Dancing

V: Would you... dance with me?

Evey Hammond: Now? On the eve of your revolution?

V: A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having!

--"V For Vendetta" (Movie)

Formed

"A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Appointed II

"And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above."
--Robert Anton Wilson,
"The Illuminatus! Trilogy" (1975)

Chickens

A baby eagle became orphaned when something happened to his parents. He glided down to the ground from his nest but was not yet able to fly. A man picked him up. The man took him to a farmer and said, "This is a special kind of barnyard chicken that will grow up big." The farmer said, "Don’t look like no barnyard chicken to me."  "Oh yes, it is. You will be glad to own it." The farmer took the baby eagle and placed it with his chickens.

The baby eagle learned to imitate the chickens. He could scratch the ground for grubs and worms too. He grew up thinking he was a chicken.

Then one day an eagle flew over the barnyard. The eagle looked up and wondered, "What kind of animal is that? How graceful, powerful, and free it is." Then he asked another chicken, "What is that?" The chicken replied, "Oh, that is an eagle. But don’t worry yourself about that. You will never be able to fly like that."

And the eagle went back to scratching the ground. He continued to behave like the chicken he thought he was. Finally he died, never knowing the grand life that could have been his.

--Author Unknown

Banned

"The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us--it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind...  You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
--Ray Bradbury,
As quoted in "Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of ‘Fahrenheit 451’", interview by Misha Berson, in The Seattle Times (March 12, 1993)

Unless IV

"Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice."
--Aldous Huxley,
forward to the 1946 edition of "Brave New World"

Ravagers

"Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers."
--Barbara Tuchman,
"A Distant Mirror" (1978)

Retain

"At a time in our history when the streets of the Nation's cities inspire fear and despair, rather than pride and hope, it is difficult to maintain objectivity and concern for our fellow citizens. But, the measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis. No nation in the recorded history of man has a greater tradition of revering justice and fair treatment for all its citizens in times of turmoil, confusion, and tension than ours. This is a country which stands tallest in troubled times, a country that clings to fundamental principles, cherishes its constitutional heritage, and rejects simple solutions that compromise the values that lie at the roots of our democratic system."

--Thurgood Marshall,
Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, Concurring opinion (January 17, 1972)

Pilled

When at last we are sure
You’ve been properly pilled,
Then a few paper forms
Must be properly filled
So that you and your heirs
May be properly billed.

--Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"You're Only Old Once!: A Book for Obsolete Children" (1986)

Wait

"Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"

Nothing VII

"To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy."
--Hippocrates

Voting

"The only problem with voting is no matter who you vote for the government always gets in."
--Andrew P. Napolitano

Dogma

"Dogma demand authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic hatred."
--Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970) Philosopher, educator

Traditionally

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."
-- Margaret Thatcher
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979 - 1990)
Source: February 5, 1976, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'

Watch

"Television is where you watch people in your living room that you would not want near your house."
--Groucho Marx

Modes

"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."
--Edward Gibbon,
"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

Urgency

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there 'is' such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Purveyor

"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own Government, I can not be Silent."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Walking II

"We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Adventurous

"We need to be bold and adventurous in our thinking in order to survive."
--William O. Douglas

Hats II

"These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong."
--James W. Douglass,
"JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters"

Reincarnated

"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."
--Prince Phillip

Abiding

"I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage."
--Edward R. Murrow

Permission II

"Stop asking for permission where none is needed"

--Robert Scott Bell

Fantasy

"I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."

Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

--Thomas Pynchon,
"The Crying of Lot 49"

Lingers

"Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die."
--Albert Camus,
"The Sea Close By" in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970)

Neurosis

"Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes."
--Julian Mitchell,
"As Far as You Can Go" (1963)

Scraped

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
--George Orwell

Hard II

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
--H.L. Mencken,
"A Little Book in C Major"

Ignorance III

"The enemies of a people are those who keep them in ignorance."
--Thomas Sankara

Pebble

"To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know."
--Issac Asimov,
"Pebble In The Sky" (1950)