Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Skid

"You won't skid if you stay in a rut."
--Kin Hubbard

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Rush

"They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea."
--Horace

Monday, August 29, 2016

Beard

"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Route

"A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time."
--Milan Kundera

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Completed

"No one has ever completed their apprenticeship."
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Friday, August 26, 2016

Philosophies

"For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you."
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Rub

"If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?"
--Rumi

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

House

If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master, more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that's what we call them today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here.
--Malcolm X

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Pediments

"Well aware of both the continuity and contingency of human affairs, Adams and Madison searched the works of Tacitus and Voltaire and Locke like carpenters rummaging through their assortment of tools, knowing that all the pediments were jury-rigged, all the provisional, all the alliances temporary."
--Lewis H. Lapham
"Waiting For The Barbarians" (1997)

Monday, August 22, 2016

Follow II

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
--Steve Jobs
Stanford University commencement address (June 12, 2005)

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Reluctantly

"These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion."
--Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: "War and Non-Resistance," Atlantic Monthly, August 1915, p. 274.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Plunder II

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
--Frederic Bastiat
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)

Friday, August 19, 2016

Lemonade

"If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds ... its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos."
--Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Source: Democracy–The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Cleansing

"If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, "political cleansing" squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Internet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of "acceptable" attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism."
--Charles W. Moore
Source: Barquentine Ventures Online Journal, 8 July 1999

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Where III

"You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"
--Gore Vidal
Interview by Mike Sager, Esquire, (June 2008)

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Facade

"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

Monday, August 15, 2016

Overgrown

"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."
--James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Speech, Constitutional Convention (1787-06-29), from Max Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. I[1] (1911), p. 465

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Respectable

"Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery."
--Gerry Spence
"Give Me Liberty! Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century"v

Technocracy

"We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other."
--C. S. Lewis
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958

Friday, August 12, 2016

Drugs

"I've never had a problem with drugs.  I've had problems with the police."
--Keith Richards
(1943-) British musician, songwriter and founding member of The Rolling Stones

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Tired II

"People are tired of liberty.
They have had a surfeit of it.
Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin...
Today’s youth are moved by other slogans...
Order, Hierarchy, Discipline."
--Benito Mussolini
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: Speech, March 1923

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Gauge

“Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given 12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened."
--R. Lerner

Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Whatever

"Whatever power you give politicians and bureaucrats to use against other people will eventually be used by future politicians and bureaucrats against you."
--Michael Boldin
Founder of Tenth Amendment Center

Monday, August 08, 2016

Predominantly

"[T]he courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.... The mere fact that a school is black does not mean that it is the product of an unconstitutional violation."
--Justice Clarence Thomas
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Missouri v. Kalima Jenkins, 115 S. Ct. 2038 (1995) (concurring).

Sunday, August 07, 2016

Safe III

"Let me get a sip of water here...you figure this stuff is safe to drink? [audience yells "No"] Actually, I don't care, I drink it anyway. You know why? 'Cause I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water. I'm a loyal American and I'm not happy unless I let government and industry poison me a little bit every day."
--George Carlin

Saturday, August 06, 2016

Umpires

"[The Yippie demonstrations] were merely an attack of mental disobedience on an obediently insane society ... and if you feel you have been living in an unreal world for the last couple of years, it is particularly because this power structure has refused to listen to reason ... Step outside the guidelines of the official umpires and make your own rules and your own reality."
--Phil Ochs
As quoted in "An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Period" (1990) by Charles DeBenedetti, p. 223

Friday, August 05, 2016

Hazard

I think it's interesting the two drugs that are legal, alcohol and cigarettes, two drugs that do absolutely nothing for you at all, are legal, and the drugs that might open your mind up to realize how badly you're being f***ed every day of your life? Those drugs are against the law. He-heh, coincidence? See, I'm glad mushrooms are against the law, 'cause I took 'em one time, and you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours going, "My God! I love everything." Yeah, Now, if that isn't a hazard to our country... how are we gonna justify arms dealing if we know we're all one?!
--Bill Hicks
November 11, 1992

Thursday, August 04, 2016

Pretensions

"That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
--H. L. Mencken
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Enormous

"The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
--Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author

Tuesday, August 02, 2016

Dissonance

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."
--Alan Bullock
[Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock] (1914-2004) British historian
Source: in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991)

Monday, August 01, 2016

Learning VI

"School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony."
--John Taylor Gatto