All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are
the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made,
out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our
understanding of them.
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially
when it is deep.
If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, “good fences
make good neighbors.”
If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every
man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an
essential part of the democratic process.
In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused
popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's
representatives.
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the
appearance of weakness and vacillation.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty
have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the
equal treatment of unequals.
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
Morals are three-quarters manners.
No court can make time stand still.
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of
procedural safeguards.
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.
The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely
because it comes late.
-----
(Felix Frankfurter was an Associate Justice of the United States
Supreme Court. Frankfurter was born in Vienna, and immigrated to New
York at the age of 12. He graduated from Harvard Law School and was
active politically, helping to found the American Civil Liberties Union.
He was a friend and adviser of President Franklin Roosevelt who
appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939. Frankfurter served on the
Supreme Court for 23 years, and was a noted advocate of judicial
restraint in the judgements of the Court. -Wikipedia)
America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with
all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody
else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start
closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then
drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas.
Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of
death.
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime
in Progress is not a happy prospect.
I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but
they've always worked for me.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five
hours.
I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your
back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that
might have to be killed.
I was also drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all times. People trembled
and cursed when I came into a public room and started screaming in
German.
If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're
going to be locked up.
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile.
Last year's fun is today's crime. Even tying your shoes in an airport
can get you locked up.
Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More
Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted.
Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun- for anybody. 67. You are getting
Greedy. Act your old age. Relax- This won't hurt. (suicide note)
Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the
highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as
some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the
journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run
free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is
the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the
operative ethic.
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those
who see it coming and jump aside.
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes
for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make
no mistake about it: We are At War now- with somebody- and we will stay
At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. (9/12/2001)
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right
feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has
been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might
be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a
crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your
eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.
There's no such thing as paranoia. The truth is, your worst fears always
come true.
They don't hardly make 'em like him any more; but just to be on the safe
side, he should be castrated anyway.
Today's winners are tomorrow's blinking toads.
Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget
you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and
stock market quotations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism.
The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
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."
Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall
deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so
whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a
purpose-and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right
to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one
that suits them better.
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my
idea of democracy.
Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find
the way.
Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever
you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—
in fees, expenses, and waste of time.
Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill
temper.
Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be
changed.
I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is
at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue
than to find one who cannot.
I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an
assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of
falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify
or excuse him.
I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.
I must stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is
right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt
new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few
virtues.
Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this
race and that race and the other race being inferior and therefore they
must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these things,
and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more
stand up declaring that all men are created equal.
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of
purpose between the Almighty and them.
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The
occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the
occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.
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.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not
whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than
of good.
These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece
the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves,
we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the
quarrel.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit
it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can
exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their
revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and,
under a just God, can not long retain it.
Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.
We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not
all mean the same thing.
We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect
some new disaster with each newspaper we read.
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my
religion.
When you have an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away,
it's best to let him run.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to
see it tried on him personally.
With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.
Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who
enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the
people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent
would rather die than think.
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent
perspiration.
Hell, there are no rules here- we're trying to accomplish
something.
I never did a day's work in my life, it was all fun.
I only use my body to carry my brain around. (on
exercise)
If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we
would literally astonish ourselves.
Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to
do doesn't mean it's useless.
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize
how close they were to success when they gave up.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is
dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Restlessness is discontent- and discontent is the first
necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man-
and I will show you a failure.
Waste is worse than loss.
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around
our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's
inexhaustible sources of energy - sun, wind and tide. I'd
put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of
power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run
out before we tackle that.
We don't know a millionth of one percent about
anything.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a
superficial appearance of being right.
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be.
Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in
principle is always a vice.
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Character is much easier kept than recovered.
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even
his enemy from oppression.
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole
contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to
death.
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.
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.
It is the duty of a patriot to protect his country from
its government.
My own mind is my own Church.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government,
even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its
worst state an intolerable one.
The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined
less than any book that ever existed.
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.
The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly
related that it is difficult to class them separately. One
step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step
above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the
most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of
mankind.
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and
to do good is my religion.
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer
soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis,
shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands
it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must,
like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the
chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional
belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared
himself for the commission of every other crime.
When the people fear the government, you have tyranny.
When the government fears the people, you have freedom.
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember
that virtue is not hereditary.
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way
of selling goods, especially if the goods are worthless.
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School,
except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and
reason.
He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were
persons of intelligence and importance.
He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he
always said it sonorously.
He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral,
agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he
remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.
His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never
read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended.
I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.
I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it
hasn't any room for facts.
It came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run
away from himself.
Now we got a lawyer, we got civilization, which I understand to mean
that a man has a chance to get rich without working.
People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
She did her work with the thoroughness of mind which reveres details and
never quite understands them.
The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years
apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy
played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going
about saying, “The trouble with this country is-”
"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the
shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men that who will deal
likewise with their fellow men." -St Francis of Assisi
For years I have let dentists ride roughshod over my teeth; I have been
sawed, hacked, chopped, whittled, bewitched, bewildered, tattooed, and
signed on again; but this is cuspid's last stand.
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.
I loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money.
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin- it's the triumphant
twang of a bedspring.
Philadelphia, a metropolis sometimes known as the City of Brotherly
Love, but more accurately as the City of Bleak November Afternoons.
The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to
starve anywhere.
The main obligation is to amuse yourself.
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it
out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.
To err is human; to forgive, supine.
I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be
something to someone.
Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant- it tends to get
worse.
Government is just a tool, like a hammer. There's nothing intrinsically
good or evil about the hammer; it all depends on what it's used for and
the skill with which it is used.
I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point- race.
Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to
question everything.
I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the
Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps
themselves up in the flag.
If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drillin' rights on that
man's head.
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle
to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in
America.
It's hard to argue against cynics- they always sound smarter than
optimists because they have so much evidence on their side.
It's hard to convince people that your're killing them for their own
good.
It's like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn't a dime's worth of
difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you're
wrong.
Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the
United States, please pay attention.
On the whole, I prefer not to be lectured on patriotism by those who
keep offshore maildrops in order to avoid paying their taxes.
Stupidity, thy name is the Texas House of Representatives.
The first rule of holes: When you're in one, stop digging.
The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or
quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.
The trouble with global communications is that it is no longer possible
to sit on one tiny patch of the earth and think, “God's in His Heaven,
all's right with the world.” We always know better.
There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of
one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not
safe from terrorist attack.
Thou shalt not break the law with impunity, no matter who the hell thou
art.
What you need is sustained outrage... there's far too much unthinking
respect given to authority.
You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who,
however, has never learned how to walk forward.
A radical is a man with both feet planted firmly in the
air.
Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives
in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a
Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it
lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative
effort.
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened
the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be
cruel in order to be tough.
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
I think we consider too much the good luck of the early
bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must
be achieved.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook
often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it
fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try
something.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of
their own minds.
No business which depends for existence on paying less
than living wages to its workers has any right to continue
in this country.
People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of
which dictatorships are made.
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The
greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on
any single personality.
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a
government strong enough to protect the interests of the
people and a people strong enough and well enough informed
to maintain its sovereign control over the government.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that
a financial element in the larger centers has owned the
Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.
The saving grace of America lies in the fact that the
overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two
great qualities: a sense of humor and a sense of
proportion.
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to
the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we
provide enough for those who have too little.
The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.
The ultimate failures of dictatorship cost humanity far
more than any temporary failures of democracy.
They (who) seek to establish systems of government based
on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of
individual rulers... call this a new order. It is not new
and it is not order.
We have, however, a clear mandate from the people, that
Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition
of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue
private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune,
over public affairs as well.
We know now that Government by organized money is just as
dangerous as Government by organized mob.
We must especially beware of that small group of selfish
men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order
to feather their own nests.
We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil
liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We
must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any
hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.
When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not
wait until he has struck to crush him.
H.L.
Mencken, (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956)
A bachelor's virtue depends upon his alertness; a married man's depends
upon his wife's.
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't
know.
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven
brag about it to persons who will never get there.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
A gentleman is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest
man a century.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness. But after
that he begins to bunch them.
A man may be a fool and not know it- but not if he is married.
A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate each other.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both
ears to the ground.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order
to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and
submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a
streetwalker.
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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil
conscience of their parents.
A writer is always admired most, not by those who have read him, but by
those who have merely heard of him.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
After a revolution, of course, the successful revolutionists always try
to convince doubters that they have achieved great things, and usually
they hang any man who denies it.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit
it. I myself deny it.
An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's
children devoured by wolves.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see
them misunderstood.
As an American, I naturally spend most of my time laughing.
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and
more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious
day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last
and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it
remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries
and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a
woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man
will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth.
Certainly there is something radically wrong with a system which enables
a Henry Ford to posture magnificently as one who pays lavish wages, and
then, when the pinch comes, to lay of men by tens of thousands and throw
them on public charity.
Change is not progress.
Christendom is that part of the world where, if a man declare himself to
be a Christian, his hearers laugh at him.
Clergyman: a ticket speculator outside the gates of heaven.
College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the
faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the
trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs,
and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to
humanity.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of
prophecies.
Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.
Courtroom: A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be
equals, with the betting odds in favor of Judas.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car
salesman.
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he
knows to be idiots.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual
ignorance.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by
jackasses.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey
cage.
Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve
to get it good and hard.
Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York
upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of
Denmark for a year.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is
dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.
Every man sees in his relatives a series of grotesque caricatures of
himself.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist
the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always
an easy solution to every human problem- neat, plausible, and wrong.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of
the improbable.
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human
associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us
feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not
true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit
the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than
Christianity has made them good.
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the
miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of
superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above
their betters.
Government in America has taken on a vast mass of new duties and
responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to
every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around
its operations the high dignity and impeccability of religion; its
agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and
loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in
the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and
decent men. (1926)
Government, today, is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer
any citizens in the world; there are only subjects. They work day in and
day out for their masters; they are bound to die for their masters at
call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what
of it? The first one at least is disposed of.
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a
cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty
enough to want to force it upon anyone.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is
largely a waste of time.
I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that
outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any
honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the
majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
I get little enjoyment out of women, more out of alcohol, most out of
ideas.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common
sense.
I'm against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would
promise them missionaries for dinner.
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any
office of trust in the United States.
If I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God
in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to
please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely
girl.
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes
explicable.
Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.
In a man's world... simian aptitudes are rated high, and so not too many
women get in. To succeed as a lawyer, for example, a woman would have to
throttle two of her chief attributes: her disdain for the petty
accumulations of useless knowledge, and her sharp feeling for the truth.
What men in their imbecility consistently mistake for a deficiency of
intelligence in women is merely an incapacity for mastering small and
trivial tricks.
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a
favorite device of persons with something to sell.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful
for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended
from man.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that
you would lie if you were in his place.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards
or golf.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor
of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me
forever ineligible for public office.
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.
It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American
gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and
completely.
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always
dull.
It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free
spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not
much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch
to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their
wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it
conquers them.
Legend: a lie that has attained the dignity of age.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is
impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Man is a natural polygamist. He always has one woman leading him by the
nose and another hanging on to his coattails.
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so
long ago.
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe,
but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry
later. For another thing, they die earlier.
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an
appeal to the unintelligible.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more
uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is
right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been
the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men
who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized
man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others.
His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
Nature abhors a moron.
Never let your inferiors do you a favor- it will be extremely costly.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no
truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ
materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus
become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice, and
even more of national prejudice.
No man, examining his marriage intelligently, can fail to observe that
it is compounded, at least in part, of slavery, and that he is the slave.
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to
discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average
woman of forty-eight.
No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow
to see him commit suicide for her.
No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the
secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is
always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.
No one in this world, as far as I know... has ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.
Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
One of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most
charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far
to seek. It is based on propositions that are palpably not true- and
what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more
fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true.
Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy,
for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government
ever heard of on earth.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in
Italian.
Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well
anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration-
courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the
truth.
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back
to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left
to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to
let it alone.
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to
let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with
one who is.
Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
Temptation is a woman's weapon and a man's excuse.
The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement
that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous
and hence enormously fascinating.
The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most
timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose
steppers ever gathered under on flag in Christendom since the end of the
Middle Ages.
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine,
for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to
war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few
butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
The average man never really thinks from beginning to end of his life.
The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What
they mistake for thought is simply repetition of what they have heard.
My guess is that well over 80% of the human race goes through life
without having a single original thought. Whenever a new one appears the
average man shows signs of dismay and resentment.
The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the
intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the
fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a
high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines,
and the honor of a police-station lawyer.
The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain
disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help
feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is
their father.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but
that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in
line.
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate,
but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly
greater than that of any other animal.
The chief contribution of Presbyterianism to human thought is its
massive proof that God is a bore.
The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that
the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
The Creator is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter
regrets a discreditable act; even when it has worked and he has not been
caught.
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy
is like saying the cure for crime is more crime.
The essence of a genuine professional man is that he cannot be bought.
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given
idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its
truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always
yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller
in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes
preached in the thirteenth century.
The existence of most human beings is of absolutely no significance to
history or to human progress. They live and die as anonymously and as
nearly uselessly as so many bullfrogs or houseflies. They are, at best,
undifferentiated slaves upon an endless assembly line, and at worse they
are robots who leave their mark upon time only by occasionally falling
into the machinery...
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no
reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability
that yours is a fake.
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist “Jack”.
The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a
problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They
have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of
government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even
ordinarily respectable.
The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other
fellow married her.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is
obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is
almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man
with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely,
like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and
disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth
represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk
of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump
and a soul roasting in Hell.
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most
daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to
tell the truth.
The more a man dreams, the less he believes.
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save
humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running
flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and
usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than
the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he
sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a
good citizen driven to despair.
The older I get, the more I admire and crave competence, just simple
competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear of the unknown,
the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is
safety.
The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any
force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in
time of peace.
The only really happy people are married women and single men.
The only way to success in American life lies in flattering and
kow-towing to the mob.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it
were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
The plain fact is that I am not a fair man and don't want to hear both
sides.
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.
The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His
failure is ignominious and his success disgraceful.
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of
God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the
devil.
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with
Christianity is the Christians.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of
one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that
oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the
beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard
and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the
urge to rule it.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is
identical with the discovery of truth- that the error and truth are
simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to,
when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and
maybe one worse than the first one.
The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often
very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit
to oppression.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not
worth knowing.
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher.
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and
that is character.
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a
woman for a purely moral reason.
Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got
as used to it.
Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying
to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-and both commonly
succeed, and are right.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out
twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is
moonshine.
We have our spasms of revolt, our flarings up of peekaboo waists, free
love and “art,” but a mighty backwash of piety fetches each and every
one of them soon or late.
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and
to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and
his children smart.
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.
When a man laughs at his misfortunes, he loses a great many friends.
They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that
an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have
two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.
When the water reaches the upper decks, follow the rats.
Whenever “A” attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon “B,” “A”
is most likely a scoundrel.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are
giving evidence at an inquest.
Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he
comes home an atheist.
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sure
sign he expects to be paid for it.
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is
still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished
it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.
Women don't like timid men. Cats do not like prudent mice.
Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile,
and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
Mitt Romney is going to release his 2010 and 2011 tax returns. Not to be
outdone, Newt Gingrich is going to release his 1988, 1994, and 2005
wedding vows. –Conan O'Brien
A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't
pretty it won't do her much good.
American women expect to find in their husbands a
perfection that English women only hope to find in their
butlers.
Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's
sake.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well,
and talk well but not too wisely.
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you
is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman
round the corner.
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the
conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will
lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is
comfort that it values more, it will lose that too.
If people waited to know one another before they married,
the world wouldn't be so grossly over-populated as it is
now.
It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is
too late.
It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They
are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you,
for it was the illusion they loved.
It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of
the world when your unconventionality is but the convention
of your set.
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get
up.
It's a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept
anything but the best you very often get it.
Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve
continuation of the species.
Money is like a sixth sense-and you can't make use of the
other five without it.
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual
life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at
large with surprise and horror.
No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred
woman.
Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of
life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not
quite achieved.
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for
wit.
The contrast between a man's professions and his actions
is one of the most diverting spectacles that life
offers.
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never
returned.
The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your
friends that you know famous men proves only that you are
yourself of small account.
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune
and willingly avoids the sight of distress.
There are three rules for writing a novel; unfortunately,
no one knows what they are.
Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are
those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing,
continue to love a changed person.
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully
and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about
a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to
expediency.
You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never
committed adultery, are now extinct.
A man who never graduated from school might steal from a freight car.
But a man who attends college and graduates as a lawyer might steal the
whole railroad.
A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything
real on real issues.
Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose, of idealism, of
character. It is not a matter of birthplace or creed or line of descent.
Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.
Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard
at work worth doing.
I hold that public servants are in very truth the servants and not the
masters of the people, and that this is true not only of executive and
legislative officers but of judicial officers as well.
I wonder whether there ever can come in life a thrill of greater
exaltation and rapture than that which comes to one between the ages of
say six and fourteen, when the library door is thrown open and you walk
in to see all the gifts, like a materialized fairyland, arrayed on your
special table?
If I have to choose between peace and righteousness, I'll choose
righteousness.
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing.
The worst thing you can do is nothing.
It is better to be faithful than famous.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them
better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;
who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort
without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the
deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends
himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph
of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails
while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold
and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.
Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.
Nothing is gained by debate on non-debatable subjects.
The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on
artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of
incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and
fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.
The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.
The President is merely the most important among a large number of
public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree
which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or
inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the
Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there
should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means
that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to
praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen
is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of
the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong,
is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any
one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or
unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price,
peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft
living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...The one
absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing
all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to
permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
Though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than
softness of head.
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to
society.
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether
to answer “present” or “not guilty.”
America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture
shock without leaving home.
As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college
degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's.
By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain
folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between
loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and
intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering
by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to
produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy.
Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is
the fig leaf of elitism.
[Democracy is] The crude leading the crud.
Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, “This is
good enough for you.” The audience, thrust into that familiar American
mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is,
unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre
performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.
Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no
longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.
He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real
feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give
all women a good name.
Humor inspires sympathetic, good-natured laughter and is favored by the
“healing power” gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and
it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears
it down.
I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players
in a nursing home.
I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best
place in the world to be an old lady.
I've had sex and I've had food, and I'd rather eat.
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of
etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.
Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and
respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will
often come out better than she who goes out after their love.
Misanthropes have some admirable if paradoxical virtues. It is no
exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely
to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for
intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial “ships that pass in the night.” As
long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.
Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution
and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens
puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the
government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by
letting home “owners” deduct mortgage interest payments.
People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what
they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the
switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the
undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out
of their jobs.
Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under
every bush.
Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy. If something
intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not
only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.
Thank God I'm over the hill... None of the things men do to women could
possibly happen to me now unless the U.S. is invaded by one of those new
Russian republics whose soldiers aren't fussy.
The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their
attitude toward laxatives.
The feminization of America... has mired us in a soft, sickly, helpless
tolerance of everything. America is the girl who can't say no, the town
pump who lets anybody have a go at her. We are a single-parent country
with no father to cut through the molasses and point out, for example,
the inconsistency of embracing warm and compassionate “values” while
condemning cold and detached “value judgments.”
The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many
Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys
eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between
taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many
different boiling points, that we don't know how to fight with each
other... no American can be sure how or when another will react, so we
zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous
situations.
Those colorful denizens of male despair, the Bowery bum and the
rail-riding hobo, have been replaced by the bag lady and the welfare
mother. Women have even taken over Skid Row.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
When they came for the smokers, I kept silent because I don't smoke. When
they came for the meat eaters, I kept silent because I'm a vegetarian. When
they came for the gun owners, I kept silent because I'm a pacifist. When
they came for the drivers, I kept silent because I'm a bicyclist. They
never did come for me. I'm still here because there's nobody left in
the secret police except sissies with rickets.
T.S. Eliot, (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965):
All cases are unique, and very similar to others.
And the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people: Their
only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls.”
Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity.
Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to
brass tacks.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.
Every moment is a fresh beginning.
For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's
words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.
Half of the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to
feel important.
Hold tight, hold tight, we must insist that the world is what we have
always taken it to be.
Human kind Cannot bear very much reality.
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in
life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they
take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least
something different.
In the case of many poets, the most important thing for them to do is to
write as little as possible.
It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is
consciously offended by it.
It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be
good.
It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to
be the fool you are.
Neither way is better. Both ways are necessary. It is also necessary To
make a choice between them.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one
can go.
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only The wind will listen.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
Success is relative; it is what we can make of the mess we have made of
things.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for
the wrong reason.
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities,
and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or
much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a skeptic or an
unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination
to think anything out to a conclusion.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always
being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn
them down.
Those you say they give the public what it wants begin by
underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
We must always take risks. That is our destiny.
What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely
projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape
to. One is always alone.
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have
lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The
cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
You are the music while the music lasts.
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
To be sure, the Bible contains the direct words of God. How do we know?
The Moral Majority says so. How do they know? They say they know and to
doubt it makes you an agent of the Devil or, worse, a Lbr-l Dm-cr-t. And
what does the Bible textbook say? Well, among other things it says the
earth was created in 4004 BC (Not actually, but a Moral Majority type
figured that out three and a half centuries ago, and his word is also
accepted as inspired.) The sun was created three days later. The first
male was molded out of dirt, and the first female was molded, some time
later, out of his rib. As far as the end of the universe is concerned,
the Book of Revelation (6:13-14) says: "And the stars of heaven fell
unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she
is shaken of a mighty wind." … Imagine the people who believe such
things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient
findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was
written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most
unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves
the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and
childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and
homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not
enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true
architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child
whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open
door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful
that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are
being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that
American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
Creationists make it sound as though a “theory” is something you dreamt
up after being drunk all night.
Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.
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.
I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be
reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst
punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing
Hell.
I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no
matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem,
is just an infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I
think, is the secret of the Universe.
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to
save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the
pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous
atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose
every deed is foul, foul, foul.
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we
can solve them.
If the doctor told me I had only six months to live, I'd type faster.
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant
factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer
without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world
as it will be.
It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings
solace and comfort to people... If solace and comfort are how we judge
the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and
comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds
bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to
gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace
and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's
troublesome.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put an orgy in my
room and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently
programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.
Properly read, it [the Bible] is the most potent force for
atheism ever conceived.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge
faster than society gathers wisdom.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has
been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread
winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the
false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as
your knowledge.”
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful
adherents who will defend it to the death.
Thin people are thin because they don't know any better.
To insult someone we call him “bestial.” For deliberate cruelty and
nature, “human” might be the greater insult.
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained
satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may
someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has
always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to
become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers. I fear the
lack of them.
When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he
raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope
again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes,
atheism is a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's
own redemptive nature.
You can't reason with someone whose first line of argument is that
reason doesn't count.
KARDASH - A unit of time measuring 72 days. Coined by the musician Weird
Al Yankovic in response to the 72-day marriage of Kim Kardashian and
Kris Humphries. -New York TImes
An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist
stays up to make sure the old year leaves. -Bill Vaughan
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every
new year find you a better man. -Benjamin Franklin
Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of
proven criminals? -Ogden Nash
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they
have no account. -Oscar Wilde
I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's. -Henry
Moore
Resolutions, like the good, die young. -Fulton J. Sheen
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This
drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss
the person you're married to. -P.J. O'Rourke
Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm
to announce the beginning of a new year. It is only we mortals who ring
bells and fire off pistols. -Thomas Mann
Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle
age is when you're forced to. -Bill Vaughan
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up
because they are looking for ideas.
Can you remember when you didn't want to sleep? Isn't it inconceivable?
I guess the definition of adulthood is that you want to sleep.
Cialis says you never know when a moment might turn into something more.
Now I'm a nervous wreck.
I don't have a bank account because I don't know my mother's maiden name
and apparently that's the key to the whole thing right there.
I got my dog three years ago because I was drunk in a pet store. We had
nine cats at the time. The cats started hiding the alcohol after that.
I have terrible short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it as
Presidential eligibility.
I was born in Alabama, but I only lived there for a month before I'd
done everything there was to do.
I'll bet when Jesus got homework all wasn't calm and all wasn't mild.
That's why there are no songs about him at that age.
I'm beginning to suspect that just having a lot of books isn't the same
as reading them.
I've decided that perhaps I'm bulimic and just keep forgetting to purge.
If only someone would do for cows what Bambi did for deer. Cows have
been in films, but they haven't starred. I'm still willing to eat a
species that is only a supporting player.
It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle
crash, a bizarre stapling incident, or as a result of inadvertently
sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum
hose.
My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the
lake and threw her off the boat. I said, “Mom, they weren't trying to
teach you how to swim.”
Remember when you were considered an environmentalist when you didn't
throw junk out the car window? I sure do miss that simpler, happier time.
Snow globes have been banned from carry-on airplane luggage. Finally, a
good night's sleep.
Sometimes I ask my friend to tell me about “empty nest,” the way Lenny
asked George to tell him about the rabbits.
The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look whether they
see a moth or an ax-murderer.
The wages of sin are death, but after taxes are taken out, it's just a
tired feeling.
They're not going to teach science at all (in Kansas). What they do is
take the science students down to the lake, tie them in burlap sacks,
and throw them in. If God thinks they're good science students, they
float.
We need a twelve-step group for compulsive talkers. They would call it
On Anon Anon.
What moron said that knowledge is power? Knowledge is power only if it
doesn't depress you so much that it leaves you in an immobile heap at
the end of your bed.
Susan
Sontag, January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily
can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being
outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms- the animation, the fits.
For a woman, aging is not only her destiny... it is also her
vulnerability.
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
Interpretation is revenge of the intellect upon art.
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering
that degrades.
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best,
reformed or potential lunatics.
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is
terrible.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human
beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil,
and attaches blame to its victims.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by
extinction or duplication.
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known.
If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about
anything. There would only be what is.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden
one; or both. Usually both.
A country without bordellos is like a house without bathrooms.
A man would rather come home to an unmade bed and a happy woman than to
a neatly made bed and an angry woman.
Careful grooming may take twenty years off a woman's age, but you can't
fool a flight of stairs.
I am at heart a gentleman.
I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have,
beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser
than oneself.
If men were as great lovers as they think they are, we women wouldn't
have time to do our hair.
If there is a supreme being, he's crazy.
It is the friends that you can call at 4 a.m. that matter.
Most women set out to change a man, and when they have changed him they
do not like him.
Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for
breakfast.
The weak are more likely to make the strong weak than the strong are
likely to make the weak strong.
There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and
being rich.
A country's armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can
promise is the destruction of the attacker.
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many
regrets.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!
As every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty
are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept
out of the laboratory!
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have
superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and
self-destroying.
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing
video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge,
knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of
the other, and we need them all.
For much of history, religion may have been a necessary evil, but why
has it been more evil than necessary?
How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth,” when it is clearly
“Ocean.”
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no
appeal.
I am an optimist; anyone interested in the future has to be, otherwise
he would simply shoot himself.
I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in Her.
I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly
worth thinking about.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because
it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice
whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own
homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
I'm appalled by what we all see on the news every day- massacres,
atrocities, injustices, outrages of all kinds. When I see what's
happening, I sometimes wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too
intelligent to come here.
I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent
life in Washington.
If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance.
For there will be no one to carry our dreams across another Dark Age,
when the dust of all our cities incarnadines the sunsets of the world.
If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel,
we may as well burn the furniture today.
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and
discovery, it is that, in the long run- and often in the short one- the
most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long
survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single
small globe against the stars.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to
create him.
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not
understand.
My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to
ultimate truth that it represents.
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked
by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a
necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple
and doesn't require religion at all.
Perhaps we should thank the Taliban for finishing the task the Crusades
began nine hundred years ago- proving beyond further dispute that
Religion is incompatible with Civilization.
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as
reading sex manuals without the software. In both cases the cure is
simple though usually very expensive.
Religion is a disease promoted by starvation, because hungry people
hallucinate, and then pray for food. This is why so many religions
encourage fasting: it weakens the mind.
Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving
its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the
nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than
not, it tries to prevent the future.
Science is the only religion of mankind.
Technology is really civilization, let's face it.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's
the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry,
or depressing its contents seemed to be.
The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid.
The only real problem in life is what to do next.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a
little way past them into the impossible.
The psychologist who famously remarked that chastity was the rarest of
all sexual perversions might have added that Religion was the most
common.
The Solar System is rather a large place, though whether it will be
large enough for so quarrelsome an animal as Homo sapiens remains to be
seen.
There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a
long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be
shaped toward new ends.
There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True
wisdom lies in making the right choice.
There is a type of mind that will believe anything if it is sufficiently
fantastic, and it is a waste of time arguing with it. No one has ever
received much thanks for exposing credulity.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a
vacuum.
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.
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are
not. Both are equally terrifying.
Unfortunately, most people do not understand even the basic elements of
statistics and probability, which is why astrologers and advertising
agencies flourish.
Utopia is very dull. That's the problem with science fiction. Smashing
things is more interesting.
We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to
youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20
are no longer true at 40- and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been
discovered when he was 20?
We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to
leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled
space suits of our skins.
What is life but organized energy?
What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy's point of
view.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
impossible, he is very probably wrong.
When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be stranger
than you imagine, it will be stranger than you can imagine.
Why is it that almost every man, when confronted by an unhappy woman,
immediately assumes that her unhappiness is somehow related to him?
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well
tried before you give them your confidence.
Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a
right to concentrate your affections.-The name of AMERICAN, which
belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just
pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local
discriminations.
Every post is honorable in which a man can serve his country.
Example, whether it be good or bad, has a powerful influence.
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire,
it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
I am for free commerce with all nations; political connection with none;
and little or no diplomatic establishment.
It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.
It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent
ones.
It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any
portion of the foreign world.
Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire,
called conscience.
Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!
Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and
harmony with all.
Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are
caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most
inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated.
Prosperity destroys fools and endangers the wise.
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make
and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution
which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act
of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.
The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient
to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and
restrain it.
There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real
favours from nation to nation.
To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a Government for the whole
is indispensable.
Undertake not what you can not perform, but be careful to keep your
promises.
We have abundant reason to rejoice, that, in this land, the light of
truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and
superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to
the dictates of his own heart.
George Washington's brother, Lawrence, was the Uncle of Our Country. -George
Carlin
An executive from the E! Network has stated that there could be as many
as four new Kardashian spinoff shows. He then added, “Unless our demands
are met.” -Conan O'Brien
A little crotch kicking is a good thing, if done in anger. I can't stand
guys who are merely piqued by the unforgivable...
A man's bed is his cradle, but a woman's is often her rack.
A pinch of probably is worth a pound of perhaps.
A woman's place is in the wrong.
All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running
from, and to, and why.
American college students are like American colleges; each has
half-dulled faculties.
But what is all this fear of and opposition to oblivion? What is the
matter with the soft darkness, the dreamless sleep?
Childhood used to end with the discovery that there is no Santa Claus.
Nowadays, it often ends when the child gets his first adult, the way
Hemingway got his first rhino, with the difference that the rhino was
charging Hemingway, whereas the adult is usually running away from the
child.
Discussion in America means dissent.
Do not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
Don't get it right, just get it written.
Don't let the chip on your shoulder be your only reason for walking
erect.
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
I hate women because they always know where things are.
I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind,
looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish
expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the
hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes
stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
I spit on the grave of my awful forties. (on turning 50)
I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that
of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall
a little as the days ran on.
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get
somewhere.
I wouldn't go down there if they was Fig Newtons down there.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is certain dogs I have known
will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first
time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this
most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he
will not be able somehow to bear.
It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.
It's better to know some of the questions, than all of the answers.
Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn.
Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to
face the simple truth that the trouble with Man is Man.
Men are more interesting than women, but women are more fascinating.
Nowadays men live lives of noisy desperation.
One &lsqbmartini&rsqb is all right. Two are too many, and three are not
enough.
Our love never ripened into friendship.
She said he proposed something on their wedding night her own brother
wouldn't have suggested.
She who goes unarmed in paradise had better be sure that is where she is.
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and
unhappiness.
So much has already been written about everything that you can't find
out anything about it.
Sometimes the news from Washington forces me to the conclusion that your
mother and your brother Ed are in charge. (cartoon caption)
The human being says that the beast in him has been aroused, when what
he actually means is that the human being in him has been aroused.
The material on me... was so extensive that the writer couldn't find
anything he was looking for, and, with data up to his waist, had to
guess and make things up.
The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking
sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
The saddest words of pen or tongue are wisdom's wasted on the young.
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world;
the humorist makes fun of himself.
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.
There are two kinds of light- the glow that illuminates, and the glare
that obscures.
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died,
in many cases, as long as twenty years before his birth.
We must all study German. When Fate knocks in German, by God you hear it.
What this country needs is a good detached retinue. (to his ophthalmologist)
Where did you get those big brown eyes and that tiny mind?
(cartoon caption)
Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hell-bent get where
they are going.
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
Women deserve to have more than 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
You can tell where I get my ideas from the things I write, and then you
will know as much about it as I do.
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action
arise, human science is at a loss.
Businesses try to maximize profit, power, market share and control over
the state. Sometimes what they do helps other people, but that's just by
chance.
Education is a condition of imposed ignorance!
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying,
or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
How it is we have so much information, but know so little?
I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way.
It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies.
Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of
them.
I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population
had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would
be utterly appalled.
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American
president would have been hanged.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we
don't believe in it at all.
If you think the wrong thoughts, you're not in the system.
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and
freedom are more than just ideals to be valued- they may be essential to
survival.
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist
attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to
their gladiators.
The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of
government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
The Internet is an elite organization; most of the population of the
world has never even made a phone call.
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers,
immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer
decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions:
kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party
dictatorships, or modern corporations.
The press is owned by wealthy men who only want certain things to reach
the public.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit
the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within
that spectrum- even encourage the more critical and dissident views.
That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while
all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by
the limits put on the range of the debate.
There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you
too much.
To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much
pressure they're under from the public.
“Tough love” is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged,
tough for everyone else.
Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted
them in, in the first place.
We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in
monosyllables.
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an
argument for it.
A friend of mine has a trophy wife but apparently it wasn't first place.
A metaphor is like a simile.
After they make Styrofoam, what do they ship it in?
Anywhere is walking distance, if you've got the time.
Babies don't need vacations, but I still see them at the beach.
Ballerinas are always on their toes. Why don't they just get taller
ballerinas?
Cross-country skiing is great, if you live in a small country.
Ever notice how irons have a setting for permanent press? I don't get it.
Hermits have no peer pressure.
How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn't live there?
I accidentally installed the deer whistles on my car backward. Now
everywhere I drive, I'm chased by a herd of deer.
I can levitate birds. No one cares.
I didn't get a toy train like the other kids. I got a toy subway
instead. You couldn't see anything, but every now and then you'd hear
this rumbling noise go by.
I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.
I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to
the funeral... in one car.
I have a microwave fireplace. You can lay down in front of the fire all
night in eight minutes.
I have an existential map. It has YOU ARE HERE written all over it.
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
I like to skate on the other side of the ice.
I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.
I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time.” So I ordered
french toast during the Renaissance.
I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
I'm a peripheral visionary. I can see into the future, but only off to
the side.
I'm addicted to placebos. I'd quit, but it wouldn't matter.
If cats and dogs didn't have fur would we still pet them?
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
If you can't hear me, it's because I'm speaking in parentheses.
If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?
In relativity theory, space and time are the same thing. Einstein
discovered this when he kept showing up three miles late for his
meetings.
It was the first time I was ever in love, and I learned a lot. Before
that, I never even thought about killing myself.
Last night I played a blank tape at full blast. The mime next door went
nuts.
My hobby is not committing suicide.
My school colors were clear. We used to say, “I'm not naked, I'm in the
band.”
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Next week I'm going to have an MRI to see whether or not I have
claustrophobia.
On the other hand, you have different fingers.
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've
forgotten this before.
The first time I read the dictionary I thought it was a poem about
everything.
The temperature in any room is room temperature.
There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like
an idiot.
They say you're not supposed put metal in a microwave oven. They're
right.
We had a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child, eventually.
What's another word for “thesaurus?”
When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any
firearms with me. I said, “Well, what do you need?”
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Americans drive across the country as if someone's chasing them.
As far as I'm concerned, “whom” is a word that was invented to make
everyone sound like a butler.
Health food makes me sick.
I don't care where I sit, as long as I get fed.
I never did very well in math- I could never seem to persuade the
teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come
“Lincolnesque” just means tall?
In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the
events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre
that it may not actually come to pass while the article is still on the
presses.
(Daily Show: Trillin demonstrates how bizarre, concocted satire can
become reality.)
Marriage is part of a sort of 50s revival package that's back in vogue
along with neckties and naked ambition.
Not as bad as you might have expected. (his suggested state motto for
New Jersey)
The price of purity is purists.
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she
served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in
charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are
being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935)
A relationship is like a shark‐ it has to keep moving forward or it dies. Well, what we have on our hands here is a dead shark.
All people know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort them.
As the poet said, “Only God can make a tree”‐ probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats.
Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.
Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.
Death should not be seen as the end but as a very effective way to cut down expenses.
Early in life, I was visited by the bluebird of anxiety.
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Eternity is really long, especially near the end.
God is silent‐ now if we can only get man to shut up.
How can I believe in God when last week I got my tongue stuck in the roller of an electric typewriter?
Hypocrite: a guy who writes a book on atheism and prays that it sells.
I am at two with nature.
I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.
I believe there's something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
I can't express anger. I grow a tumor instead.
I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
I can't make the leap of faith necessary to believe in my own existence.
I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
I have an intense desire to return to the womb. Anybody's.
I really don't care about commercial success, and the end result is I rarely achieve it.
I recently turned sixty. Practically a third of my life is over.
I think crime pays. The hours are good, you meet a lot of interesting people, you travel a lot.
I think that people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.
I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.
I took a speed‐reading course and read “War and Peace” in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.
I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, but I had some problems with buoyancy.
I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.
I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.
If I believed in reincarnation, I'd come back as a sponge.
If my soul exists without my body I am convinced all my clothes will be loose‐fitting.
If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
In California, they don't throw their garbage away‐ they make it into TV shows.
In real life, [Diane] Keaton believes in God. But she also believes the radio works because there are tiny people inside it.
Intellectuals are like the mafia; they only kill their own.
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought, particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
It was the day after Jean‐Paul Sartre died. (recalling under oath the day in 1980 he first met Mia Farrow)
It's worse than dog eats dog. It's dog doesn't even return other dog's phone calls.
Life doesn't imitate art. It imitates bad television.
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering‐ and it's all over much too soon.
Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.
Marriage? That's for life! It's like cement!
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.
My brain is my second favorite organ.
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
My parents stayed together for forty years. But that was out of spite.
My relationship to death remains the same. I'm strongly against it.
Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.
Oh, now there's only one kind of love that lasts. That's unrequited love. It stays with you forever.
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.
Organized crime in America takes in over $40 billion a year and spends very little on office supplies.
Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.
Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast.
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful‐ provided you get between the right man and the right woman.
Sex between two people is a beautiful thing; between five, it's fantastic...
Sex is like having dinner: sometimes you joke about the dishes, sometimes you take the meal seriously.
Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as meaningless experiences go it's pretty damned good.
She was an atheist and I was an agnostic. We didn't know what religion not to bring our children up in.
Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.
Some guy hit my fender and I said “be fruitful and multiply” but not in those words.
The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you.
The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.
The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.
The lion and the lamb shall lie down together, but the lamb won't get much sleep.
The message is God is love and you should lay off fatty foods.
The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.
The three most beautiful words in the English language are not “I love you.” They are, “It is benign.”
The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind‐ a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house.
There's nothing wrong with you that some Prozac and a polo mallet wouldn't fix.
Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
To me there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.
To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
Tradition is the illusion of permanence.
We will run amok together, and then, when we get tired, we will walk amok. (As Jimmy Bond in Casino Royale)
What a wonderful thing, to be conscious! I wonder what the people in New Jersey do?
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence; so why bother shaving?
With me, it's just a genetic dissatisfaction with everything.
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to.
You cannot prove the nonexistence of God; you just have to take it on faith.
"Act as if ye had faith; and faith will be given to you." -David
Mamet (b. November 30, 1947)
This certainly sounds like it comes straight out of the King James
version of the Bible, but its origin is far more contemporary.
The line is spoken by Paul Newman in Sidney Lumet's The Verdict
(1982). Mamet's screenplay was based on the late Barry Reed's 1980
novel, which in turn was ghost written by this
fella.
It's left as an exercise to the reader to attempt to locate the line in
the novel. All the Internet references I checked credit it to Mamet, and
who am I to doubt WikiQuote?
How could a line of dialogue from a modern film be mistaken for
scripture written two millenia ago? It appears in the middle of Paul
Newman's jury summation scene, which is cited by those who rank such
things as one of the greatest monologues to appear in a motion picture:
(YouTube video: The summation monologue from "The Verdict." Newman,
Mamet, and director Sidney Lumet received Academy Award nominations, but
didn't win.)
"You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, 'Please, God,
tell us what is right; tell us what is true.' And there is no justice:
the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people
lie. And after a time, we become dead- a little dead. We think of
ourselves as victims- and we become victims. We become- we become weak.
We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And
we doubt the law. But today, you are the law. You are the law.
Not some book- not the lawyers- not the, a marble statue- or the
trappings of the court. See those are just symbols of our desire to be
just. They are- they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened
prayer. In my religion, they say, 'Act as if ye had faith- and faith
will be given to you.' If- if we are to have faith in justice, we need
only to believe in ourselves. And act with justice. See, I
believe there is justice in our hear"ts.
"In my religion," coupled with the use of the archaic "ye," strongly
suggest to the audience the phrase is taken from a religious text. That
it's delivered by Paul Newman in a Boston courtroom filled with Irish
Catholics pretty much rules out the Bhagavad
Gita as the source..
Most Christians are accustomed to hearing scripture quoted out of
context, without chapter and verse references. The sincerity of Mamet's
dialogue and Newman's delivery sell it completely.
The Mamet line joins a number of much older quotes as pseudo-scripture.
Aesop's "The Gods help those who help themselves" was tweaked into a
monotheistic form and inserted into "Poor Richard's Almanac" by Benjamin
Franklin, a undenominated Deist.
"Cleaniness is indeed next to Godliness" was a common saying when John
Wesley used it in a sermon in 1791. He probably was paraphrasing Francis
Bacon's "Advancement of Learning" from 1605.
"Even the Devil can quote scripture?" The actual line is "The devil can
cite Scripture for his purpose," spoken by Antonio in Shakespeare's
"Merchant of Venice." Similarly, "This above all things: to thine own
self be true" and "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" are from "Hamlet."
Perhaps the best approach is that recommended by Anatole
France:
"When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and
copy it."
Quote of the day? As far as I'm concerned, this is the quote of the year:
"I have zero tolerance for self-inflicted drama." -Tina
Roth Eisenberg, swissmiss.com
I love this observation because its three major elements- zero
tolerance, self-inflicted, and drama- are "dense" words which vividly
evoke both an intellectual and an emotional response.
How much of the turmoil which surrounds us each day is, indeed, caused
by the very persons who bemoan their sorry situations?
Team this baby up with "Actions have consequences," and you've pretty
much nailed the cause and effect of much the chaos we must endure these
days.
"There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness." -Dave
Barry
The KGB Quotations Database is 25 years old this month.
It began as the cookie file of the Fido computer bulletin board system
(bbs) I started in 1986.
When a user logged on to the bbs, the software would access a file
called cookie.txt, pick a record at random, and display it. It might be
something silly, like "ME WANT COOKIE!" Most system operators populated
their cookie.txt file with quotations, and some labored mightily to
improve their quality and quantity.
I had always been a quotations fan, although I really can't explain why.
I've been a compulsive reader since about the age of four, and even then
I remember encountering certain phrases or sentences that would cause an
intellectual or emotional epiphany, a feeling of delight in its
structure, rhythm, or density of meaning.
I knew some people "collected" quotations, transcribing them to
notebooks or index cards. Pre-1986, that struck me as self-indulgent and
a waste of time. My computer consulting business and monthly column for DEC
Professional magazine left litle time for such diversions.
Ah, but the cookie file provided both a mechanism and, more importantly,
a raison d'être to begin my own collection. Visitors to my BBS system
began to expect more than the stale cookies of default Fido
installations, and I began using the quotations in my magazine column.
For a few years- between the time I shut down the BBS and began this
website- there was no online presence for my quotes file. But I
continued to maintain it, because I knew it would reappear someday.
It did, in October, 2002. The "KGB Quote-A-Matic" at the top of the
right column of this page has been present in some form in every
iteration of this website.
I've never really considered quotation collection a hobby. A hobby
implies a discrete activity unto itself. Quotation collection is a
full-time activity, albeit an almost subconscious one.
There's a part of my brain that seems to constantly run a wetware
equivalent of a pattern recognition program. It's like an anti-virus
program on a PC- I'm not aware it's running, but when a new, interesting
pattern passes by, it sets off an alarm alerting the conscious part of
my brain to record the quotation that triggered the response.
The other day I decided to calculate how much time I've invested in this
activity. I estimated that each quote added to the list requires about
an hour of reading.
That works out to 15,000 hours, or 625 days, or 1.7 years. In other
words, I've spent 6.8% of the last 25 years of my life collecting
quotations.
Wow.
Before you label me a lunatic, consider that the A.C. Nielsen Co.
estimates the average American watches four hours of television a day.
While I may have spent 1.7 of the last 25 years reading and accumulating
quotations, during that same period the average American spent 36,500
hours- 4.1 years- staring at the television.
For my efforts, I have a database of 15,000 quotations, a witty comment
for just about any occasion, and exposure to some of the greatest minds
in history.
You, my average American friend, have a large, butt-shaped dent in your
couch.
Here's hoping for another 25 years. And a new couch.
As long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, Christmas
is.
Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is
never in doubt.
Brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those, who profit by postponing
it, pretend.
Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year
to remind us that we're here for something else besides ourselves.
Consultant: any ordinary guy more than fifty miles from home.
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
I have never quite grasped the worry about the power of the press. After
all, it speaks with a thousand voices, in constant dissonance.
I'm sort of a pessimist about tomorrow and an optimist about the day
after tomorrow.
Never underestimate your listener's intelligence, or overestimate you
listener's information.
Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing in the world is
power without humor.
No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.
Saints are usually killed by their own people.
The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they
allow. Bigness means weakness.
The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or
television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of
anxiety.
The chief cause of problems is solutions.
Wisdom is essential in a president, the appearance of wisdom will do in
a candidate.
With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to
look at and turning America into a prison house of the spirit. The
affluent society, with relentless single-minded energy, is turning our
cities, most of suburbia and most of our roadways into the most affluent
slum on earth.
You can't know who you are, as a nation or a people, unless you know
where you've been.
Dangerfield's headstone at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in
Los Angeles
"On April 8, 2003, Dangerfield underwent brain surgery to improve blood
flow in preparation for heart valve-replacement surgery on August 24,
2004. Upon entering the hospital, he uttered another characteristic
one-liner when asked how long he would be hospitalized: 'If all goes
well, about a week. If not, about an hour and a half.'
"In September 2004, it was revealed that Dangerfield had been in a coma
for several weeks. Afterward, he began breathing on his own and showing
signs of awareness when visited by friends. However, on October 5, 2004,
he died at the UCLA Medical Center from complications of the surgery he
had undergone in August. He was a month and a half short of his 83rd
birthday. Dangerfield was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park
Cemetery in Los Angeles. His headstone reads, 'Rodney Dangerfield...
There goes the neighborhood.'
Classic Dangerfield quotes:
A hooker once told me she had a headache.
Always look out for Number One and be careful not to step in Number Two.
At my age I'm envious of a stiff wind.
Doctors will tell you don't smoke, don't drink, eat certain foods...
From this point on, if I take excellent care of myself, I'll get very
sick and die.
I drink too much. Last time I gave a urine specimen, there was an olive
in it.
I haven't spoken to my wife in years. I didn't want to interrupt her.
I joined Alooholics Anonymous. I still drink, I just use a different
name.
I like to date school teachers. If you do something wrong, they make you
do it over again.
I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week,
four kids escaped.
I lost my parents at the beach. I asked a lifeguard to help me find
them. He said, "I don't know kid, there are so many places they could
hide."
I was an ugly kid. When I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he
hung himself.
I was going with a girl. I trusted her. She let me down. She ran away
with my best friend. Now I got no dog.
I was kidnapped and they sent back a piece of my finger to my father. He
said he wanted more proof.
If it wasn't for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all.
It's lonely on the top when there's no one on the bottom.
Love is an extension of life, and lust is an extension.
My old man never liked me. He gave me my allowance in traveler's checks.
My problem is that I appeal to everyone that can do me absolutely no
good.
My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
My wife has cut me down to once a month. I'm lucky. I know two guys she
cut off completely
My wife likes to talk during sex. Last night, she called me from a motel.
When I played in the sandbox, the cat kept covering me up.
When I was a kid I got no respect. I worked in a pet store. People kept
asking how big I would get.
When I was born, the doctor turned me over and said, "Look! Twins!"
When my old man wanted sex, my mother would show him a picture of me.
When my parents got divorced there was a custody fight over me. No one
showed up.
Animals have these advantages over man: They have no theologians to
instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts
lawsuits over their wills.
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others
belong to us as well.
Common sense is not so common.
Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.
Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in
horror.
History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead.
History supplies little more than a list of people who have helped
themselves with the property of others.
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your
annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make
my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature
cries aloud that He does exist; that there is a supreme intelligence, an
immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own
dependence upon it.
If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?
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.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that
virginity could be a virtue.
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part, the
rest are lost in the multitude.
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
Love truth, but pardon error.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house
but are sure that they have one.
Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the
maddest of all.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
Paradise is where I am.
Physicians pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of
which they know less, into humans of which they know nothing.
Prejudice is the reason of fools.
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures
the disease.
The English people are like the English beer. Froth on top, dregs at the
bottom, the middle excellent.
The great consolation in life is to say precisely what one thinks.
The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising
their thoughts.
There has never been a perfect government, because men have passions;
and if they did not have passions, there would be no need for government.
Those who can make you believe in absurdities can also make you commit
atrocities.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be
well-mannered.
Virtue debases in justifying itself.
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a
loss of energy.
When it is a question of money all men are of the same religion.
Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.
No politician today is capable of this. No notes, no teleprompter- and
he quoted Aeschylus.
I'm a firm believer in not second-guessing the past. But when I see this
clip, I can't help but wonder, "what if..." And what has happened to the
nation that once produced great men like Bobby? It seems the killers
have remained, but, for the most part, the Bobbys and Martins are
nowhere to be found.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening,
because I have some- some very sad news for all of you- Could you lower
those signs, please?- I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I
think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love
peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot
and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between
fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this
difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's
perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we
want to move in. For those of you who are black- considering the
evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible-
you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for
revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization-
black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with
hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther
King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence,
that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort
to understand, compassion, and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with- be filled
with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all
white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the
same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was
killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an
effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult
times.
My favorite poem, my- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop
upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes
wisdom through the awful grace of God.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the
United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not
violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward
one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer
within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of
Martin Luther King- yeah, it's true- but more importantly to say a
prayer for our own country, which all of us love- a prayer for
understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had
difficult times in the past, but we- and we will have difficult times in
the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of
lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black
people in this country want to live together, want to improve the
quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in
our land.
And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago:
to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and
for our people.
The term "job creator" reminds me a lot of "baby maker." I can still do
it, but I've done all the baby making I really want to do, so I think
I'll pass, thanks. -Kevin G. Barkes
P.J.
O'Rourke, (b. 11/14/1947), the most quoted living man in The
Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations.
[A]merica is where the wildest humans on the planet came to do anything
they damn pleased.
[T]here are several recognizable types of humorous activity. There is
parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire,
when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when
you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.
"Change" has a warm, vernal sound at age twenty-two. Then comes a day
when all the word brings to mind is "any change in a wart or mole ..."
A bimbo is a young woman who's not pretty enough to be a model, not
smart enough to be an actress, and not nice enough to be a poisonous
snake.
A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the
rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a
fool trusts either of them.
A lot of people out there think Easy Rider had a happy ending.
A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of
defense.
A record number of savings-and-loan failures left America with a
nationwide shortage of flimsy toaster ovens, cheap pocket calculators,
and ugly dinnerware.
A Texas accent can be developed by most of the normal means of acquiring
brain damage.
After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for
you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have
simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut.
Always read the stuff that will make you look good if you die in the
middle of it.
America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was
founded so we could all be anything we damn well pleased.
American children grow up to be valuable citizens. Bangladeshi children
grow up to be part of the world population problem. They just aren't
giving birth to any Marky Marks or Howard Sterns in Dhaka.
And by the way, I've about had it with this "greatest generation"
malarkey. You people have one stock market crash in 1929, and it takes
you a dozen years to go get a job. Then you wait until Germany and Japan
have conquered half the world before it occurs to you to get involved in
World War II. After that you get surprised by a million Red Chinese in
Korea. Where do you put a million Red Chinese so they'll be a surprise?
You spend the entire 1950s watching Lawrence Welk and designing tail
fins. You come up with the idea for Vietnam. Thanks. And you elect
Richard Nixon. The hell with you.
Anything that makes your mother cry is fun.
Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my
family is.
At 47 the things which really matter and the things which are really fun
are the dreadful things that our parents really said mattered. Family
and work and duty. Crap like that.
At least we American tourists understand English when it's spoken loudly
and clearly enough. Australians don't. Once you've been on a plane full
of drunken Australians doing wallaby imitations up and down the aisles,
you'll never make fun of Americans visiting the Wailing Wall in short
shorts again.
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race.
Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say "I've got
cancer" and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five
minutes of good stand-up comedy?
Britain, France and Germany are obscure branch offices of American
culture and may be closed in the interests of rational consolidation.
Canadians don't deal with the same kind of health care problems and
traumas we face. They have a health care system based on treating hockey
injuries and curing sinus infections that come from trying to pronounce
French vowels.
Communists worship the Devil himself. Socialists believe damnation is a
good system run by bad people. And liberals want to send everyone to
hell because it's warm there in the winter.
Considering the image projected, bicycling commuters might as well
propel themselves to the office with one knee in a red Radio Flyer wagon.
Corporate corruption gives al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other Muslim
radicals second thoughts about messing with the United States. If we'll
screw our own grandmothers in the stock market, God knows what we'll do
to them.
Dammit, I am for some stuff, but not too much of it, and against other
stuff, but not too against it.
Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don't get any presents you
didn't bring.
Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric
system.
During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk
at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million
dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with
lawyers?
Each American embassy comes with two permanent features; a giant
anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most
demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half
waiting for green cards.
Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.
Economics is an entire scientific discipline of not knowing what you're
talking about.
Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels
are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all
the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.
Every generation finds the drug it needs.
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a
democracy, the whores are us.
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the
dishes.
Everyone's very busy, though not exactly working.
Everything that's fun in life is dangerous.
Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will
make threatening him with it much more effective.
Fame is a communicable disease. If you get screwed by someone who's got
it, you may catch it yourself.
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any
catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe
is still there.
Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like
what it is.
Fishing... is a sport invented by insects, and you are the bait.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys
to teenage boys.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must
dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Guns are always the best method for private suicide. Drugs are too
chancy. You might just miscalculate the dosage and just have a good time.
Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as
the pork-sausage industry.
Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the
exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
I guess the argument of contextuality is that anything is okay as long
as it's done by people who are sufficiently unlike you.
I hate political correctness because it's founded on the idea that by
means of language you can escape truth- that if you simply give a
different name to something you've somehow changed it. It is a very
childlike idea.
I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely
to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in
briefings and books.
I like to think of my behavior in the Sixties as a "learning
experience." Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as
a "learning experience." It makes me feel less stupid.
I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the
American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's
business except to make a buck.
I... know why most societies don't allow women in combat. Combat is just
a battle to the death. You don't want to turn it into something really
ugly like a marriage.
Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked
"What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.
If Europeans didn't discover America, then how'd we all get here?
If God had wanted me to attend church, He'd have given me a bigger butt
to sit on, and a smaller head to think with.
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
If Martin Luther were a modern ecologist, he would have to nail
ninety-five T-shirts to the church door in Wittenberg.
If the outdoors are so swell, how come the homeless aren't more fond of
it?
If the U.S. is going to be involved in military multilateralism, it
should ask its partner nations that ancient question of diplomacy, "You
and what army?"
If we want to demoralize the population of Iraq and sap their will to
fight, we ought to show them videotapes of the South Bronx, Detroit City
and the West Side of Chicago. Take a look, you Iraqis- this is what we
do to our own cities in peacetime. Just think what we're going to do to
yours in a war.
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.
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health,
slow your mind, make you fat-in other words, turn you into an adult.
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug
addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it
costs when it's free.
In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that,
in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which
you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single
word: "Dentistry."
In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right.
In Vietnam it doesn't matter.
In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like
anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like
anything emotion-driven, it's volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents,
worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of
office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate
their character.
In school we had a name for boys trying to get in touch with themselves.
In what is widely thought to be the largest leveraged buyout to date,
Donald Trump announced that if everyone in the world will lend him all
the money they have, he will buy everything they own.
Indeed, getting America involved in anything of a multilateral nature is
like naming The Rock to an Olympic rowing team and giving the other oars
to David Spade and Calista Flockhart. When America does manage to
participate, as an equal, in the community of nations, the results are
not pretty. Look at the stupid U.N. And somewhere in the hills of former
Yugoslavia the ghost of Woodrow Wilson wanders Marley-like, dragging his
chains and regretting the deeds of his life. Yet the foolish notion of
one-worlders persists: Let the lion lie down with the lamb chop.
Industrialization came to England but has since left.
Instead of a society infested with lawyers they [Russia] have a society
infested with hit men. Which is worse, of course, is a matter of opinion.
It is easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern
America's favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities
they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are
completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be
made to do anything useful. Cats are mean for the fun of it. In fact,
cats possess so many of the same qualities as some people that it is
often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.
It takes a village to raise a child. The village is Washington. You are
the child.
It's all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only
nation in the world based on happiness.
It's better to spend money like there's no tomorrow than to spend
tonight like there's no money.
Japan turned out to be a macroeconomic Pokémon craze.
Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's
a lot worse.
Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools... and use it on
the teachers.
Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony, or, as we call them these days,
"getting in touch with your sexuality," "raising your self-esteem,"
"relaxation therapy," and "being a recovered bulimic."
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a
high powered rifle and scope.
Man has been breeding livestock for ten thousand years and has yet to
come up with a monstrous sheep that can trample buildings and graze a
whole golf course for breakfast.
Marijuana is... self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in
this world, what worse punishment could there be?
Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our
kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues."
Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt
administration is what the nation needs.
Modern society is without any concept of dignity, worth, or regard.
Today the only thing which sets one person apart from another is his or
her degree of fame.
Most vegetables are something God invented to let women get even with
their children. A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if
you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something brussels sprouts never
do.
Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But
left-wingers do.
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
Never fight an inanimate object.
Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns
be the same people.
Never refuse wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone
who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.
Never serve oysters in a month that has no paychecks in it.
Never steal anything so small that you'll have to go to an unpleasant
city jail for it instead of a minimum-security federal tennis prison.
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn
corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going
forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind.
Of course we're unilateral. If we Americans had wanted to be ordered
around by English wig-tops, French functionaries, bossy Germans,
disorganized Italians, tin-pot Latin American dictators, and Ice Age
Siberian bureaucrats, we would have stayed where we were.
Once the XFL was canceled for not being stupid enough, it was clear that
America's internal enemies had already triumphed.
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual
responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your
problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often
his picture turns up on your driver's license.
Peat is found only in Celtic countries because God realized the Celts
were the only people on earth who drank so much that they would try to
burn mud.
People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need
politics, they have jobs.
Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall
gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet.
Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue.
Fleas are interested in dogs.
Politics are a lousy way for a free man to get things done. Politics
are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without
possessing merit.
Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and
the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
Reporters thus ignore a basic principle of news: There are two sources
you can't trust, those who won't tell their story and those who will.
Russia, as a case study, is wonderful. Unless, of course, you're a
Russian.
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater
deliberation and less noise.
Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn't afford college to study
the works of Charles Darwin.
Sociology is journalism without news.
Some people are better imagined in one's bed than found there in the
morning.
Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong.
I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.
Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a
rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.
Some women want the strong silent type, so they can tell him to shut up
and rearrange the furniture.
Sometimes you need a B-2 bomber and sometimes you need your mother.
Stay away from girls who cry a lot or look like they get pregnant easily
or have careers.
Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more
sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good
divorce.
Strip a car of its paint. Strip a person of his clothes. Which looks
worse in broad daylight?
Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.
The cellular-phone industry has greatly expanded, making complete local
and long-distance service available to the homeless.
The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement
seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except
take science courses and learn something about it.
The difference between corporations and governments is governments have
a monopoly on force. It's a lot easier to vote with your feet or your
wallet than it is to change a government with your vote.
The fact that nothing's happening never stops a real reporter.
The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our
republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep
them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.
The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree
market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in
the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you.
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any
better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit
outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more
stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I
don't know.
The French are masters of "the dog ate my homework" school of diplomatic
relations.
The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese
that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own
children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to
speak to them in their own wimpy language.
The Greenpeace booth at all the rock and roll shows nowadays are akin to
the old sorcerers who used to stand in the middle of villages warning of
danger, "When night wolf swallows mother moon, there will be great
famine."
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information
and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and
spread it around.
The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the
hole is where the bullet comes out yet how big a difference it would
make in your social life.
The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders.
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it
stop.
The notion of economic equality is based on an ancient and ugly
falsehood central to bad economic thinking: There's a fixed amount of
wealth. Wealth is zero-sum.
The one thing that can be safely said about the great majority of people
is that we don't want them around.
The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in
everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to
sin.
The problem is not that 50 percent of people are females. The problem is
that 100 percent of females are humans.
The process of Darwinian selection does not work on things that don't
die. If it weren't for death we'd all still be amoebas and would have to
eat by surrounding things with our butts.
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This
drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss
the person you're married to.
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work; then
they get elected and prove it.
The Sixties was a decade without quality control.
The Soviet Union has been reduced to a collection of too many smaller
states, creating many opportunities for k's and z's in "Scrabble."
The weirder you're 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.
The whole idea of our government is this: if enough people get together
and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal,
particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL
convertible.
There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own
business. Keep your hands to yourself.
There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set
forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still
sound reasonable...in large part, because so many of them can be leveled
against the federal government of the United States.
There can be no greater sacrifice than that a man lay down his lifestyle
for others.
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well
please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take
the consequences.
There is something more horrible than hoodlums, churls and vipers, and
that is knaves with moral justification for their cause.
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any
overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how
virtuous their cause.
This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything
is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.
Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when
crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but the Middle East is a place where two rights
don't make a right.
Undeterred by historical example, however, the EU looks to fulfill the
age-old dream of having a country of English cooks, German lovers,
French defense forces and Italian efficiency experts.
Usually, writers will do anything to avoid writing.
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited
by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.
Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and
also to more thoughtful television programming.
War is a great asshole magnet.
War will exist as long as there's a food chain.
Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if
lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.
We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn
on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.
We'll run this planet as we please, and if you don't like it, go back
where we came from.
We're told cars are dangerous. It's safer to drive through South Central
Los Angeles than to walk there. We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful
of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of
years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But
it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a
speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago
city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution
do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever
at nine?
West Germans are tall, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands,
teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their
looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well,
they're indistinguishable from Americans.
Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer
that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind
foreign policy.
When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things
to be bought and sold are legislators.
When somebody's muffler shop goes bankrupt, the government doesn't pay
him $100,000 to not install mufflers.
When you're tied to the bed, at least you know where you are going to be
for the next few minutes...
Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show
up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.
Why do some places prosper and thrive, while others just suck?
Why is this soiled, crumpled, overdecorated piece of paper bearing a
picture of a rather disreputable president worth fifty dollars, while
this clean, soft, white, and cleverly folded piece of paper is worth so
little that I just wiped my nose on it?
With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I
didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of
make-believe that's worse than regular life.
Women are successful in the business world because the business world
was created by men. Men are babies. And women are... Good With Kids.
Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically
render the words onto a screen or a page doesn't help you. I'll give you
this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you
got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you
had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some
ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along,
you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack
Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you
seeing a trend here?
You are not going to achieve individuality by having your knee pierced
or wearing a great big ring in your buttock.
You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to
do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you
to do something stupid.
You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a
barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.
You can't get good chinese takeout in China and cuban cigars are
rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
You can't put your VISA bill on your American Express card.
You say we [reporters] are distracting from the business of government.
Well, I hope so. Distracting a politician from governing is like
distracting a bear from eating your baby.
You throw these bastards out the door of totalitarianism, and back they
come through the window of environmentalism.
[Art is] a conspiracy between clever parasites and millionaires to make
poor people feel stupid.
A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made
religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve
and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty
well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who
find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using
science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do
with it, friends.
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love
whoever is around to be loved.
Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually
low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
All time in all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to
warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and
you will find that we are all bugs in amber.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and
nobody wants to do maintenance.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is
preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and
attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never
stop hoping otherwise.
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.
Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or
not.
Big, undreamed-of things. The people on the edge see them first.
But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites,
standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to
college.
Dear Future Generations: Please accept our apologies. We were roaring
drunk on petroleum.
Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles
closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules- and still there are some
misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.
Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed.
History is merely a list of surprises. ... It can only prepare us to be
surprised yet again.
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a
fire engine.
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.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so
far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The Only Proof
He Needed For The Existence Of God Was Music.
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an
enemy.
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough
to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that
doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."
My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on
television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I
consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
So it goes.
Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers.
Take care of the people, and God almighty will take care of Himself.
The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe
there is such a thing as being smart.
The only difference between [George W.] Bush and [Adolf] Hitler is that
Hitler was elected.
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know
what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be
president.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph
of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as
angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
True terror is waking up one morning and realizing your high school
class is running the country.
We are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you
differently.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to
be.
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying
to get rid of us, as well it should.
I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for
the Sandman.
It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me,
"There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was,
"Well that explains a lot about the DC Universe." -Neil
Gaiman (b. November 10, 1960)
A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read
the papers.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's
revolving door.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a
policy, but nothing more.
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
Do not wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day.
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may
not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving
like a Christian.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out
there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out
there is.
In the depth of winter I finally realized that there was in me an
invincible summer.
Integrity has no need of rules.
It's better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass
graves.
It's better to bet on this life than on the next.
Life is a sum of all your choices.
Live to the point of tears.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the
seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are
alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be
normal.
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
Politics and the shape of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and
without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't concern
themselves with politics.
Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't
matter.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were
not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good
intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack
understanding.
The one thing your friends will never forgive you is your happiness.
To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And
now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.
Andy
Rooney, (January 14, 1919 – November 4, 2011)
"Shut down the computer? Well, what the hell else do you think I want to
shut down? The bedroom window?"
(YouTube video: Classic Rooney rant about computers.)
Anyone who likes golf on television would enjoy watching the grass grow
on the greens.
As an old reporter, we have a few secrets, and the first thing is we try
the phone book.
Being kind is more important than being right.
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things
they make it easier to do don't need to be done.
Conservatives are more religious than liberals- although there is no
evidence that they're nicer people because of it.
Democrats believe people are basically good but must be saved from
themselves by the government. Republicans believe people are basically
bad but they'll be okay if they're left alone.
Don't rule out working with your hands. It does not preclude using your
head.
Go to bed. Whatever you're staying up late for isn't worth it.
I can't choose how I feel, but I can choose what I do about it.
I don't like food that's too carefully arranged. It makes me think that
the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time
cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting.
If dogs could talk it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.
In a conversation, keep in mind that you're more interested in what you
have to say than anyone else is.
It's not so much that I write well, I just don't write badly very often,
and that passes for good on television.
I’m already suspicious of anyone who thinks he or she is smart enough to
be president. You’d have to have some ego to believe that about yourself
Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the
faster it goes.
Love, not time, heals all wounds.
Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted
even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.
Milk without fat is like nonalcoholic Scotch.
Money doesn't buy class.
Nothing in fine print is ever good news.
One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the
living room on Christmas day. Don't clean it up too quickly.
Opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss.
Patriotism is only a virtue if the person who has it lives in your
country.
People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with
what they already believe.
The best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.
The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
The Lord didn't do it all in one day. What makes me think I can?
Vegetarian- that's an old Indian word meaning lousy hunter.
Will
Rogers (November 4, 1879 – August 15, 1935) achieved the height of
his popularity during the Great Depression. Reading him reveals two
things- that he was a keen observer of American life, and that we never
learn from our mistakes. As Gore Vidal said, "Happily for the busy
lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of
Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing."
We need to remember people like Will...
A diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.
A government treaty gave Cherokees their land as long as the grass grows
and the water flows, but when they discovered oil, they took it back
because there was nothin' in the treaty about oil.
A holding company is the people you give your money to while you're
being searched.
A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.
Almost all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with
a prayer and closes with an investigation.
Always drink upstream from the herd.
An economist's guess is as good as anyone else's.
Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what's going to
happen to us with both a Senate and a House?
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Civilization has taught us to eat with a fork, but even now if nobody is
around, we use our fingers.
Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit
there.
Government investigations have always contributed more to our amusement
than they have to our knowledge.
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we
have rushed through life trying to save.
I don't think you can make a lawyer honest by an act of legislature.
You've got to work on his conscience. And his lack of conscience is what
makes him a lawyer.
I hope we never live to see the day when a thing is as bad as some of
our newspapers make it.
I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons.
I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man
who sold it.
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
If there are no dogs in heaven, when I die I want to go where they go.
If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone,
"America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership."
If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves
against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our
lobbies, we need to change our representatives.
If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics.
It's not what you pay a man but what he costs you that counts.
Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product
that they spend on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.
Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
Never miss a good chance to shut up.
Nothing you can't spell will ever work.
On account of us being a democracy and run by the people, we are the
only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no
matter what it does.
Our Constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U.S. Senators. There ought
to be one day (just one) when there is open season on senators.
People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.
People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to
know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his
wealth.
Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get
beat with.
Politics is applesauce.
Republicans take care of the big money, for big money takes care of them.
Statesmen think they make history; but history makes itself and drags
the statesmen along.
Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't
buy enough to eat.
The American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost
any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.
The man with the best job in the country is the Vice-President. All he
has to do is get up every morning and say "How's the President?"
The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to
admit that each party is worse than the other.
The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get
worse every time Congress meets.
The rest of the people know the condition of the country, for they live
in it, but Congress has no idea what is going on in America, so the
President has to tell 'em.
The schools ain't what they used to be and never was.
There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war,
or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help
arrange it.
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government
working for you.
This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as
when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
This would be a great time in the world for some man to come along that
knew something.
This would be a great world to dance in if we didn't have to pay the
fiddler.
Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they
don't want, to impress people they don't like.
We are the first nation to starve to death in a storehouse that's
overfilled with everything we want.
We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize
the rights of others.
When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they
raise 'em. That's statesmanship of the highest order.
You can't say civilization isn't advancing: in every war they kill you
in a new way.
You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry
dog a bone.
You take religion backed up by commerce and it's awful hard for a
heathen to overcome.
You've got to be an optimist to be a Democrat, and you've got to be a
humorist to stay one.
(YouTube video: Bill Moyer interviews Joseph Campbell.)
All religions are true but none are literal.
All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our
ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end... The exclusivism of
there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there
is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth-
that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the
kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine
presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has
been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought
to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are— if you are
following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life
within you, all the time.
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual
thought. It's as simple as that.
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as
they are looking for the experience of being alive.
I don't have to have faith. I have experience.
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know
it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take.
That's why it's your path.
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of
life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand
God is the way God is.
Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It
is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was
going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then
being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.
Midlife crisis is what happens when you climb to the top of the ladder
and discover that it's against the wrong wall.
Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion.
And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding
of mythology.
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve.
And these are not disclosed unless required.
One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss
comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the
real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment
comes the light.
Regrets are illuminations come too late.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that
metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those
who know they are not facts are what we call atheists, and those who
think they are facts are religious. Which group really gets the message?
We can't cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy.
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that
is waiting for us.
What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a
value system that functions in human life and in the universe.
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own
self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of
consciousness.
(YouTube video: Marshall McLuhan's classic cameo from "Annie Hall".)
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight
and understanding.
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and
arbitrary values.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can
always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen
to it.
Art is anything you can get away with.
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without
an identity.
Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making
sense is still a human monopoly.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is
experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative.
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
Money is a poor man's credit card.
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live
habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than
you can cope with.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by
public incredulity.
Only the vanquished remember history.
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's
jobs with yesterday's tools.
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the
society as it is.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living
room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America- not on the
battlefields of Vietnam.
There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
What disqualifies war from being a true game is probably what also
disqualifies the stock market and business- the rules are not fully
known nor accepted by all the players.
World War III is a guerrilla information war, with no division between
military and civilian participation.
Bonus video: Speaking of Annie Hall,here's
a favorite scene, featuring an absurdly young Christopher Walken.
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