Wretched

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."
--Eugene Debs

Fundamental III

"There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man... We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is a result of our emotions - love apathy, charity of malice - and what part is predetermines by the constant power play among individuals.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buries from view), consists of attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental débâcle, a débâcle so fundamental all others stem from it."
--Milan Kundera,
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Avail

"No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor."
--Andrew Carnegie

Carriers

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print."
--Barbara Tuchman

Sense III

"The world doesn't make sense until you force it to."
--Batman
(Frank Miller)

Candidate

"Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity."
--Neil Simon
(July 4, 1927 - August 26, 2018)

Punctually

"A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already."
--Lin Yutang,
"The Importance Of Living" (1937)

Darwin

"There were four million people in the American Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!"
--Mort Sahl

Ability V

"I have two things going for me. The first is the fidelity to my principles, and the other is my ability to show up for the fight every day. Period that."
--Ron Dellums

Empires

"Empires are not innocent, absentminded, accidental, unintentional aggressions; they are given force by purpose driven rulers who consciously have to mobilize vast amounts of men and materials to conquer and plunder far off places. The British didn't just happen to find themselves in India."
--Michael Parenti

Risk VII

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
--T.S. Eliot,
Preface to "Transit of Venus: Poems" by Harry Crosby (1931)

Aims

"The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand."
--George Orwell

Shield

"Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit... So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves."
--Ogden Nash,
Commencement address at his daughter Linell's boarding school, as quoted in The Washington Post (May 8, 2005)

Resilient

"Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow."
--Joseph Heller

Fifty II

"Fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class - Hope your surgery went well!"
--Simone Elkeles,
"Rules Of Attraction (Perfect Chemistry, #2)"

Psychic

"In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell."
--Norman Mailer,
"The Fourth Presidential Paper--Foreign Affairs : Letter To Castro"

Disagreeing

"She [Ayn Rand] was supposed to be on my show; I was kind of sorry she wasn’t, because I was kind of laying for her. I did not succumb, as a kid, to being enthused by Ayn Rand, and that sense of power, as every kid was at one time until they outgrew it. The old bag sent over a list of fifteen conditions for appearing with me, or for appearing with anyone, I guess. One of them was, 'There will be no disagreeing with Ms. Rand’s philosophy.' [...] I wrote at the bottom of the list, to be sent back to her, 'There will be no Ms. Rand, either.'"
--Dick Cavett,
a conversation from an interview by Elon Green (2014)

Reforms

"It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression."
--Aldous Huxley,
"Ends and Means" (1937)

Unruly

"The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a 'turbulence and a folly' that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob."
--Lewis H. Lapham,
"Waiting For The Barbarians" (1997)

Expectations IV

"One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas — and you have to work through it all."
--V. S. Naipaul
(August 17, 1932 - August 11, 2018)
Quoted in "V.S. Naipaul in Search of Himself: A Conversation" with Mel Gussow, The New York Times, (April 24, 1994)

Rooting

"Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians."
--Wilhelm Reich

Disturbed

"My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers."
--Woody Allen

Binds

"Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit."
--Michel Houellebecq,                                                                                                                             "The Elementary Particles"

Intolerance

"It's an universal law--intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

React

"From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: 'What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.' He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed."
-- Jon Rappoport
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: "The Underground"

Bound II

"I'm a sociopath. I look normal, but I'm not. I'm smarter, better, and freer, because I'm not bound by rules, law, emotion or regard for you."
--Lisa Scottoline,
"Every Fifteen Minutes"

Workable

"It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's marriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and segregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a few great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens, as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it is tyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing."
--G.K. Chesterton

Stab

"Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime."
--Mineko Iwasaki

Straitjacket II

"Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen."
--Rebecca McKinsey

Treasure

"No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire."
-- L. Frank Baum,
"The Lost Princess of Oz"

Rod

"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph"
--Tom Wolfe,
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968)