Sunday, March 31, 2013

Orders

"No slaves shall keep any arms whatever, nor pass, unless with written orders from his master or employer, or in his company, with arms from one place to another."
--A Bill Concerning Slaves Source: [1785],
reproduced in Alfred Fried, Ed., The Essential Jefferson (Collier Books, 1963), p. 140.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Shares

"He who allows oppression, shares the crime."
--Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Begins

"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks- 'They’re only animals.'"
--Theodore Adorno

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Sealed

"There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . .Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory. . . Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's."
--Hunter S. Thompson

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

While II

"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive, to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."
--Elisabeth Kubler Ross (1926-2004)
Swiss-born American psychiatrist

Study II

"Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."
--Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-born American physicist

Monday, March 25, 2013

Weed

"A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Safely

"Now That He Is Safely Dead"

Now that he is safely dead let us praise him,
build monuments to his glory,
sing hosannas to his name.

Dead men make such convenient heroes.
They cannot rise to challenge
the images we would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.

--Carl Wendell Hines

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Just

"It is not enough just to be for peace. The point is, what can we do about it?"
--Richard M. Nixon

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Folly III

"It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf."
--Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, 1776

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Weeds

"Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted; Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden."
--William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English poet, playwright, actor
Henry VI, Part 2

Grip

"The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball."
--Doug Larson

Monday, March 18, 2013

Defending

"They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance."
--Edmund Burke

Delighting

"In hunting and fishing, the fault is in the men delighting in the torments and cruel deaths of beasts and tearing them without compassion from their whelps and their young ones."
--Plutarch

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Damage

The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The
honest men who just want to be left in peace.

Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than
themselves.

Those with no sides and no causes.

Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of
antagonizing their own weakness.

Those who don't like to make waves or enemies.

Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature.

Those who live small, mate small, die small.

It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep
it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find
you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll
up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe.

Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow
streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle
burns itself out just like a flaming torch does.

I choose my own way to burn.

• Sophie Scholl, member of the resistance group The White Rose
Society, who disseminated information against Hitler's propaganda

Friday, March 15, 2013

Sign

"The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'"
--Dr. Maria Montessori (1870-1952)
Italian educator

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Fortifies

"Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it."

--Stephen Vizinczey

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Retrieve

"People these days are reluctant to read the canonical texts, but they love fiction. Not all fiction, mind you, for they are sick of exemplary themes and far prefer the obscene and fantastic. How low contemporary morals have sunk! Anyone concerned about public morality will want to retrieve the situation."
--Li Yu (937-978) Chinese emperor, poet, artist

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Club

"History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club."
--John W. Campbell (1910-1971) American writer, editor

Mass III

"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. ...It's importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda ...Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated."
--Bertrand Russell [Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Uniform

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."
--Alan Bullock
[Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock] (1914-2004) British historian
Source: Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives

Field

"When you and I look back on the country over which we have passed, what a field of slaughter does it exhibit! Where are all the friends who entered it with us, under all the inspiring energies of health and hope? As if pursued by the havoc of war, they are strewed by the way, some earlier, some later, and scarce a few stragglers remain to count the numbers fallen, and to mark yet, by their own fall, the last footsteps of their party. Is it a desirable thing to bear up through the heat of the action, to witness the death of all our companions, and merely be the last victim? I doubt it. We have, however, the traveller's consolation. Every step shortens the distance we have to go; the end of our journey is in sight."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Governor John Page, Jun. 25, 1804

Saturday, March 09, 2013

Straightjacket

"Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear."
--Karl Kraus

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Preface

"[T]he next time you read or hear about a murder victim, a rape victim or an assault victim, I want you to preface it with the word 'unarmed' so that murder victims become 'unarmed murder victims'; this is especially true in rape. How many times have you read, 'An unidentified woman, heavily armed with a semi-automatic weapon was raped by a man wielding a knife.' No answer is necessary, right?"

--The Liberty Pole
Source: A Letter to L. A. Times Advertiser Big 5., October, 1997.

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Piled II

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787

Certainty II

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
--Erich Fromm

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Secure

"You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license."
--Wilhelm Reich

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Pure

"The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin."
--Oscar Wilde

Censorship II

"Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was."

--Krzysztof Kieslowski
(1941-1996) Polish filmmaker

Saturday, March 02, 2013

Hears

"Who hears the fishes when they cry?"

--Henry David Thoreau