Normal III

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."
--Ellen DeGeneres

Knocking

"Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago."
--Horace Mann

Collateral

"We could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was ... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them."
--William McKinley (1843-1901) 25th US President
Source: 1899, on the Filipinos, following the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1898. During the invasion and occupation, U.S. forces killed an estimated 200,000 Filipino civilians.
Address to the Methodist Episcopal Church; cited in Olcott, The Life of William McKinley (1916), v. 2, p. 110; estimate of civilian casualties from U.S. Library of Congress, "The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War," 1998.

Habit

"Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters."
--Nathaniel Emmons

Deterioration

"The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded."
--Charles-Louis De Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748

Lawyer

"If it weren't for my lawyer, I'd still be in prison. It went a lot faster with two people digging."
--Joe Martin, Mister Boffo

Neurobabble

"[W]hen psychiatrists start using what I call neurobabble, beware, because we rarely know what we are talking about...We have convinced ourselves that we have developed cures for mental illnesses, when in fact we know so little about the underlying neurobiology of their causes that our treatments are often a series of trials and errors".
--Daniel Carlat, "Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry"

Lawful

"There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so."
--Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
French economist, statesman, and author.

Good II

Freedom V

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities."
--Alan Bloom (1930-1992)
Source: The Closing of the American Mind, 1987

Admire

"The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are those who try to tell the truth."
--H.L Mencken

Perfect

"Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect."
--Benny Hill

Dance

"I love dancing. I think it's better to dance than to march through life."
--Yoko Ono

Tug

"You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug."
--Michael Parenti

Any

"Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war."
--Norman Mailer, Armies Of The Night

Translated

"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed."
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Rights II

"Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will turn vegetarian." --Heywood Hale Broun (1918-2001)
American sportswriter, commentator, and actor

Risk VI

"But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies."
--Alan Watts (1915-1973)
Source: Tao: The Watercourse Way, 1975

Enlighten

"Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dupont de Nemours, 1816

Plunder

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
--Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author.

Deficiency

"Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy . . . The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups."
--Samuel Huntington U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission
Source: Trilateral Commission Report on the Governability of Democracies, The Crisis of Democracy (1975), 169.

Twilight

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
--Letter from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to a group of young lawyers at the Washington State Bar Association in the wake of COINTELPRO and Watergate

Willing

Destination

"A sailor without a destination cannot hope for a favorable wind."
--Leon Tec, M.D.

None III

"Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence."
--Voltarine De Cleyre
(1866-1912)
Source: The Cry for Justice (Upton Sinclair)

Steve Jobs, R.I.P.

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" - Steve Jobs' famous question to John Sculley, former Apple CEO

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently - they're not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." - Think Different, narrated by Steve Jobs

Beginning II

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
--Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Public Utilities Commission v Pollack, 1952

Conscience

"Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?"
--Lord Chancellor Thurlow
[Lord Chancellor of England Edward First Baron Thurlow] (1731-1806)
English jurist
Source: J. Poynder, Literary Extracts, (1844) Vol. 1, page 268.

Study

"I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself."
--Robert Bork (1927- ) former US Circuit Judge, legal scholar, author

Imagination II

"It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations."
--Walter Bagehot

Find

"You want to know who's a real medicine man? He's the one who doesn't say 'I'm a medicine man.' He doesn't ask you to come to him. You've got to go and ask him. And you'll find he's always there among his own people."
--Louis Farmer, Onondaga