Saturday, March 31, 2018

Transform II

"As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation--either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Friday, March 30, 2018

Without IV

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless,
and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."
--Dr. Samuel Johnson
(1709-1784)

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Quarantines

"Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made."
--Norman Mailer,
"Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (1960)

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Tyrants IV

"The purpose of the Second Amendment’s is not to protect your right to shoot deer, it's to protect your right to shoot tyrants when they take over the government".
--Andrew Napolitano

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Sage

"When we think of the past,
we forget the fools and remember the sage.
We reverse the process for our own time."
--George Boas
(1891-1980) Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University

Monday, March 26, 2018

Tricked

"He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do--he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest."
--Upton Sinclair,
"Metropolis" (1908)

Infected

"Grandfather's [B.F. Skinner's] theories infected my mother's life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy?  How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?"
--Mary Loretta Hartley,
"Breaking the Silence" (1990)

Saturday, March 24, 2018

Stew

"Society is like a stew.  If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top."
--Edward Abbey

Friday, March 23, 2018

Flagrant

"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
--George Orwell

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Auxiliary

"A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." 
--James Madison (1751-1836), 
Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US PresidentSource: Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Incomprehensible

"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true."
--Franz Kafka,
"Description of a Struggle".

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Open II

"Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated."
--Saul Bellow
(1915-2005) Canadian author, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976

Monday, March 19, 2018

Hopelessness

"That feeling of hopelessness only serves your masters."
--Mort Sahl

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Crazes

"Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury."
--H.L. Mencken,
"In Defense Of Women"

Empire II

"The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity--a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop."
--Issac Asimov,
"The Foundation Series"

Switch II

[Janie Crane presses a button on a television, turning it off.]
Janie Crane: "An off switch?"
Metrocop: "She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!"

--Max Headroom (TV Series)

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Ability IV

"I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home. We don't have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It's not about duck hunting; it's about the ability of the individual. It's the same reason we have freedom of speech."
--Vince Vaughn
(1970-) American actor, producer, screenwriter, and comedian
Source: British GQ

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Disabled

"If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can."

--Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942 - March 14, 2018),
"Handicapped People and Science" by Stephen Hawking, Science Digest 92, No. 9 (September 1984): 92

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Reform VI

"Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons."
--John Ruskin
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic

Monday, March 12, 2018

Educated III

"It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be educated."
--Edith Hamilton,
Saturday Evening Post (September 27, 1958)

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Remain

"All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end."
--J.M. Barrie,
"Peter Pan"

Saturday, March 10, 2018

Overtasked

"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Friday, March 09, 2018

Better IV

"Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake."
--Pol Pot

"If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response."
--Richard B. Cheney

Thursday, March 08, 2018

Expanding

"If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?"
--Steven Wright

Wednesday, March 07, 2018

Motivate

"People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents."
--Andrew Carnegie

Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Might IV

"Do not expect justice where might is right."
--Plato
(429-347 BC)
Source: Phaedrus, 360 B.C.

Monday, March 05, 2018

Unrestricted

"Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element."
--Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)

Sunday, March 04, 2018

Matches

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches."
--Ray Bradbury

Saturday, March 03, 2018

Shaping

"... political reporters love to write about politics as if they are merely disinterested observers of political events and the public's perceptions of them, when in fact they play a very key role in shaping those events and perceptions."
--Greg Sargent,
Columnist for the Los Angeles Times

Friday, March 02, 2018

Self-Respect

"We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and--in spite of True Romance magazines--we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely--at least, not all the time--but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness."
--Hunter S. Thompson,
"The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967"

Thursday, March 01, 2018

Path II

"The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism did not begin in the ‘30s and ‘40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to the consolidation of power in central government in the name of “social justice.” It was decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of extermination and genocide, who built the Trojan Horse for Hitler to take over. We Americans promote disrespect for our Constitution, rule of law and private property in our pursuit of “social justice.” But the scum that rises to the top has an agenda of command and control that’s leading toward totalitarianism. And, incidentally, it’s no coincidence that most of those at the top are lawyers -- people with a special, seemingly tutored, contempt for our Constitution and rule of law."
--Walter E. Williams
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: Conservative Chronicle, September 20, 1995