Complex

"Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die.
--Gil Stern

Onward

"One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!"
--Aldous Huxley, "Island" (1962)

Care

"One must care about a world one will not see."
--Bertrand Russell

Bury

"If you shut up the truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
--Emile Zola (French Author)

Surface

Jack Ruby (Oswald's assassin) made a statement to reporters after he has been permitted a new trial:

Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts, of what occurred, my motives. The people had , that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world.

Reporter : Are these people in very high positions Jack ??

Jack : Yes.

Utterly

"The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed."
--Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"

Contradictory

"The mystical union, on the one hand. The resurrection of the body, on the other. I can't reach the ghost of an image, a formula, or even a feeling, that combines them. But the reality, we are given to understand, does. Reality is the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems--but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem."
--C.S. Lewis, "A Grief Observed"

Fixed III

"You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself."
--Edna Ferber

Desks

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

--Kurt Vonnegut, "A Man Without a Country"

Staying

"The Zen student, the poet, the husband, the wife -- none knows with certainty what he or she is staying for, but all know the likelihood that they will be staying 'awhile': to find out what they are staying for. And it is the faith of all of these disciplines that they will not stay to find that they should not have stayed."
--Wendell Berry

Hooey

"One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape." ]
--Will Rogers
(1879-1935) American humorist

Reached

"Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it."
--Frank Zappa

Hidden II

"There are millions of Americans living in hidden places, whose faces and names we never know.  But I have seen children starving in Mississippi, idling their lives away in the ghetto, living without hope or future amid the despair on Indian reservations, with no jobs and little hope.  I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity--but the mines are closed, and the jobs are gone, and no one, neither industry or labor or government, has cared enough to help.  Those conditions will change, those children will live, only if we dissent.  So I dissent..."

--Robert F. Kennedy
Vanderbilt University, March 21, 1968

First-Rate II

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Field II

"There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail, all exquisite niceties of weights and measures, as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts however indubitably detected, no effort of reason however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful."
--Edith Hamilton (1867 - 1963)

Painter

"It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."
--Pablo Picasso

Wings

Be like the bird, pausing in his flight
On limb too slight,
Feels it give way, yet sings,
Knowing he hath wings.

--Victor Hugo

Expedience

"Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law."
--Abbie Hoffman

Wrong

"If there's nothing wrong with me...maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"
--Beverly Crusher, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Remember Me

Rise

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bigness

We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness' shows how size can become a menace – both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace – because of its control of prices. Control of prices in the steel industry is powerful leverage on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds of other articles. Our price level determines in large measure whether we have prosperity or depression – an economy of abundance or scarcity. Size in steel should therefore be jealously watched. In final analysis, size in steel is the measure of the power of a handful of men over our economy. That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it.

--Justice William O. Douglas,
Dissenting Opinion, United States v. Columbia Steel Co., 334 U.S. 495 (1948).

Only

On a display of "I love you only" Valentine cards: Now available in multi-packs.
--Author Unknown

Noblest

"The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity."
--H.L. Mencken, "The Smart Set" (October 1919), p. 139

Prosecuted

"People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We’ll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us."
--Joseph Sobran
(1946-2010) Columnist, former editor of National Review
Source: May 13, 1998 (commenting on US vs Microsoft)

Virtues

"One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination."
--Sam Levenson

Clothes

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
--Mark Twain

Plush

"Comfort zones are plush lined coffins. When you stay in your plush lined coffins, you die."
--Stan Dale

Materially

"This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor." 
--John F. Kennedy, January 14, 1963
"Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union"