Brevity

"When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death."
--Clarence Darrow,
"The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow"

Submission

"Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man."
--Barbara Tuchman,
"A Distant Mirror" (1978)

Round

"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."
--Ray Bradbury,
"Fahrenheit 451" (1953)

Nowhere

"It was ready-made for them to call an emergency and pretend it was war-time, you know, the war on terrorism is a metaphor, and terrorism is an abstract noun. It's like a 'war on dandruff.' There's no such thing, you know. It isn't war, it's just a slogan. But using the slogan they got through the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which removes many of our liberties. Nobody made a sound when we lost Habeas Corpus--due process of law--and suddenly Bush managed to get rid of it. Where was a voice on television, aside from mine, that spoke out against this? Where were all those noble jurists, those great lawyers, those lovers of liberty, where the hell were they? They were nowhere!"
--Gore Vidal,
"Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (Documentary, 2013)

Exhausted

"It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness."
--Edward Gibbon,
"The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire", Volume 1 (1776)

Fidelity

"Fidelity to the public requires that the laws be as plain and explicit as possible, that the less knowing may understand, and not be ensnared by them, while the artful evade their force."
--Samuel Cooke
(1709-1783) Pastor of the Second Church in Cambridge
Source: May 30, 1770, Sermon before the Massachusets Bay provincial House of Representatives

Forgotten

"A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten."
--John F. Kennedy

Prevent II

"That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"

Immune

"Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity."
--Aldous Huxley,
"Brave New World Revisited"

Told

"The American people are free to do exactly what they are told."
--Ward Churchill

Lonely

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with."
--Wayne W. Dyer

Influence II

"You never influence the world trying to be like it."
--Author Unknown

Goal 1.5

"Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost."

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so."

--Russell Baker,
"The Plot Against People," The New York Times (June 18, 1968)

Overlord

"In our desire to have government become our benefactor and sustainer, we have allowed it to become our taskmaster and overlord. As a result, we have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. Freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone."
--Chuck Baldwin

Research II

"I was writing - at least beginning to write Boston Boy and there were a lot of holes in my so-called research. I didn't know the towns my mother and father came from in Russia. I didn't know the name of the clothing store I went to work for when I was 11 years old. I didn't know a lot of things. So I called for my FBI files, not expecting to have that stuff there, but I wanted to know what they had on me.  But they did have the towns my mother and father lived in Russia. They had the grocery store I worked in when I was 11 years old."
--Nat Hentoff

Presidential

"When they say [Donald Trump] is not 'presidential': I asked myself what does it mean to be 'presidential'? You wear a suit; you talk to the American people like you possess the character and the dignity of one who seeks the highest office in the land, and behind the door you're the worst criminal on the planet, plotting the overthrow of nations and governments, and regime change, and sending drones to kill people you don't like? That's presidential."
--Louis Farrakhan,
"The Breakfast Club Interview with the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan". www.finalcall.com. July 5, 2016.

Offer

"It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one."
--George Washington

Stop II

"We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases."
--Adolf Hitler,
February 22, 1942

Interference

"Everyone has the right...to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers."
--United Nations
Source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, 1948

Somebody should go tell Google and FB...

TLC

Menace II

"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . .  The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . .  [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection."
--John F. Hylan,
Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925

Bonds

Q: What's the difference between "bonds" and "men"?

A: Bonds mature.

Stay young, my friends!

TLC

Tear

"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."
--George R.R. Martin,
"A Clash of Kings"

Subversion

"It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties--the freedom of association--which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile."
--Chief Justice Earl Warren,
United States v. Robel, 389 U.S. 258 (1967)

Throat II

"Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight."
--Mark Twain,
"Man's Place in the Animal World" (1869)

Held

"You knew then that this was not any kind of hospital that cured, but a hospital that held, that kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life.... These people no longer made progress."
--Anne Spollen,
"The Shape Of Water"

Classical

"The classical Liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them."
--Ronald Reagan

Smile II

"A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities."
--Herman Melville,
"Pierre: or, The Ambiguities" (1852)

Pies

"The transportation bill had over $5 billion worth of special local projects and favors attached to it, lamprey-like, by various congresspersons. But this is good, because these projects will CREATE JOBS. See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."
--Dave Barry,
Column for week of February 29, 1992

Deceiver

"Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth."
--Criss Jami,
"Killosophy"

Expose

"Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them."
--Ephesians 5:11