Plantation

I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college.

"Yale," he said.

I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called "Plantation Owners' Tech."

"I don't get it," he said.

"I had to ask her to explain it myself," I said. "She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
"Hocus Pocus" (1990)

Ennobled

"I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances—from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (May 16, 1967)

Security VII

"You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."
--Vincenzo Vinciguerra

Wishes II

"Then the question is, are we worried about the wishes of the patient or about the money involved?"
--Art Buchwald,
"Too Soon to Say Goodbye"

Optical

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
--Albert Einstein

Woven

"The whole Earth is the Sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on Stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives."
--Pericles

Mob

"When the mob gets involved in reasoning, all is lost."
--Voltaire

Fourth II

"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize--very publicly and very sincerely--to all the widows and the orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. I would then announce that America's global interventions--including the awful bombings--have come to an end. And I would inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but--oddly enough--a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings and invasions. There would be more than enough money. Do you know what one year of the US military budget is equal to? One year. It's equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ  was born. That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated."
--Wllliam Blum

Objectivity II

"I would not be fooled by the old myth that reporting is about objectivity. Deciding what is news is the most subjective of acts and it is probably the most important thing that we do."
--Carl Bernstein

Gratitude II

"To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or ... to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds."
--William F. Buckley Jr.

Barbaric II

"I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph."
--Winston Churchill,
Speech and interview at the University of Michigan, 1902.

Horrible III

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."
--Charles Bukowski

Malcontent

"Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."
-- Hunter S. Thompson,
"The Rum Diary"

Professionalization

"Is it any wonder that Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, that of pre-empting the teaching function, which, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"

Plant III

"Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food."
--Genesis 1:29

Burned

"In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake."
--Hans Christian Andersen

Flock II

"Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed - first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf."
--Gerry Spence

Harshly

"And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"
--H.G. Wells,
"The War Of The Worlds"

Lines

"If you give me six lines written by the most honest man,
I will find something in them to hang him."
--Cardinal Richelieu
(1585-1642)

Terrorized

"Once the people are terrorized, you can force a police state on them."
--Mae Brussell

Grow III

"It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."
--Mitch Albom,
"Tuesdays with Morrie"

UPDATE, November 21, 2024: Actually the quote is from -Morrie Schwartz, about whom the book "Tuesdays With Morrie" is about.

Luminous

"I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere."
--Carrie Fisher,
"Postcards from the Edge"

Notice

"But the plans were on display..."
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn't you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

--Douglas Adams,
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Veneer

"This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart."
--Bill Hicks

Energies

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right."
--H.L. Mencken,
"Minority Report"

Unhappy II

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none."
--Ray Bradbury,
"Fahrenheit 451"

Massacre

"Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre."
--Philip Roth,
"Everyman"

Euphorics

"Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory--all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, far everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots--all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics--chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates."
--Aldous Huxley,
"The Doors Of Perception"

Rampant II

"No wonder prostitution is so rampant in China, I mused as I watched the four girls watch us: why stand on your feet all day for slave wages when you can get rich on your back?"
--Tom Carter,
"Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China"

Closest

"A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king."
--Criss Jami,
"Killosophy"