In the future, military experts charged with the safety of the planet will meet, unarmed, in buildings with no security, in rooms with large picture windows.

The bad guy may be superhuman and have lots of guns, but he can't hit the side of a Nibiruian barn. Too bad he didn't have another one of those magic fizzy explosive class rings.

Despite other advances in technology, firefighting still relies on hoses, strategically placed so they can be hurled into the turbine intakes of 23rd century shuttles.

Question: if you can use a super-duper transwarp transporter to beam yourself from earth to a planet light years away, isn't it kind of dumb to waste all that money building a star fleet? And lucky for him there were no magnetic volcanoes in the way?

We need to wake up this guy who's been in suspended animation for 300 years so he can design advanced weapons for us. Just imagine if we could somehow bring Thomas Newcomen from 1712 to the present. He could show us how to build a steam engine!

I swear that was a red-skinned Admiral Ackbar sitting at the station in the brig. Another Abrams joke? ("It's a trap. Also, wait until you see what I do to Star Wars.")

I'm a doctor and a scientist, which is why I injected blood from a 300 year old mutated human into a dead tribble for absolutely no reason, a species from a totally different planet with totally dissimilar biology and by the way, did I mention it was already dead? And why did we bring the movie to a freaking stop to point this out to you? It's a little thing we learned in writing school called "foreshadowing." Aren't we clever?

When Scotty disabled the weapon systems on the bad guy's ship he could have also disabled their shields, so Kirk and whatshisname could have just beamed on over instead of doing that dangerous space-suited jump between the vessels. Well yeah, but then we couldn't put in our homage to the asteroid scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And also, Mr. Smart Guy, the bad starship was powered by a cold fusion magnetic volcano that would have blocked the transporter anyway. Pbpbpbpbt.

"To really piss off the science nerds, we're going to make a reference about being 238,000 kilometers from earth and then place the ships next to the moon, which is 238,000 *miles* from earth. Later we'll make some clever joke about even NASA getting the two confused. Oh, and screw you, science fans."

Those 72 super-duper torpedoes which blew up simultaneously inside the bad starship were neither super nor duper, because not only did they not destroy the bad guys, they allowed the ship to make it through earth's atmosphere without burning up, take out Alcatraz, and mess up all those nice Bay-view apartment buildings. Yeah, the same folks in charge of Starfleet security also run Earth's planetary defense system.

Even assuming the ships were caught by Earth's gravity, one expects it would take slightly more than ten minutes for them to cover the distance between the moon and the earth. That would make their velocity 1.5 million miles per hour or over 400 miles per second. Objects entering the atmosphere at that speed explode and/or incinerate.

This Enterprise is designed like an 80s Hyatt hotel, with a big atrium and, one presumes, a food court that didn't appear because Orange Julius wouldn't sign the contract.

23rd century starships have engineering sections which apparently also have the ability to brew large quantities of beer in massive tanks.

Speaking of tanks, when the guys are hanging from one of the ubiquitous engineering catwalks and a big one goes whizzing past, my wife noted they had not only lost warp drive, but also had no hot water.

In the first movie, they were able to beam two people falling at escape velocity from the surface of a planet being imploded by the massive, constantly-changing gravitational field of a red-matter generated black hole. This time around, they couldn't differentiate between Dr. McCoy and a torpedo (both are blunt and explosive?) or pull Spock and the bad guy from a flying vehicle. Wait- is there a magnetic volcano near here?

23rd century matter/anti-matter warp drive engine design is a lot like that of 70s Volkswagen Beetle engines, in that you can get both to function optimally by repeatedly kicking them.

Hey, remember that we discovered there was something in this guy's blood that can cure incurable illnesses and bring people back from the dead? Shouldn't we be working on this? Or do magnetic volcano-resistant transporters get higher priority?

Note I haven't said anything about the lifted dialogue or the stolen and abused plot lines from previous movies.

One can only hope that some persons who see this film will decide to take a look at Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and realize Star Trek was intended to be entertainment for thinking grown-ups, not the burlesque Abrams perpetrated in what is hopefully his last dubious contribution to a once dignified franchise.

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Categories: Movies; Star Trek

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A long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.
-Charles Manson

All things considered, insanity is the only alternative.
-Unattributed

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
-H.P. Lovecraft

America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.
-Charles Pierce

Being crazy isn't enough.
-Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

Don't call me irrational. It makes me crazy when you do that.
-Unattributed (From the TV series Frasier)

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
-William Dement

Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
-Steve Landesberg

I am not insane, you just have no context.
-Velut Luna

I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
-Unattributed

I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
-S.J. Perelman

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
-Hunter S. Thompson

I plead contemporary insanity. (T-shirt)
-Unattributed

I sent my desk calendar to a psychiatrist. The schedule was insane.
-Carol Simpson

I'll take crazy over stupid any day.
-Joss Whedon

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an "information highway," but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.
-Mike Royko

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
-John Steinbeck

If you spend all of your time arguing with people who are nuts, you'll be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.
-Scott Adam

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers, but creative artists very seldom.
-G.K. Chesterton

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
-J.G. Ballard

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
-Oscar Wilde

In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.
-Johnny Carson

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
-Nora Ephron

Insanity in the individual is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Insanity is contagious.
-Joseph Heller

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
-Rita Mae Brown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a raise.
-Robert Brault

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over-taxed.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
-Ray Bradbury

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
-Philip K. Dick

Madness may be a sane response to an insane world, and insanity breeds special perceptions.
-R.D. Laing

Madness takes it toll. Please have exact change.
-Unattributed

Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food.
-Austin O'Malley

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
-Susan Sontag

Mothers are all slightly insane.
-J.D. Salinger

My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.
-Spike Milligan

My grandmother was insane. She had pierced hearing aids.
-Steven Wright

Never tell a crazy person he's crazy.
-Tina Fey

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions.
-Henry Ward Beecher

No sane man will dance.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
-G.K. Chesterton

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
-Robert Anton Wilson

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.
-Heinrich Heine

Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane.
-Scott Adams

Sanity is a cozy lie.
-Susan Sontag

Sanity is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency.
-N.F. Simpson

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected.
-Robert Pirsig

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-Carl Jung

Some are born mad. Some remain so.
-Samuel Beckett

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.
-William Saroyan

The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.
-Unattributed

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes- the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals; and, the Don Quixotes, with a sense for ideals, but mad.
-George Santayana

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to be insane in such a useful way that they can't commit you.
-Mark Edwards

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
-Rita Mae Brown

There are worse things than being mad.
-Jack Kerouac

There is a pleasure sure,
In being mad, which none
but madmen know!
-John Dryden

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
-Oscar Levant

This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
-P.J. O'Rourke

This is a mournful discovery.
1) Those who agree with you are insane
2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.
-Philip K. Dick

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who did not hear the music.
-Angela Monet

To be crazy is not necessarily to writhe in snake pits or converse with imaginary gods. It can sometimes be not knowing what to do in the morning.
-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
-Henrik Tikkanen

Warning: the Internet may contain traces of nuts.
-Unattributed

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
-John Updike

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
-Hermann Hesse

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
-Dave Barry

When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
-Alan Moore

Would it not be more economical for the governments to build asylums for the sane instead of the demented?
-Kahlil Gibran

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the United States of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war.
-Unattributed

You're only given a little spark of madness; you mustn't lose it.
-Robin Williams

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Elizabeth Stamatina "Tina" Fey (born May 18, 1970) is an American actress, comedienne, writer and producer, known for her work on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, the critically acclaimed NBC comedy series 30 Rock, and such films as Mean Girls, Baby Mama, Date Night, and Admission. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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Confidence is ten percent hard work and 90 percent delusion.

Gay people don't actually try to convert people. That's Jehovah's Witnesses you're thinking of.

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society... unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

I learned quickly that trying to force Country Folk to love the Big City is like telling your gay cousin, "You just haven't met the right girl yet."

I prefer the retro chic of spending Christmas just like Joseph and Mary did- Traveling arduously back to the place of your birth to be counted, with no guarantee of a bed when you get there.

I think God designed our mouths to die first to help us slowly transition to the grave.

If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?

If you're ever feeling really good about yourself, there's this thing called the Internet.

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don't like something, it is empirically not good. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles trying to prove it doesn't exist.

It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.

Never tell a crazy person he's crazy.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff?

Seriously, I've just realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it.

Sometimes if you have a difficult decision to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.

The eyes are the window to where the soul is supposed to be.

The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30.

When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable.

When people say, "You really, really must" do something, it means you don't really have to... When it's true, it doesn't need to be said.

You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.

You can't be that kid standing at the top of the water slide, over- thinking it. You have to go down the chute.

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Categories: Quotes of the day; Tina Fey

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Alan Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist whose Dynabook, proposed in 1972, served as the conceptual prototype for the design and development of laptop and slate computers. He was the original architect of the overlapping-window user interface, and coined the phrase "object-oriented programming." (Click for Wikipedia article).

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

A successful technology creates problems that only it can solve.

Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults.

I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire.

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in- the one that we think is reality

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal- a sort of voting situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws.

The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

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Categories: Alan Kay; Quotes of the day

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As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.
-William Gibson

Forget the past- the future will give you plenty to worry about.
-George Allen

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
-Isaac Asimov

I am an optimist; anyone interested in the future has to be, otherwise he would simply shoot himself.
-Arthur C. Clarke

I believe the children are like our future: nasty, brutish and short. (From The Onion)
-Unattributed

I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
-Arthur Wing Pinero

I have seen the future. It needs work.
-Robert Littell

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
-Albert Einstein

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.
-E.B. White

I'm a peripheral visionary. I can see into the future, but only off to the side.
-Steven Wright

I'm optimistic about the future, but not about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one.
-James Baldwin

Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars... Could anything- anything- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous that the world we are living in.
-Sam Harris

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
-Eric Hoffer

In the future, more people will work for themselves, creating a huge market for bizarre products.
-Scott Adams

In the future, most democratic countries will be led by tall people with good hair.
-Scott Adams

In the future, the most important job skill will be a lack of ethics.
-Scott Adams

It's not the future that scares me... it's what will happen tomorrow.
-Frank Romano

My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer... and there are flying cars.
-Joss Whedon

Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.
-Ashleigh Brilliant

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
-Dean Acheson

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-Alan Kay

The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed.
-Scott Adams

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
-Frank Herbert

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
-Erich Fromm

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
-Winston Churchill

The enemies of the Future are always the very nicest people.
-Christopher Morley

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
-Warren Bennis

The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.
-Alvin Toffler

The future depends on assumptions and assumptions are just stuff you make up. No sense in knocking yourself out.
-Scott Adams

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
-George F. Will

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.
-James Cameron

The future is the past returning through another gate.
-Arnold H. Glasow

The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror.
-Bruce Sterling

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.
-George F. Will

The future will be better tomorrow.
-Dan Quayle

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
-John Sladek

The past can only be known, not changed. The future can only be changed, not known.
-Steward Brand

The past is gone; the present is confusing; and the future scares the hell out of me.
-David L. Stein

The trouble with our times is the future is not what it used to be.
-Paul Valery

The written word will soon disappear and we'll no longer be able to read good prose like we used to could. This prospect does not gentle my thoughts or tranquil me toward the future.
-James Thurber

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
-Eugene O'Neill

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
-Arthur C. Clarke

When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.
-John M. Richardson, Jr.

When you think all is lost, the future remains.
-Robert Goddard

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.
-Honore de Balzac

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.
-Bette Davis

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
-Benjamin Disraeli

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
-Bertrand Russell

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself.
-Don Marquis

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
-George Bernard Shaw

God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he'll be there.
-Rev. Billy Graham

Grief and sadness knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger than common joys.
-Alphonse de Lamartine

Grief is the obverse of happiness. They are two sides of a single coin, and only the vulnerable know either.
-Irving Townsend

Happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.
-Tom Magliozzi

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-Ernest Hemingway

Happiness is a belt-fed weapon.
-(Bumper Sticker) Unattributed

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
-William S. Burroughs

Happiness is a form of courage.
-Holbrook Jackson

Happiness is a good feeling I get when things go a particular way; joy is an attitude I adopt in spite of how things go.
-Fil Anderson

Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
-Hermann Hesse

Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.
-Channing Pollock

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
-Robertson Davies

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
-Marcel Proust

Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.
-Isaac Asimov

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
-Ingrid Bergman

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family- in another city.
-George Burns

Happiness is that ridiculous life goal of illiterates.
-Elias Cannetti

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
-Don Marquis

Happiness isn't good enough for me. I demand euphoria!
-(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) Bill Watterson

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
-Oscar Levant

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.
-George Sand

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
-Robert Frost

Happiness, it is said, is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves.
-F. Emerson Andrews

He that is happy, by whatever means, desires nothing but the continuance of happiness.
-Samuel Johnson

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.
-Paul Sweeney

I believe that a man's pursuit of happiness should not be impeded by his employer's lack of imagination.
-Rob Neyer

I believe that inherent within the God-given right to the pursuit of happiness, is the equally God-given right to the pursuit of unhappiness. That is why I support gay marriage.
-Chuck Lorre

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
-Aldous Huxley

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
-John Stuart Mill

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices do.
-C.S. Lewis

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.
-Bertrand Russell

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.
-C.S. Lewis

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
-Thomas Paine

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.
-Thomas Paine

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
-Agnes Repplier

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
-W. Somerset Maugham

It is poor government that does not realize that the prolonged life, health and happiness of its people are its greatest asset.
-William James Mayo

It's all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness.
-P.J. O'Rourke

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.
-Mark CHernoff

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
-Helen Keller

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
-George Orwell

Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house but are sure that they have one.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Men's hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

Money can't buy you happiness, but it helps you look for it in a lot more places.
-Milton Berle

Money doesn't buy happiness, but with it at least you can be miserable in comfort.
-Unattributed

My recipe for marital happiness is whenever you can, read at meals.
-Cyril Connolly

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.
-Samuel Adams

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
-Mary Wollstonecraft

No one has a right to happiness.
-Eric Hoffer

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
-Virginia Woolf

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
-Guillaume Apollinaire

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
-William Feather

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
-Rita Mae Brown

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
-Terry Pratchett

People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older.
-Sydney J. Harris

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
-Oscar Wilde

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
-Hosea Ballou

Reason, Observation and Experience- the Holy Trinity of Science- have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Remember: Anyone who says money can't buy happiness simply hasn't learned where to shop.
-Warren Buffett

Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us either peace or happiness.
-Gustave Le Bon

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
-Oscar Wilde

Sometimes it's hard to avoid the happiness of others.
-David Assael

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

That action is best which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
-Francis Hutcheson

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-Henry Ward Beecher

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
-Joseph Addison

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
-H.L. Mencken

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.
-Martha Washington

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
-Jeremy Bentham

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
-Ernest Dimnet

The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.
-Bertrand Russell

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race, have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist.
-Thomas Paine

The one thing your friends will never forgive you is your happiness.
-Albert Camus

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
-William Cowper

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
-Aldous Huxley

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
-Eric Hoffer

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do.
-James M. Barrie

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
-F.H. Bradley

The secret of happiness... is to be happy already.
-Julian Barnes

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible...
-Bertrand Russell

The secret to true happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity.
-Olivia Goldsmith

The trouble is not that we are never happy- it is that happiness is so episodical.
-Ruth Benedict

There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.
-Helen Keller

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
-Unattributed

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.
-Dante Alighieri

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
-Anthony Trollope

There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy.
-Unattributed

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have a clear conscience, or none at all.
-Ogden Nash

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
-Buddha

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
-Gustave Flaubert

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
-Bertrand Russell

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
-Erich Fromm

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
-George Bernard Shaw

We hold these truths to be self-evident- that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-Thomas Jefferson

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
-Jane Austen

You can't postpone sorrow, so why would you postpone happiness?
-Robert Brault

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Categories: Quotes of the day

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Baritone Frank Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was indisputably the 20th century's greatest singer of popular song. Though influenced by Bing Crosby's crooning, and by learning from trombonist Tommy Dorsey's breath control and blues singer Billie Holiday's rhythmic swing, Frank Sinatra mainstreamed the concept of singing colloquially, treating lyrics as personal statements and handling melodies with the ease of a jazz improviser. His best work is standards- Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and the Gershwins- but Sinatra, despite his 1957 denunciation of rock & roll as degenerate, recorded songs by the likes of Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Jimmy Webb, and Billy Joel. Not only did his freely interpretive approach pave the way for the idiosyncrasies of rock singing, but with his character- a mix of tough-guy cool and romantic vulnerability- he became the first true pop idol, a superstar who through his music established a persona audiences found compelling and true. (Click for full article.)

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Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.

Being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.

Cock your hat- angles are attitudes.

Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world- to an individual or to a nation.

For years I've nursed a secret desire to spend the Fourth of July in a double hammock with a swingin' redheaded broad... but I could never find me a double hammock.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

How can a free people make decisions without facts? If the press reports world news as they report about me, we're in trouble.

Hunger is inexcusable in a world where grain rots in silos and butter turns rancid while being held for favorable commodity indices.

I believe that God knows what each of us wants and needs. It's not necessary for us to make it to church on Sunday to reach Him. You can find Him anyplace. And if that sounds heretical, my source is pretty good: Matthew, Five to Seven, The Sermon on the Mount.

I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest.

If you possess something but you can't give it away, then you don't possess it... it possesses you.

I'm gonna live 'til I die.

I'm not one of those complicated, mixed-up cats. I'm not looking for the secret to life... I just go on from day to day, taking what comes.

I'm not unmindful of a man's seeming need for faith; I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle.

I'm supposed to have a Ph.D on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them.

I've always had a theory that whenever guys and gals start swinging, they begin to lose interest in conquering the world.

People often remark that I'm pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you've got to have talent and know how to use it.

Put your sunglasses on, because you ain't going home 'til the morning comes.

Stop worrying about communism; just get rid of the conditions that nurture it.

What I do with my life is of my own doing. I live it the best way I can.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I'm honest.

When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.

You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad- if you're indifferent, endsville.

You gotta love livin', baby, 'cause dyin' is a pain in the ass.

(YouTube video: "Fly Me to the Moon")

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Categories: Frank Sinatra; Music; Video; YouTube

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