Threat II

"We want only peace, to build up our country. World opinion is paying great attention to the threat against Democratic Kampuchea. They are anxious. They fear Kampuchea cannot oppose the Vietnamese. This could hurt the interests of the Southeast Asian countries and all of the world's countries."
--Pol Pot,
Interview with Elizabeth Becker (December 22, 1978),
quoted in "Pol Pot remembered", BBC News (April 20, 1998)

Concealing

"You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms."
--Vladamir Lenin,
Letter to G. F. Fyodorov, August 9, 1918

Contender

"The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you."
--Philip Roth,
"The Human Stain"

Passive II

"Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling"

Dick Gregory, October 12, 1932 - August 19, 2017

I never learned hate at home or shame. I had to go to school for that.

I don't know why America always thinks she has to run all around the world forcing people to take our way of governance at the barrel of a gun. When you've got something really good, you don't have to force it on people. They will steal it!

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it.

 

In America, with all of its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun. But we don't know yet whether that sun is rising or setting for our country.

I buy about $1,500 worth of papers every month. Not that I trust them. I'm looking for the crack in the fabric.

Poems

"[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck--and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road."
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
New York Times (February 2, 1986).

Shrank

"Khedron was content with the order of things as it was. True, he might upset that order from time to time--but only by a little. He was a critic, not a revolutionary. On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples; he shrank from diverting its course."
--Arthur C. Clarke,
"The City and the Stars" (1956)

Pathology

"That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane."
--Erich Fromm,
"The Sane Society"

Advocates

"It is typical of today's culture that the proponents of seething, raging hostility are taken as advocates of love."
--Ayn Rand,
"Apollo and Dionysus" (1969)

Offended

"College presidents, provosts, and deans act as if they have discovered a Constitutional right for students not to be offended."
--Nat Hentoff

Cheese

"The early bird may get the worm, but it's the second mouse who gets the cheese."
--Steven Wright

Hypothesis

"The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a 'hypothesis,' but the word 'hypothesis,' though euphonious, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word 'guess.' If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word 'hypothesis.' When it is understood that 'hypothesis' means 'guess,' people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it."
--William Jennings Bryan,
"God and Evolution" (1922)

Moments II

"Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age."
--Booth Tarkington

Consequences

"We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance."
--Calvin Coolidge
(1873-1933), 30th US President

Matriculating

"I could teach an eighth-grader in twenty minutes how to brief a case. Yet for all three years in most law schools the casebook method of learning the law is still in. The matriculating young lawyer is as qualified to represent a client with the education he has suffered through as a doctor who has never seen a patient, who has never held a scalpel in his hand and who learns surgery by having read text books about it and becomes skilled in surgery, if ever, after having stacked up piles of corpses who represent his pathetic learning process."
--Gerry Spence

Cruel

"There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."
--Norman Mailer,
"The Deer Park" (1955)

Times IV

":Whether it is the best of times or the worst of times, it is the only time we've got."
--Art Buchwald

Unorthodox

"If we confuse dissent with disloyalty--if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox--if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the ... confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought."
--Edward R. Murrow,
Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show, CBS and NBC (June 1953)

Cleaner

"Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race."
--Margaret Sanger,
"Woman, Morality, and Birth Control" (1922).

Falterers

"No great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty."
--George Eliot
(pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans Cross)

Superstition II

"I know that millions of dollars have been spent to produce this splendid graduating class, and that the main hope of your teachers was, once they got through with you, that you would no longer be superstitious. I'm sorry--I have to undo that now. I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.

If you can believe that, and make others believe it, then there might be hope for us. Human beings might stop treating each other like garbage, might begin to treasure and protect each other instead. Then it might be all right to have babies again."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
Bennington College address (1970)

Greatness III

"They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?"
--H.G. Wells,
"The Food Of The Gods And How It Came To Earth" (1904)

Expensive

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever."
--James Baldwin

Literature

"We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement."
--B. F. Skinner,
"The Man and His Ideas" (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans

Negotiable

"We cannot negotiate with those who say, 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.'"
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Immortal

"Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal."
--George Orwell

Jealously

"Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies--that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself."
--T. Casey Brennan

Peril

"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."
--Joseph Heller,
"Catch-22"

Rigged

"If we are all god's children than why have we rigged the earth with dynamite and are flipping coins to see gets to set it off."
--Terence McKenna

Self-Determination

"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination--'that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth'. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."
--H.L. Mencken,
"Prejudices, Third Series" (1922)

Coalition

"Conspiracy is just another name for coalition."
--Robert Anton Wilson,
"The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Luigi Duccio"