Saturday, October 31, 2015

Poets II

"The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness."
--Christopher Morley 

Friday, October 30, 2015

Dates

"The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates."
 --Alexandre Dumas, "The Count of Monte Cristo"

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Statistically

"Statistically, the probability of any of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in contented dazzlement of surprise."
--Lewis Thomas

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Nations

"The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes."
-- Stanley Kubrick

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Scientist II

"Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man."
--Jacob Bronowski

Monday, October 26, 2015

Blessing

"Liberty is no less a blessing because oppression has so long darkened the mind that it can not appreciate it."
--Lucretia Mott

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Reckoning

Always a Reckoning,

There always seemed to be a need
for reckoning in early days.
What came in equaled what went out
like oscillating ocean waves.

On the farm, our wages matched
the work we did in woods and fields,
how many acres plowed and hoed,
how much syrup was distilled,
how many pounds of cotton picked,
how much cordwood cut and stacked.
All things had to balance out.

I had a pony then that lacked
a way to work and pay her way,
except that every year or two
Lady had a colt we sold,
but still for less than what was due
to buy fodder, hay, and corn
she ate at times she couldn't be
on pasture.

Neither feed nor colts
meant all that much that I could see,
but still there was a thing about
a creature staying on our place
that none of us could eat or plow,
did not give eggs, or even chase
a fox or rabbit, that was sure
to rile my father.

We all knew
that Lady's giving me a ride
paid some on her debt, lieu
of other ways--but there would be
some times I didn't get around
to riding in my off-work hours.

And I was sure, when Daddy frowned
at some mistake I might've made, he
would be asking when he could,
"How long since you rode Lady?"

--Jimmy Carter, included in his book "A Full Life"

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Artists

"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading."
--H.L. Mencken

Friday, October 23, 2015

Policing

"The federal government has turned policing into policing for profit."
--Stephen Downing
Retired LAPD deputy chief of police
Source: told FoxNews Latino

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Joneses

"Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level."
--Quentin Crisp

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Squeezed

"A ‘normal person’ is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being."
--Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Correctness

"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line.
What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed
group of vigilantes imposing their views on others."
--Doris Lessing
Source: Sunday Times, 10 May 1992

Monday, October 19, 2015

Reform IV

"One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
--Richard Cowan
(1940- ) National Director of NORML (1992-95)

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Felony

"Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."
--David Brower, Executive Director of The Sierra Club

Knocks

"The greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes; because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember: Others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win, unless you hate them. And then, you destroy yourself."
--Richard M. Nixon

Friday, October 16, 2015

Bureaucrats II

"I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peacetime in all American history - one which piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs or reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer. We are spending altogether too much money for government services which are neither practical nor necessary. In addition to this, we are attempting too many functions and we need a simplification of what the Federal government is giving the people."
--Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Campaign Address on Agriculture and Tariffs at Sioux City, Iowa, September 29, 1932".

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Culture II

"To Benito Mussolini, from an old man who greets in the ruler, the Hero of Culture."
--Sigmund Freud,
in a 1933 dedication sent in a gift copy of the book Warum Krieg which he had co-written with Albert Einstein, as quoted in Fascist Spectacle : The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (2000) by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, p. 53; Photo of dedication

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Artifice

"I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody. I am proud of it, as the true title of our people to distinction above others; but ... I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it."
--Fisher Ames
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
Source: letter to George Richard Minot, June 23, 1789

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Governed

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."
--William F. Buckley
1963 statement, as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes, p. 82

Monday, October 12, 2015

Habits II


“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.”
John Taylor Gatto

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Initiation

"The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them."
--Ivan Illich

Friday, October 09, 2015

Remedy

"When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth."
--Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Color

"If you always color inside the lines the picture never changes."
--Rick Sutter

Thursday, October 08, 2015

Literacy

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies--the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction."
--Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"

Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Myths

"Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final."
--Hunter S. Thompson
"Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time" (1979)

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Heroes III

"Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."
--Gore Vidal, The Times Online, (September 30, 2009)

Monday, October 05, 2015

Absurdity III

"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."
--Albert Camus, "Three Interviews" in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970)

Saturday, October 03, 2015

Forecast

"This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way's life … The weather forecast hadn't mentioned that, of course, that wasn't the job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out."
--Douglas Adams,
"Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" (1987)

Submissively

"He was, however, speaking to a representative of government, the police. And it is to government that one goes 'for a redress of grievances,' to use an almost forgotten phrase of the First Amendment. But it is said that the purpose was 'to cause inconvenience and annoyance.' Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet."
--William O. Douglas,
Dissenting, Colten v. Kentucky, 407 U.S. 104 (1972).

Friday, October 02, 2015

Inhumanity

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."
--George Bernard Shaw,
"The Devil's Disciple", Act II (1901)

Thursday, October 01, 2015

Cheap

"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.