Optimism

"Optimism is the madness of maintaining that all is well when it is wrong."
--Voltaire

Slime

"I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you...

You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help... no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold.

That's right, folks...
Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go."

--Frank Zappa,
"I'm The Slime"

Principles II

"I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men."
--Emiliano Zapata,
as quoted in "Heroes Of Mexico" (1969) by Morris Rosenblum

Yes

"One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found--and it is found in terrible places. ...For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
--James Baldwin,
"The Fire Next Time" (1963)

Softening

"The Eugenic optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and confused confidence, so common in private theatricals, that it will be all right on the night. They have all the ancient despotism, but none of the ancient dogmatism. If they are ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the Inquisition, at least we cannot accuse them of offending us with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head."
--G.K. Chesterton,
"Eugenics And Other Evils: An Argument Against The Scientifically Organized State"

Parentheses

"I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter."
--D.H. Lawrence,
Letter to Blanche Jennings (April 15, 1908), "Letters Of D.H. Lawrence" (1979), edited by James T. Boulton

Forgotten II

"Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?"
--Sigmund Freud

Language III

"The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet."

--Allen Ginsberg,
"Wichita Vortex Sutra" (1966)