Friday, May 31, 2013

Taxidermist

"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin."
--Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Absurdity II

"In politics, absurdity is not a handicap."
--Napoleon Bonaparte

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Promising

"Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising."
--Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

Crusades

"Let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence in one another, rather than in crusades of suspicion. Let us prove we think our country great, by striving to make it greater."
--John F. Kennedy, November 18, 1961

Monday, May 27, 2013

Nerves

"The brave die never, though they sleep in dust:
Their courage nerves a thousand living men."
--Minot J. Savage, Decorating the Soldiers’ Graves

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Fixed II

"Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. Captain, that is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave."
--Stonewall Jackson
Speaking to Captain John D. Imboden, July 24, 1861,
as quoted in Stonewall Jackson As Military Commander (2000) by John Selby, p. 25;

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Illusionary

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.":
--General Douglas MacArthur
Speech to the Michigan legislature, in Lansing, Michigan, May 15, 1952

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Won

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
--George S. Patton

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Crime

"It's strange that men should take up crime when there are so many legal ways to be dishonest."
--Author unknown, quoted in "Sunshine" magazine

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Degrees

"The tragedy of the police state is that it always regards all opposition as a crime, and there are no degrees."
--Lord Vansittart (1881-1957)
Source: Speech, 1947

Decorating

"I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
--Anna Quindlen

Monday, May 20, 2013

Boil

"There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil."
--Gore Vidal, "Death in the Fifth Position"

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Coercion

"Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites."
--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Swineherd

"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side."
--Orson Scott Card, Novelist

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Walks

"The only thing that walks back from the tomb with the mourners and refuses to be buried is the character of a man. This is true. What a man is survives him. It can never be buried."
--J.R. Miller

Smile

 "You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun."
--Al Capone

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Exclusively

"But as the plan of the convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States."
--Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 32, 3 January 1788)

Freedom IX

"What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
--Rudolph W. Giuliani (1944- )
Mayor of New York City from 1994-2001
Source: March 16, 1994, at symposium on urban crime sponsored by the New York Post

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Tragedy II

"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it."
--Helen Hayes, in Roy Newquist, Showcase, 1966

Fundamental

"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts."
--H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Stream

"The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity."
--George Brandes

Stream

"The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity."
--George Brandes

Thursday, May 09, 2013

Abandoned

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood."
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
Source: Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Demon

"Our capitol punishment system is haunted by the demon of error - error in determining guilt, error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. The legislation couldn’t reform it. Lawmakers won’t repeal it. I won’t stand for it. I had to act. I am commuting the sentences of all death row inmates."
--Governor George Ryan of Illinois, January, 2003

1500

Distance in miles (2,414 km) that scientists estimate a mountain lion traveled from South Dakota before killed by a car in Connecticut.

--Time Magazine, issue of August 15, 2011, p. 11
Read more »

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Tuesdays

The question about assassination used to be, "What did the President know and when did he know it?"  Now we have Obama saying, "Hey on Tuesdays I go to meetings and we pick the guys."
--Seymour Hersh, February 20, 2013, Indiana University Journalism School

Monday, May 06, 2013

Monarchies

"I was much an enemy to monarchies before I came to Europe. I am ten thousand times more so, since I have seen what they are. There is scarcely an evil known in these countries, which may not be traced to their king, as its source, nor a good, which is not derived from the small fibres of republicanism existing among them."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to General Washington, May 2, 1788

Sunday, May 05, 2013

Problem

"I've never had a problem with drugs.  I've had problems with the police."
--Keith Richards

Saturday, May 04, 2013

Whimpering

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear -- fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."
--Hunter S. Thompson

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Subordinated

The choice was between serving human beings and serving history, between thinking ethically and thinking strategically. [Dwight] Macdonald criticized Marxists for the same reason he criticized the liberal class: both subordinated ethics to another goal. By serving history and power, the liberal class, like the Marxists,surrendered their power and moral authority to the state. The capitulation of the liberal class, as Irving Howe noted, has bleached out all political tendencies: "It becomes a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything."

--Chris Hedges, "Death Of The Liberal Class", page 112

Systematically

After the war [World War 1], as Stuart Ewen told me when we met in New York, all systems of public discourse, communication and expression were "systematically designed to avoid including any information or knowledge that might encourage people to evaluate the situation."  Mass propaganda obliterated an informed public. "Except for those who seek out information intentionally or through nontraditional sources," Ewen lamented, "the entire picture of the universe that is provided to people is one reduced to a comic strip."

--Chris Hedges, "Death Of The Liberal Class", page 87