Fifty

“Fifty years,” I hackneyed, “is a long time.”

“Not when you’re looking back at them,” she said. “You wonder how they vanished so quickly.”

--Issac Asimov,
"I, Robot" (1950)

Sum

"With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens,—A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
--Thomas Jefferson

Short II

"Life is too short to be living somebody else's dream."
--Hugh Hefner,
April 9, 1926 - September 27, 2017

Bored

"I'm insane. I'm fucked up. I have problems. But I don't get depressed and I don't get bored."
--Warren Zevon,
Quoted in David Bowman, Salon.com - "My Lunch with Warren Zevon," Salon.com (March 17, 2000)

Root II

A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root.
--Napoléon Bonaparte,
Statement (1803) as quoted in "The Mind of Napoleon" (1955) by J. Christopher Herold

Bound

"If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything."
--Franz Kafka,
"The Castle" (1926)

Flipping

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Reading

"I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will."
--Lewis H. Lapham,
"Money And Class In America" (1989)

Opposition III

"If the opposition disarms, all is well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves."
--Joseph Stalin,
"The Political Report of the Central Committee, The Fifteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.) (December 7, 1927)

Ladder

"You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself."
--Andrew Carnegie

Lag

"In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it."
--H.G. Wells,
"The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind" (1931)

Own II

"I may die a beggar, but with the Grace of God, I will not die a slave.
I will not be filed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered...
My life is my own."
--The Prisoner

First III

"If you're not going to offend somebody you don't need the First Amendment".
--Larry Flynt

Rooms

"I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideals."
--Charles Bukowski,
"Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993"

Readin'

"I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress."
--Bill Hicks

Resemblance

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
--Ronald Reagan,
Remarks at a business conference in Los Angeles (March 2, 1977)

Boat

"That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all."
--Philip K. Dick,
"A Scanner Darkly" (1977)

Attention

"The President of the Universe holds no real power. His sole purpose is to take attention away from where the power truly exists..."
--Douglas Adams,
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Destruction II

"I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger."
--Daniel Webster,
June 1, 1837

Truth IV

"If I'd written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people--including me--would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."
--Hunter S. Thompson
Rolling Stone, February 15, 1973


P.S. Happy Fake News Day!

TLC

Grow II

"Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging."
--Maya Angelou

Free IV

"For some people, being free means being free to keep their feet on someone else's chest."
--Mike Royko

Socialistic

"Every socialistic type of government...produces bad art, produces social inertia, produces really unhappy people, and it's more repressive than any other kind of government."
--Frank Zappa,
Interview, "My Afternoon with Frank Zappa", Larry Rogak, (New York writer and attorney) Zappa.com (May 8, 1980)

Mischief

"In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute."
--Edward Gibbon

Compensated

"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy."
--Woody Allen

Methods

"The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious—it makes little or no difference."
--Aldous Huxley

Wasted II

"A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him."
--George Orwell,
"Down and Out in Paris and London"

Self-Respecting

"A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours."
--Franklin D. Roosevelt

Tired III

"The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves."
--John L. Lewis

Time II

"Time is the most valuable thing on earth: time to think, time to act, time to extend our fraternal relations, time to become better men, time to become better women, time to become better and more independent citizens."
--Samuel Gompers