Chance II

"The man who leaves nothing to chance will do few things badly, but he will do very few things."
--Lord Halifax (1881-1959)
English statesman

Bedfellows

You know it's true that politics does make for strange bedfellows. I read a quote from Saddam Hussein two days after the [Clinton] election, we had to wait two days for him to quit gut laughing. "Aaaahahahahaha, the elephant is dead," Saddam Hussein says in his quote, "we have nothing against America, we just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the road like a soccerball." And I thought: that's so weird, 'cause … that's what I wanted to see! Wow, me and Hussein, we're like this! Who would'a thunk it?!
--Bill Hicks

Film

"I don't like film. Film is too clankingly real, too permanent, too industrial for me. … The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusions. It makes them impossible. It's a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Between Time and Timbuktu" (1972)

Rational

"[There can be no] rational administration of government when good men are held in the same esteem as bad ones."
--Polybius
(ca. 203-120 BC,) Greek historian

Marched II

"Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted--sometimes with guns--by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"

Stored

"Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go. That's your charge."
--David R. Brower, in an interview with Studs Terkel, but much of it is sometimes misattributed to Terkel himself.

Practices

"Many people profess Christianity. Very few live it-almost none. And when you live it people may think you're crazy. It has been truthfully said that the world is equally shocked by one who repudiates Christianity as by one who practices it."
--Peace Pilgrim

Superstitions

"Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either."
--Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)

Superior II

"The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him.  It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself."
--Joseph Sobran
(1946-2010) Columnist

Meteors

"Great people are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted."
--Napoleon Bonaparte

Class

"I know no class of my fellowmen,
however just, enlightened, and humane,
which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely
with the liberties of any other class."
--Frederick Douglass
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era

Remembered II

"When I went to the Yellow Cab Company I passed the Cancer Building and I remembered that there were worse things than looking for a job you didn't want."
--Charles Bukowski

Intention

Part of how we come to take command of our world, to take command of our environment, to make these tools by which we're able to do this, is we ask ourselves questions about it the whole time. So this man starts to ask himself questions. "This world," he says, "so who made it?" Now, of course he thinks that, because he makes things himself. So he's looking for someone who would have made this world. He says, "Well, so who would have made this world? Well, it must be something a little like me. Obviously much much bigger. And necessarily invisible. But he would have made it. Now why did he make it?" Now we always ask ourselves "why?" because we look for intention around us; because we always intend– we do something with intention. We boil an egg in order to eat it. So we look at the rocks, and we look at the trees, and we wonder what intention is here even though it doesn't have intention.
--Douglas Adams
"Parrots, the Universe and Everything" (2001)

Mutants

"Here I am saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr. deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us. Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn't seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as where we would wind up going. It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren't."
--Philip K. Dick
Story notes for The Golden Man (1953), in the short story anthology The Golden Man (1980)

Tale

"In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle."
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Holiday

"Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized. Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinate. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. Stability was practically assured."
--Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"

Vending

"The field of Western medicine has seemingly become literally nothing but medicine. Are doctors are on their way out, to be replaced by self-service pharmaceutical vending machines?"
--Terri Guillemets, "Prescribed," 2004

Coconuts

"150 people die every year from being hit by falling coconuts. Not to worry, drug makers are developing a vaccine."
--Jim Carrey, Tweet, November 20, 2009

Slipping

"When you no longer know what headache, heartache, or stomachache means without cistern punctures, electrocardiograms and six x-ray plates, you are slipping."
--Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

Constitution

"Physicians and politicians resemble one another in this respect, that some defend the constitution and others destroy it."
--Author unknown

Premature

"It is a good thing for a physician to have prematurely grey hair and itching piles. The first makes him appear to know more than he does, and the second gives him an expression of concern which the patient interprets as being on his behalf."
--A. Benson Cannon

MD II

"We are in the age of M.D., medical darkness, which seeks legislative protection from the light."
--James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897

Medi-Sin

"Western medicine is a medi-sin. When did we get away from nature?"
--Terri Guillemets,
"Pills," 2004

Candle II

"My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -- it gives a lovely light!"
--Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Stars II

 "Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television."
--Paul Hawken, in A Sense of Wonder,

Making

"But to hear Kennedy when he was grandstanding in front of the McClellan Committee you might have thought I was making as much out of the pension fund as the Kennedys made out of selling whiskey."
--James R. Hoffa

Depriving

"In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lieutenants

"There is certainly...something wrong in that form of unionism whose leaders are the lieutenants of capitalism."
--Eugene V. Debs

Association

"With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men."
--Clarence Darrow

Hope III

"Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent."
--Jean Kerr