Anything VII

"When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the [many] believe almost anything you want, and you can guide them."
--Gore Vidal,
"The Golden Age"

Tyrannical

Morton Downey Jr.: Your solutions, on stopping drug trade, is, give up, give up to world drugs. I say zero tolerance, we use the military for aid, we stop it from getting into the country, we cut it off at the source. Why give up on that fight?

Ron Paul: What we give up on is a tyrannical approach to solving a social and medical problem, and We endorse the idea of voluntarism, self-responsibility, family, friends, and churches to solve problems, rather than saying that some monolithic government is going to make you take care of yourself and be a better person. It's a preposterous notion, it never worked, it never will. The government can't make you a better person, it can't make you follow good habits. Why don't they put you on a diet; you're a little overweight, and i think you need government help!

--The Morton Downey Jr. Show, July 4, 1988

Finish

"Let's save the human race, let's finish off the U.S. empire."
--Hugo Chávez,
on the Islamic Republic Medal ceremony at Tehran University in Iran. July 30th, 2006

Credit

"Laws are maintained in credit,
not because they are essentially just,
but because they are laws.
It is the mystical foundation
of their authority;
they have none other."
--Michel de Montaigne
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays, 1575

Concept

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... They are not our brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life..."
--Henry Beston,
"The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod"

Terrifying

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
--Ronald Reagan

React II

"I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like [Barack] Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues."
--Nat Hentoff

Inspired

Spock: Check.
  
Kirk: Checkmate.
   
Spock: Your illogical approach to chess does have its advantages on occasion, Captain.
  
 Kirk: I'd prefer to call it inspired.
   
Spock: As you wish.

--Star Trek (Original),
Episode "Charlie X"

Practical II

"Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong."
--Russell Baker
(August 14, 1925 - January 21, 2019)
"Back to the Dump"

Shackles II

"Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles."
--Gerry Spence

Dichotomy

"One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practice the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

38

"You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Moving

"If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Continuous III

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bootstraps

"It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Nose

"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Casualty

"As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war."
--Lewis Lapham,
"Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy"

Wish II

"As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified."
--Jack Kevorkian,
Quoted in "Years of Minutes" Andy Rooney (2f004)

Measure V

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."
--Abbie Hoffman

Cannibalism

"If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday."
--H.L. Mencken,
The American Mercury (March 1936) - referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Recall

"And recall, it was the FDA that approved Vioxx, which led to more than sixty thousand deaths."
--Jim Marrs,
"Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us"

Involved

Luke: Alderaan? I'm not going to Alderaan. I've got to go home. It's late, I'm in for it as it is.
   
Obi-Wan: I need your help, Luke. She needs your help. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing.
   
Luke: Listen, I can't get involved! I've got work to do! It's not that I like the Empire, I hate it, but there's nothing I can do about it right now. It's such a long way from here.

--"Star Wars"
(First Movie)

Armies II

"To California or any place--every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. And some day--the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And they'll all walk together, and there'll be a dead terror from it."
--John Steinbeck,
"The Grapes Of Wrath"

Mythology II

"Property taxes' rank right up there with 'income taxes' in terms of immorality and destructiveness. Where 'income taxes' are simply slavery using different words, 'property taxes' are just a Mafia turf racket using different words. For the former, if you earn a living on the gang's turf, they extort you. For the latter, if you own property in their territory, they extort you. The fact that most people still imagine both to be legitimate and acceptable shows just how powerful authoritarian indoctrination is. Meanwhile, even a brief objective examination of the concepts should make anyone see the lunacy of it. 'Wait, so every time I produce anything or trade with anyone, I have to give a cut to the local crime lord??' 'Wait, so I have to keep paying every year, for the privilege of keeping the property I already finished paying for??' And not only do most people not make such obvious observations, but if they hear someone else pointing out such things, the well-trained Stockholm Syndrome slaves usually make arguments condoning their own victimization. Thus is the power of the mind control that comes from repeated exposure to BS political mythology and propaganda."
--Larken Rose

Crushed

"Limiting the power of government, in order to liberate the individual, was the great American revolutionary insight. Too much cooperation, avoiding conflict from ordinary people, these things aren’t acceptable in America although they may suit China, Indonesia, Britain, or Germany just fine. In America the absence of conflict is a sign of  regression toward a global mean, hardly progress by our lights if you’ve seen much of the governance of the rest of the world where common people are crushed like annoying insects if they argue."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling"

Sentiments

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
--Adam Smith,
"The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759)

Strenuous II

"In these strenuous times, we are likely to become morbid and look constantly on the dark side of life, and spend entirely too much time considering and brooding over what we can't do, rather than what we can do, and instead of growing morose and despondent over opportunities either real or imaginary that are shut from us, let us rejoice at the many unexplored fields in which there is unlimited fame and fortune to the successful explorer and upon which there is no color line; simply the survival of the fittest."
--George Washington Carver

Delicious

I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set.

--Frank Zappa,
 "I'm the Slime"

Shadows IV

"...nearly all men are afraid, and they don’t even know what causes their fear--shadows, perplexities, dangers without names or numbers, fear of a faceless death. But if you can bring yourself to face not shadows but real death, then you need never be afraid again, at least not in the same way you were before. Then you will be a man set apart from other men, safe where other men may cry in terror. This is the great reward."
--John Steinbeck,
"East Of Eden"

Two-Bit

"How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show--it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak"
--Robert A. Heinlein

Imagination IV

"I have found that--just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience."
--Steve Martin,
"An Object Of Beauty"