Monday, February 29, 2016

Monopoly

"Schools tried to extend a radical monopoly on learning by redefining it as education. As long as people accepted the teacher's definition of reality, those who learned outside school were officially stamped 'uneducated.' Modern medicine deprives the ailing of care not prescribed by doctors. Radical monopoly exists where a major tool rules out natural competence. Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy. It constitutes a special kind of social control because it is enforced by means of the imposed consumption of a standard product that only large institutions can provide".
--Ivan Illich, "Tools for Conviviality"

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Everything III

"No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals."
--Brian Tracy

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Funny

"If you are going to tell people the truth, be funny or they will kill you."
--Billy Wilder

Friday, February 26, 2016

Back

"For all those angry people out there, so furious because of the bay bridge demonstration, so full of hate - please know that when they come for your family, when they begin executing you, when they riddle your children with bullets, when they drag your brothers and sisters bodies through the mud, we'll get up the next morning, and meet until the early hours of the night for weeks and weeks on end, and then we'll shut down bridges, we'll shut down freeways, we'll shut down intersections, malls and airports, we'll sit on the lawns of politicians shouting at four o'clock in the morning, so that they remember your name, and what happened when you took your last breath, so that they know you were murdered and that you wanted to live. Just know, that when they come for you, we'll love you enough to fight back."
--Salima Hamirani

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Caught

"If you aren't careful, because I've seen some of you caught in that bag, you run away hating yourself and loving the man--while you're catching hell from the man. You let the man maneuver you into thinking that it's wrong to fight him when he's fighting you. He's fighting you in the morning, fighting you in the noon, fighting you at night and fighting you all in between, and you still think it's wrong to fight him back. Why? The press. The newspapers make you look wrong."
--Malcolm X
Speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (December 13, 1964)

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Punished

"There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4."
--Albert Camus
"The Plague" (1947)

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Control VI

"Nothing but defeat in war will suffice to produce any change not desired by those who control publicity."
--Bertrand Russell

Monday, February 22, 2016

Maintenance II

"When we come before the school board, most often we do not face those interested in the education of our children, but those interested in the maintenance of power. These contests are war. Any other paradigm is an illusion. It is not a mere contest, like athletes plunging down the hill on skis for the fastest time. It is not a dance in which the most graceful will be rewarded with a medal. This is war. Once we understand that the struggle is war, we can wage war and win.

The key to winning any war is to control the war. This does not mean I seek to control my opponent."

--Gerry Spence, "How To Argue And Win Every Time" (1995)

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Organism

"Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives. There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties. No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual. It invariably seeks to limit that freedom, if not by overt denial, then by seeking constantly to widen its own functions."
--H.L. Mencken

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Fruitful

"Some guy hit my car fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful and multiply.'  But not in those words."
--Woody Allen

Friday, February 19, 2016

Activist

"The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river."
--Ross Perot

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Relief

"Individuality, family, and community are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of "one-right-way" thinking on the grand scale. Children and families need some relief from government surveillance and intimidation if original expressions belonging to THEM are to develop. Without these freedom has no meaning."
--John Taylor Gatto

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Redress

"We must realize that today's Establishment is the New George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution."
--William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice
"Points of Rebellion" (1969).

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Shallow

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."
--Hunter S. Thompson
San Francisco Examiner, November 4, 1985

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Suppose II

"We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator's last word."
--George Bernard Shaw
"Everybody's Political What's What" (1944)

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Dream III

"Everything starts as somebody's day dream."
--Larry Niven

Friday, February 12, 2016

Subconscious

"It was his subconscious which told him this — that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing."
--Douglas Adams
"The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul" (1988)

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Brotherhood

"The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn."
--R. D. Laing

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

The Irony, The Irony...

From CNN's Breaking News email, 2:40 pm PST:

The U.S. Justice Department is filing a lawsuit against the city of Ferguson, Missouri, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Wednesday. The lawsuit alleges a pattern and practice of unconstitutional police conduct in the city.
______________________________________________________________

Oh the irony of a regime engaged in systematic trashing of the US Constitution complaining about another governmental entity whose terrorism pales in comparison...

TLC

Abounds

"In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous."
--Publius Cornelius

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Spinning

"The last best hope on earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie 'answers' questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare."
--Gore Vidal
"Ollie" (1987) [Ollie = Oliver North ]

Monday, February 08, 2016

Importance

"When Paul thought about his effortless rise in the hierarchy, he sometimes, as now, felt sheepish, like a charlatan. He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality. In short, what Paul missed was what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Player Piano"

Sunday, February 07, 2016

Kitchen

"They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen."
--Huey Long,
campaign speech for the re-election of Senator Hattie Caraway (D-AR), 1932 

Saturday, February 06, 2016

Dreadful

"Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God."
--Phillips Brooks

Friday, February 05, 2016

Prophetic

"Aldous Huxley was uncannily prophetic, a more astute guide to the future than any other 20th- century novelist. Even his casual asides have a surprising relevance to our own times. During the first world war, after America's entry, he warned: 'I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.' His sentiment is widely echoed today, though too late for us to do anything about it. The worst fate for a prophet is for his predictions to come true, when everyone resents him for being so clear-eyed."
--J. G. Ballard, quoted in
"Prophet of Our Present. Review of Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual" by Nicholas Murray. The Guardian, April 13, 2002.

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Shilling

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved."
--Lysander Spooner
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: "No Treason #6" (1870)

Wednesday, February 03, 2016

Crime II

"He remembered a friend of his father’s, a brave high-ranking officer and a good commander, who had often said that war was a crime, which the Army ought to prevent, instead of trying to bring it on."
--Sinclair Lewis
"Hike & The Aeroplane" (1912)

Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Proportion II

"Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you."
--William F. Buckley
As quoted in "Broken Government: Where the right went wrong," CNN (November 3, 2006).

Monday, February 01, 2016

Sunlight

"Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture."
--Stefan Molyneux