Decay II

"How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism."
--James Monroe
(1758-1831), 5th US President

Kindly II

"I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well."
--George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist, member of the socialist Fabian Society
Source: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, by George Bernard Shaw, pg 470, 1928

Stand IV

"People often ask me where I stand politically. It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy, it's that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth. Little to the left."
--Bill Hicks (November 11, 1992)

Illegalization

"Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority."
--William F. Buckley

Sinkpit

"Explain it," Hamilton muttered. "This place--this bar. Why doesn’t God erase it? If this world operates by moral laws--"

"This bar is necessary to the moral order. This is a sinkpit of corruption and vice, a fleshpot of iniquity. You think salvation can function without damnation? You think virtue can exist without sin? That’s the trouble with you atheists; you don’t grasp the mechanics of evil. Get on the inside and enjoy life, man. If you’re one of the Faithful, you’ve got nothing to worry about."

"Opportunist."

"Bet your sweet soul."

--Philip K. Dick
"Eye in the Sky" (1957)

Answerable

"Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the State die? Oh no."
--Mark Twain

Communicate

"Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored"
--Alice Walker

Perpetual VI

"The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business."
--Lewis Lapham,
"Money And Class In America" (1989)
    

Code

"What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?"
"I don't know. My...my code of morals, perhaps."
"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?"
"Comprehension."

--Albert Camus,
"The Plague" (1947)

Manufacturing

"Schooling is a manufacturing process whereby the raw material called curious boys is turned into products called obedient men."
--Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Bust

"You can't save free markets by socialism, I don't know where this idea ever came from. You save free markets by promoting free markets and sound money and balanced budgets. The whole reason why nobody wants to address the real problem is, we're spending a trillion dollars a year overseas running an empire, and it's coming to an end. This country is bankrupt, and we won't admit it. Eventually though, the dollar will go bust, and we will bring our troops home, and we will live within our means, but we ought to do it sensibly, rather than waiting for the collapse of the dollar, and this is what we're doing, we're on the verge of destroying our dollar. And then, you think we have problems now, problems then will be a lot worse, it'd look like the Weimar Republic, or a third world nation. And a lot of people know that, and they're scared to death, but we don't need to be making the problem worse by just propping up everything with more government programs, more inflation, and more helicopters, it won't work."

--Dr. Ron Paul
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Fox Business Network, October 14, 2008  

Except

"He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason."
--Sinclair Lewis
"Elmer Gantry" (1927)

Effective III

"The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them."
--Gerry Spence
"We, the People, the New American Slaves", p. 8

Sufficient

"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
--John Taylor Gatto
(1937-) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001

Technology III

"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works."
--Douglas Adams
"The Salmon of Doubt : Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" (2002)

Artist III

"You start to think, when you’re younger, how important everything is and how things have to go right--your job, your career, your life, your choices, and all of that. Then, after a while, you start to realise that--I’m talking the big picture here--eventually you die, and eventually the sun burns out and the earth is gone, and eventually all the stars and all the planets in the entire universe go, disappear, and nothing is left at all. Nothing--Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo gone. And you think to yourself that there’s a lot of noise and sound and fury--and where’s it going? It’s not going any place--Now, you can’t actually live your life like that, because if you do you just sit there and--why do anything? Why get up in the morning and do anything? So I think it’s the job of the artist to try and figure out why, given this terrible fact, you want to go on living."
-Woody Allen
Interview with France 24 (2010).

Letters

"One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange."
--Gore Vidal, "Julian"
Chapter 1, Libanius to Priscus, Antioch March 380

Collapsed

‘Of the 22 civilizations that have appeared in history, 19 of them collapsed when they reached the moral state America is in today.’
--Arnold Toynbee, April 14, 1889 - October 22, 1975
Author of the 12 volume "A Study Of History"

Successively

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
--Alexis de Tocqueville
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6

Compassion II

"In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges
to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense."
--Paul Craig Roberts
(1939- ) Economist, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration ("Father of Reaganomics"), former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.

Game II

"Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word “justice” into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
Source: Human, All Too Human

Mugger

"If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician."
--Lew Rockwell

Robbed

"You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power--he’s free again."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"The First Circle" (1968)

Orthodoxies

"He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry--in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."
--George Orwell,
"Charles Dickens" (1939), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940)

Good VII

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

    Some men see things as they are and say why.
    I dream things that never were and say why not.

--Edward M. Kennedy
Eulogy For Robert F. Kennedy, November 20, 1925 - June 6, 1968

Heard

"Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men's lives. Everything that makes man's life worthwhile--family, work, education, a place to rear one's children and a place to rest one's head--all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer--not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people."
--Robert F. Kennedy
"Day Of Affirmation" speech, June 6, 1966

Muhammad Ali, January 17, 1942 - June 3, 2016

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion.

But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.

--Muhammad Ali, March, 1967

Enforcement

"Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on."
--Robert F. Kennedy,
"The Pursuit of Justice" (1964)

Growth

"Growth has polluted our water and poisoned our air, and stripped us of contact with sunlight, trees, and lakes. Government has foundered as new agencies have proliferated, splitting tasks and energies among dozens of distant and unconnected bureaus. Individuals have lost touch with the institutions of society, even with one another; and thus have become more and more both perpetrators and victims of coldness, cruelty, and violence."
--Robert F. Kennedy

Underdeveloped

"We must turn the power and resources of our private enterprise system to the underdeveloped nation within our midst.

This should be done by bringing into the ghettos themselves productive and profitable private industry creating dignified jobs, not welfare handouts, for the men and youth who now languish in idleness."

--Robert F. Kennedy

Purpose VII

"The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better."
--Robert F. Kennedy