Friday, October 31, 2014

Certified

"Certification from one source or another seems to be the most important thing to people all over the world. A piece of paper from a school that says you’re smart, a pat on the head from your parents that says you’re good or some reinforcement from your peers that makes you think what you’re doing is worthwhile. People are just waiting around to get certified."
--Frank Zappa
Interview, Oui, 1979

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Informed

"Your failure to be informed does not make me a wacko."
--John Loeffler

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Flying

"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
--Douglas Adams

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Experimental

"Modern medicine" may well be defined as "the experimental study of what happens when poisonous chemicals are placed into malnourished human bodies."
---A. Saul
Contributing Editor, Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine
(http://www.orthomed.org)

Monday, October 27, 2014

Conclusions

"People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant."                                                                    
--Helen Keller

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Aliens

"When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force."
--Robert F. Kennedy, April 5, 1968

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Vanquished

"It is always a part of the misfortunes of the vanquished that their portraits are painted and their history written by the victors."
--A. Yankee
Source: The Spectator, Volume 38, May 20, 1865

Friday, October 24, 2014

Obstinacy

"Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses."
--C. S. Lewis
(1898-1963), British novelist

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Hunks

"Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing."
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Form

"To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators."
--Lewis H. Lapham

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Hammer

"I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil or a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammer, whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education."
--John F. Kennedy

Monday, October 20, 2014

Gnaws

"Interest works night and day in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man's substance with invisible teeth."
--Henry Ward Beecher

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Object

"The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher." 
--Elbert Hubbard

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Lipstick

"In our factory, we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope."
-- Charles Revson

Friday, October 17, 2014

Players

So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth.
--Howard Beale, "Network"

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Shot

 "The only shot my son needs is a shot at the future."
--Lori Mcilwain

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Reprieve

"Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve."
--Ryszard Kapuscinski

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Times III

"What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence."
--Studs Terkel, "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression"

Monday, October 13, 2014

Rain

"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."

--Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Whisper

"But you can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm, not advocating some, sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged differently as discriminatory, mean-spirited and...well...so Republican."
--Ron Weddington
co-counsel in Roe V. Wade
Source: letter to 'President-to-be' Bill Clinton, January 6, 1992

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Foolishness

No.2: "We can treat folly with kindness . . . knowing that soon his wild spirit will quieten, and the foolishness will fall away to reveal a model citizen."

No.6: "That day you'll never see."

--The Prisoner, episode "Dance of the Dead"

Friday, October 10, 2014

Internationalist

"Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them."
--Abbie Hoffman

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Latched

"We live in a very special time right now. At no other time in history has there been such mass disillusionment in terms of reliance on governing functions. Most people don’t want to come to terms with that. It’s been proven over and over again that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but most people don’t like to look at naked emperors. In the process of turning around to avert their eyes, they saw the discotheques and a few other things and latched onto them."
--Frank Zappa (Interview, Oui Magazine, 1979)

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Surplus

"What becomes of the surplus of human life?
It is either, 1st destroyed by infanticide,
as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or
2nd it is stifled or starved,
as among other nations whose population is
commensurate to its food; or
3rd it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or
4th it overflows, by emigration, to places where
a surplus of food is attainable."
--James Madison (1751-1836),
Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
1791

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Warm

"One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics."
--Eugene McCarthy

Monday, October 06, 2014

Known

 "We welcome almost any break
  in the monotony of things,
   a man has only to murder
a series of wives in a new way
       to become known
    to millions of people
 who have never heard of Homer."
--Robert Wilson Lynd
(1879-1949) Irish writer, essayist, Irish nationalist
Source: The New Statesman, 22 October 1921

Sunday, October 05, 2014

Reformer

"[T]here is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.  For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order."
--Niccolo Machiavelli
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher

Saturday, October 04, 2014

Consciousness II

"Somehow, the changing of consciousness is deemed to be threatening to the state. Now, why is that? Is the state somehow playing a shell game, that would be exposed, if people were to actually open their eyes? In what way does the expansion of consciousness threaten industrial democracies? I believe we need real answers to this."
--Terence McKenna

Friday, October 03, 2014

Immoral

When Virginia’s Hanover County School Board removed all copies the Harper Lee classic "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1966 on the grounds that it was "immoral," Lee wrote the following letter to the editor of The Richmond News Leader, found in "Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird":

Monroeville, Alabama

January, 1966

Editor, The News Leader:

Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board’s activities, and what I’ve heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that "To Kill a Mockingbird" spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.

--Harper Lee

Source: http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/01/literary-icons-on-censorship

Thursday, October 02, 2014

Conceptions

"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."
--George Bernard Shaw, "Mrs. Warren's Profession"

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Party II

"Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few."
--Alexander Pope
(1688-1744) English poet