Thursday, November 30, 2017

Growing II

"When a child first catches adults out--when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just--his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
--John Steinbeck,
"East Of Eden"

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Acquisition

"'The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.'"
--Leo Tolstoy,
"Anna Karenina"

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Participation II

"Psychologically, nothing is darker or more menacing, or harder to accept, than the participation of physicians in mass murder. However technicized or commercial the modern physician may have become, he or she is still supposed to be a healer--and one responsible to a tradition of healing, which all cultures revere and depend upon."
--Robert Jay Lifton

Monday, November 27, 2017

Enforced

"No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic."
--H. L. Mencken

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Responsibility VII

"What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business, possessed of great wealth, in which all citizens had a right to share... Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result... If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms."
--Edith Hamilton,
"The Echo of Greece" (1957)

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Victory III

"We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win."
--Edward Gibbon

Friday, November 24, 2017

Autobiography

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Decent IV

"What we have done with the American Indian is its way as bad as what we imposed on the Negroes. We took a proud and independent race and virtually destroyed them. We have to find ways to bring them back into decent lives in this country."
--Richard Nixon

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Lives

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on."
-- John F. Kennedy,
May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Abolished

"Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable .. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."
--John F. Kennedy

Monday, November 20, 2017

Afraid II

"Conservatives are afraid the people WON'T understand; Liberals are afraid the people WILL understand!!!"
--Author Unknown

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Atrocities II

"We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment."
--J.M. Coetzee,
"The Lives of Animals"

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Paradoxes

"One of the paradoxes of our age is the fact that the intellectuals, the politicians, and all the sundry voices that choke like asthma the throat of our communications media, have never gasped and stuttered so loudly about their devotion to the public good, and about the people's will as the supreme criterion of value - and never have they been so grossly indifferent to the people. The reason, obviously, is that collectivist slogans serve as the rationalization for those who intend, not to follow the people, but to rule them."
--Ayn Rand,
"Apollo and Dionysus" (1969)

Friday, November 17, 2017

Sweaty

"The best things in life make you sweaty."
--Author Unknown

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Center

"The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage--and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still--I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
Bennington College address (1970)

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Races

"There are only two races (and they are not distinguished by color): those who are free and those who are not."
--Gerry Spence

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Extreme

"Why, look at me. I've worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty."
--Groucho Marx

Monday, November 13, 2017

Advocate

"Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy."
--Louis Farrakhan

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Separates

"From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences--the experiences of sense."
--Aldous Huxley,
"One and Many"

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Dangerous V

"If none of us ever read a book that was 'dangerous,' had a friend who was 'different,' or joined an organization that advocated 'change,' we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants."
--Edward R. Murrow,
Speech to his staff (1954)

Friday, November 10, 2017

Back

"Have taken Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do? Give it back?"

--George S. Patton,
Reply to a message from General Dwight Eisenhower to bypass the German city of Trier because it would take four divisions to capture it (March 2, 1945), as quoted in the Introduction to War as I Knew it (1947) by George Smith Patton, Jr., with Paul Donal Harkins.

Thursday, November 09, 2017

Catastrophe

"Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets."
--Lewis H. Lapham,
"Money And Class In America" (1989)

Wednesday, November 08, 2017

Injustice II

"If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom."
--Stefan Molyneux

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Action IV

"It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. There's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action."
--Tom Smothers

Monday, November 06, 2017

Oak

"Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut, that held its ground."
--David Icke

Sunday, November 05, 2017

Accountable II

"And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you..."

--"V For Vendetta" (Movie)

Saturday, November 04, 2017

Statue

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
--George Orwell,
"1984"

Friday, November 03, 2017

Voiceprint

Female computerized voice: "Welcome to Voiceprint Identification. When you see the red light go on, would you please state in the following order: your destination, your nationality, and your full name; surname first, Christian name and initial."

--2001: A Space Odyssey

Thursday, November 02, 2017

Glide

"We are on a nice downward glide. I call it circling the drain … And the circles get smaller and smaller and faster and faster, if you watch the sink empty... Huish! And we'll be gone. And that's fine. I welcome it. I wish I could live 1000 years to watch it happen. From a distance — so I can see it all."
--George Carlin,
Archive of American Television, from one of Carlin's final interviews (2008)

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Swarms

"We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us."
--Margaret Sanger,
"The Pivot of Civilization"