Science III

"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
--Robert A. Heinlein,
"Time Enough For Love: The Lives Of Lazarus Long" (1973)

Categories

"I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable."
--Woody Allen,
"Annie Hall" (Screenplay)

Alarms

"We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read."
--Abraham Lincoln,
Speech at Bloomington (May 29, 1856)

Easier IV

"War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it is easier to send an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves...."
--Lewis H. Lapham

Raindrops

"Raindrops make rivers and ocean - our deep intention and positive actions will make the world free from nuclear weapons and wars."
--Amit Ray,
"Peace on the Earth A Nuclear Weapons Free World"

Refuse

"I write you this letter because I am sorry to know that you and your people refuse to do what the government has ordered. You do not give up your arms. Soldiers were sent to Taglibi so that you could come into camp and turn in your guns. When the soldiers went to camp a Taglibi, your Moros fired into camp and tried to kill the soldiers. Then the soldiers had to shoot all Moros who fired upon them. When the soldiers marched through the country, the Moros again shot at them, so the soldiers had to kill several others. I am sorry the soldiers had to kill any Moros. All Moros are the same to me as my children and no father wants to kill his own children. ... I want to see all of my people and speak to them so that we may forever be friends."
--John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing,
"My Life Before the World War, 1860--1917: A Memoir"

Foxholes

"When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one either."
--George Patton, June 5, 1944
Speech To The Third Army

Control VII

"Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without."
--Ivan Pavlov,
"Scientific Study of So-Called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals"

Overt

"The Party is not interested in the overt act.  The thought is all we care about."
--George Orwell

Dragon

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."
--J.R.R. Tolkien

Martial

"But our great security lies, I think, in our growing strength, both in numbers and wealth; ...unless, by a neglect of military discipline, we should lose all martial spirit...; for there is much truth in the Italian saying, Make yourselves sheep, and the wolves will eat you."
--Benjamin Franklin,
Letter to Thomas Cushing (1773).

Impression

"School is the first impression children get of organized society.
Like most first impressions it is the lasting one.
Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief.
And other products, too, of course."
--John Taylor Gatto
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: "The Underground History of American Education", 2001

Questions III

"There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to."
--Joseph Heller,
"Catch-22"

Essential II

"The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society."
--Thomas I. Emerson (1907-1991)
Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Toward A General Theory of the First Amendment, 1966

Ages II

"Let's do it right. This is for the ages."
--I. M. Pei
Ieoh Ming Pei, April 16, 1917 - May 16, 2019

Imperial

Who brought this to pass?
   
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
   
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
   
Barbarous kings.
  
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
   
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
   
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
 
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.

--Ezra Pound,
"'Lament of the Frontier Guard"
(from the book, "Cathay", 1915)

Grand

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
--Aldous Huxley,
"Brave New World"

Plunder III

"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection, it is plunder."
--Benjamin Disraeli
(1804-1881)
Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist

Inculcate

"There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Brief

"For a brief time, I was here; and, for a brief time, I mattered."
--Harlan Ellison,
"The Essential Ellison" (1987)

Understand II

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
--Albert Einstein

Incapable

Interviewer: HAL, you have an enormous responsibility on this mission, in many ways perhaps the greatest responsibility of any single mission element. You're the brain, and central nervous system of the ship, and your responsibilities include watching over the men in hibernation. Does this ever cause you any lack of confidence?

HAL: Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.

--"2001: A Space Odyssey"

Couldn't II

"They said it couldn't be done
        but sometimes
 it doesn't work out that way."
--Casey Stengel
[Charles Dillon Stengel] (1890-1975) Legendary baseball manager

Totalization

"Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder."
--Thomas Molnar,
"Utopia: The Perennial Heresy" (1967)

Next V

"Never give up. No one knows what's going to happen next."
--L. Frank Baum,
"The Patchwork Girl of Oz"

Rows

"Rows and rows of products, because our food lacks nutrition and we're being poisoned".
--TLC

Gentility

"At this juncture, the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in a room with the sociocultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter's pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped. The spirit of Hannibal Lecter is thus at the core of an expansionist European 'civilization' which has reached out to engulf the planet."
--Ward Churchill,
"A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust & Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present"

Assistance

“They said 'specialist children's wards,'
But they meant children-killing centers.
They said 'final medical assistance'
But they meant murder.”
―Ann Clare LeZotte

Chains II

"I am in chains. Don't touch my chains."
--Franz Kafka

Redemptive

"I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mirror II

"I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
--Steve Jobs