Quotations

[Newest quotes appear at the nadir, not the apex]

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you will never see the shadow.” –Helen Keller

“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley

“The human race may be compared to a writer. At the outset a writer has often only a vague general notion of the plan of his work, and of the thought he intends to elaborate. As he proceeds, penetrating his material, laboring to express himself fitly, he lays a firmer grasp on his thought; he finds himself. So the human race is writing its story, finding itself, discovering its own underlying purpose, revising, recasting a tale pathetic often, yet none the less sublime.” –Felix Adler.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” –Oscar Wilde

“Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.” –Alvin Toffler

“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.” –Mark Twain

“Praise and blame is all the same.” –? (Of course praise and blame are very different, both in their intent and their impact. But this saying is about how you should adjust your thinking to have an appropriate degree of detachment about what others say)

“It takes two to participate in a lie: one to tell it, and one to listen.” –Homer Simpson.

“Don’t get upset.” –paraphrase of Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom.

In depth: To be without Passions.

’Tis a privilege of the highest order of mind. Their very eminence redeems them from being affected by transient and low impulses. There is no higher rule than that over oneself, over one’s impulses: there is the triumph of free will. While passion rules the character, no aiming at high office; the less the higher. It is the only refined way of avoiding scandals; nay, ’tis the shortest way back to good repute.

“If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.”
–Robert Cringely

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
–Sir Richard Steele

“Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.”
–Albert Schweitzer

Helen Keller Quotes {

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

“College isn’t the place to go for ideas.”

“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”

“Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.” (Tough one for introverts)

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.”

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.”

“We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.”

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

“The highest result of education is tolerance.”

“Knowledge is love and light and vision.”

“No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. ”

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

“So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.”

“True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”

“Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.”

}; /*End Keller quotations*/

“The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.” -Cesar Chavez.

“The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.” –Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Before the Web, there was just one guy running around saying I KNOW!” –Robin Williams

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” –Albert Einstein

“Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.” –Diogenes (the cynic)

“Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.” –Andy Rooney

“I’m afraid of Americans
I’m afraid of the world
I’m afraid I can’t help it
I’m afraid I can’t
I’m afraid of Americans”
–David Bowie

“70% of life is maintenance.”–actor Robert Downey Jr., in the context of finally kicking his drug habit and getting his life in better order.

“We love you Denver! City by the bay!” –Will Ferrell, Blades of Glory

“If you want to succeed, if you really want to be the outlier in terms of achievement, just sit down on your [rear end] and read — and do it all the time.” –Warren Buffett, on succeeding as an investor (and an introvert). He reads annual reports cover to cover. Whoa.

Groucho Marx: {

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

“If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.”

“I’m leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it’s not raining.”

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. ”

“Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows – marriage does.”

“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

“It isn’t necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.”

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?”

“Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.”

“Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.”

“I remember the first time I had sex – I kept the receipt.”

“I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”

“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”

“I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.”

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

} //End G Marx

“With thee conversing I forget all time,/All seasons, and their change; all please alike.” -Milton

“The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.” –G.K. Chesterton

“You want to know why I wrote that stupid book? … I wrote it, in a way, to try to find you.” –Before Sunset

“I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.” — E.M. Forster (as a child)

“One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.” — Oscar Wilde

“No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” — Lily Tomlin

“I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.” — Beryl Pfizer

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” — Anais Nin

“Did you ever hear anyone say ‘That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me’?”
– Joseph Henry Jackson

“Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” — Samuel Johnson

“Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.” — Wilson Mizner

“Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.” — Margaret Millar (fortunately not with the company I keep)

“A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.” — Ogden Nash

“Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.” — Evan Esar

When you ride your bike to work, you always arrive at your job in a good mood. — bicycle wisdom (unless you were riding by a parked car that suddenly swung open the door)

Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister late 19th century {

“The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.”

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.”

“We should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets.”

“Man is only truly great when he acts from passion.”

“Let the fear of a danger be a spur to prevent it; he that fears not, gives advantage to the danger.”

“One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.”

“To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.”

“Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.”

“Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.”

}

“Curiosity is the cure for boredom.” — Dorothy Parker

“Curiosity is endless and free, unlike television, wine or the water in our taps. It is more pleasurable and reliable than sex. It’s what makes us human.” — The Idler. Oh, I wish they hadn’t knocked sex. But I concur by and large. I have often thought that for me, heaven would be finding out everything that happened on earth leading up to and including my life, and then, everything after. Exploring everything!

“Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.” — Margaret Mitchell

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” — Thoreau

“I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.” — John Dryden

“I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.” — John Cleese

“Do not condemn the judgement of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong.” — Dandemis (who?). I can’t believe how wrong he is, the charlatan. Oh, wait, right.

“I am free in all the ways that you are not.” — Tyler Durden

“The grabbing hands
Grab all they can
All for themselves
After all
It’s a competitive world
Everything counts in large amounts.” — Depeche Mode, 1983. And still it goes on. People think there’s no consequence, but there is, it just happens on a timescale that exceeds the scope of our predictable needs. A recent NPR story says that if each family on earth lived the way a typical American family does, we would require 6 planet earths to provide the resources necessary to sustain each one. But when our government assesses progress in other nations, it’s by how many people drive cars, use huge amounts of electricity, buy disposable diapers, get the daily Starbucks with paper cup, etc.

“If you accept your positive experiences without taking any credit, you have humility, and if you
accept your negative experiences without blame, you have serenity.” — Eastern saying. We’re taught to blame ourselves for bad things that happen in our lives, and revel in our ability to conform to school and job expectations more effectively than others and hence reap positive rewards such as material goods and higher status. Grades and performance reviews, the essence of a well-lived, interesting, fulfilling life.

The grass is green, the hills are brown
I’m gonna leave this goddamn town.
The gals won’t pester me henceforth.
I’m cuttin’ out, I’m headin’ north.

Cot my rope and got my saddle
Think it best that I skedaddle.
I don’t want no shotgun weddin’.
Colorado’s where I’m headin.

–Cowboy tune in Michener’s Centennial, p. 488.

“An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.” — unknown

“Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” — George Jean Nathan (Republicans love patriotism, because it’s a form of social control)

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” — Albert Einstein

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.”
– Agent Smith

“Why do the things I whip always leave me?!” — Homer, after sled-dogging part of the way south from Alaska. I’m more of a carrot than a stick man, myself.

“It’s become pretty clear that pundits love John McCain. “We’re his base,” MSNBC host Chris Matthews famously said.” — Move On and Chris Matthews.

“One town’s very like another when your head’s down over your pieces, brother.” — One night in Bangkok. Chess wisdom.

“I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose.” — Clarence Darrow

“I have known many good people who did not believe in God. But I have never known a human being who was good who did not believe in people.” — John Lovejoy Elliot (But who wants to be good, ha ha)

“I don’t spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don’t consider that a relevant question. It’s unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can’t worry about.” — Wendy Kaminer

“Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.” — William Arthur Ward

“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.” — Rene Descartes

“The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.” — Jonas Salk (Spoken without irony, I suppose. The more you meet your responsibilities, the more responsibilities they dump on you. The upside of work though is it gives one something to do)

“You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.” — Arlo Guthrie

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” ~Edward R. Murrow

“There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.” — Alice Thomas Ellis.

“Each of us wants and needs to have space for quiet, for then one begins to see with the eyes of the heart.” — Desmond Tutu

“I’m not normally a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman!” — Homer

“I’ve been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.” — Gary Trudeau

{ Review of the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt in the NYT

“This basic truth — feeling safe kills — lies beneath many of the book’s insights.”

“A study that followed 24 intersections that had been converted from signals or stop signs to roundabouts showed an almost 90 percent drop in fatal crashes after the change.”

“For similar reasons, S.U.V.’s are more dangerous than cars. Not just because they’re slower to stop and harder to maneuver, but because — by conferring a sense of safety — they invite careless behavior. “The safer cars get,” Vanderbilt says, “the more risks drivers choose to take.” (S.U.V. drivers are more likely to not bother with their seat belts, to talk on cellphones, and to not wear seat belts while talking on cellphones.) So it goes for much of the driving universe. More people are killed while crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking. Drivers pass bicyclists more closely on a road with bike lanes than on one without.”

}

“Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just, do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how, pathetic, their attempts to control things really are.” –The Joker, from The Dark Knight

“Jesus loves you. The rest of us think you’re an asshole.”

“America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.” — Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine

“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.” — Frank Herbert

“If McCain is the answer, then the question must be ridiculous.”  – NY Gov. Patterson

“This is an impressive crowd – the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.” — George W. Bush

“When people show you who they really are, believe them.” – Maya Angelou

“I’ve been aware of the time going by. They say in the end it’s the wink of an eye.” — Jackson Browne, The Pretender. Currently suing McCain’s hitmen for illegally using his song in one of their misleading propaganda pieces.

“All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.” — Albert Camus

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter Drucker

“One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.” — John O’Donohue

“All of the places of our lives are sanctuaries; some of them just happen to have steeples. And all of the people in our lives are saints; it is just that some of them have day jobs and most will never have feast days named for them.” — Robert Benson

“The first sign of maturity is that the volume knob also turns to the left.” –Anonymous

“A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.” — Plato. George Bush and his enablers, the Republican party, would disappoint Plato on so many levels.

“You never know what is enough until you know what is too much.” — William Blake

“…so in 1865 [Charles] Crocker hired fifty of them as an experiment. He would eventually have some ten thousand in his employ, and cumulatively, over the next four years, these Chinese workers would achieve an epic of construction second only to the Great Wall of China itself: the crossing of the Sierra Nevada with bands of steel, including the penetration of a near-solid rock barrier with the Summit Tunnel, hewn by hand from solid rock.” — Kevin Starr, California, p. 118. I recently took the California Zephyr on these rails built by the Chinese for very little pay by the Central Pacific Railroad, 1865-1869. The Summit Tunnel was abanonded in the 1990s, however.

“It was only a diary. Everyone knows diaries are full of crap.” — Bridget Jones

“This country is going to be living better 10 years from now than it is now. It will be living better in 20 years from now than 10 years from now. … We’ve got all the ingredients for a sensational future.” — Warren Buffett

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” — Wayne Gretzsky

“The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.” — Warren Buffett

“Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a ‘second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament’…Obama has a first rate intellect and a first rate temperament.” — Charles Krauthammer

“To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.” Albert Einstein.

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line some place.” — Oscar Wilde.

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” — Ellen Goodman

“An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.” — Will Rogers

“The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.” — Lucille Harper

“The reverse side also has a reverse side.” — Japanese proverb

“When I meet a man I ask myself, ‘Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?’” — Rita Rudner

“Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.”
- Ross Perot

“Success is the ability to move from one failure to the next with enthusiasm.”
- Winston Churchhill

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” — Martin Luther King

“the rate of firearms homicide in the United States is nineteen times higher than that of thirty-five other high income countries combined.” — Why We’re Liberals, p. 70.

“Loneliness is an art form.” — Dexter

“And then I had this dream that my whole family were just cartoon characters and our success had led to some crazy propaganda network called Fox News.” — Bart Simpson to his psychiatrist.

“There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media]….If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.” — Rich Bond, former chair of the Republican party. Yes, psychologically abuse the referee in order to intimidate him into throwing calls your way. Very sporting.

“I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.” — Bill Kristol, conservative columnist.

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” — Barry Goldwater. Yes, we all know about right wing extremism. It’s their whole strategy. Especially if they get a chance to use violence.

“Republicans love America – they just hate half the people living in it.” – Jon Stewart

“Only Britain soldiers on.” — Children of Men. Environmental crises lead to mass violence and refugee migrations, save in Britain, where they round up refugees and put them in death camps. The year 2027. Seems about right.

“Quietus. You decide when.” — Children of Men. The pill you take to die when you can’t take anymore.

“It’s hard for me to look at you. He had your eyes.” — Children of Men.

“The word anecdote is not the singular form of the word data.” — Robert Kuttner. We look for anectdotal evidence from our own lives to support our theories. But it would be fairer to look at the data first. Sometimes what we experience is still a minority portion of the bigger picture.

“The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power… That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.” — Tom Coburn, Republican Senator from Oklahoma. Republicans are such warm-hearted, clear thinking people!

“It is more difficult to organize a peace than to win a war.” — Aristotle

“No, no, we don’t need that. We just need you to vote!” — Obama, with a smile, to his crowds if they ever slipped into booing. Contrast that with McCain who, before facing criticism, seemed inclined to provide his crowds pitchforks and torches.

“I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick….I want to kill his dog.” — Mel G_ibson, about Frank Rich, after Rich wrote a column pointing out Gibson’s Dad was a holocaust denier. Yet Gibson was in the film Who Killed the Electric Car?, as an enthusiast of GM’s discontinued electric car, so that’s a plus. Then there was the drunken anti-Jew rant and arrest. Mad Max!

“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

“In the long run, we are all dead.”

– John Maynard Keynes

“Their ad weasels love to say: ‘When diet and exercise fail’…well diet and exercise don’t fail. A Duke University study found that exercise is just as effective a cure as paxil and zoloft. So ask your doctor if getting off your ass is right for you.” — Bill Maher

“It’s official: for the next four years, it’s pronounced ‘nuclear.’ ” — weekend update, SNL.

“I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.” — Newt Gingrich, who divorced his ailing wife by fax. This was brought out in response to protests over Prop 8, a legitimate use of First Amendment expression in response to a law limiting the freedom of 2 to 4 percent of Californians to marry. He provides no evidence of any preparations or warning signs for violence. Unlike, say, the right wing militias in the 90s, which did arm, and one of whose members blew up a day care center in a federal building.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” — Franz Kafka

“Managing positive and negative feelings should be the primary goals of a campaign.” — The Political Brain, p. 138

“There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary, and those who don’t.”

“They would get mired down inside Iraq, in a conflict that’s been raging for generations, in the interest of trying to dictate who’s going to govern in Iraq. That is not something that we are prepared to see American forces do. . . . For the U.S. to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who’s going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire.” — Darth Vader, er, Dick Cheney, 1991

“at the close of WWII, MIT was the nation’s largest academic defense contractor…By 2003, that number had grown to over $500 million, good enough to make MIT the forty-eighth-largest defense contractor in the U.S. And in 2005, the Cambridge, Mass, school had crept up to forty-fourth place, pulling in over $600 million in DoD dollars.” – The Complex, pp. 34-5.

I keep my underwear up with a piece of elastic
I use a bullshit mic that’s made out of plastic
To send my rhymes out to all nations
Like Ma Bell, I’ve got the ill communications

–The Beastie Boys, Sure Shot Because you can’t, you won’t, and you don’t stop

I’m the motherfucker you’re stuck with
Ice Cube is the wrong [rhymes with chigger, not allowed to say] to fuck with
–Ice Cube, Trespass, with Ice T (of Law and Order Fame, heh heh)

I feel the weight of the world on my shoulder
As I’m gettin’ older, y’all, people gets colder
Most of us only care about money makin’
Selfishness got us followin’ our wrong direction
…
That’s the reason why sometimes I’m feelin’ under
That’s the reason why sometimes I’m feelin’ down
There’s no wonder why sometimes I’m feelin’ under
Gotta keep my faith alive till love is found
–Where is the Love, Black Eyed Peas

Are you paranoid
As you look me up and down
And I’m soaked in gasoline,
mud and ice cream
–Yeah, Whatever, Splender (damned if you do, fucked if you don’t)

“Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.” — Blaise Pascal

“We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.” — The Dalai Llama

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” — Albert Camus

“The world is full of power and energy and one can go far by skimming off a tiny bit of it.” — Neal Stephenson

“Given that John McCain’s economic team was headlined by Carly Fiorina and Joe the Plumber, the country would be dodging a fiscal bullet even if Obama had picked Suze Orman.” — Frank Rich, 12/6/08, The Brightest Are Not Always the Best

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill (A realist sees it from both sides)

["You may be right" comes on Rhapsody, I start singing along]
Dad: “Elton John!”
Me [laughing]: “Billy Joel!”
Dad: “Yeah, same thing!”

“Sometimes you don’t have to destroy a wounded animal. You just remove the thorn.” — Dexter

“Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don’t fall in line with people who don’t respect us and who we don’t believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.” — Rachel Maddow

“Sleep is the best meditation…” — HH the Dalai Lama

“An economist is one who sees something working in practice, and then sees if it will work in theory.” — Economist humor

“It’s time for Ask Dr. Maddow, where we answer the questions you are just too lazy to Google yourself.” — Rachel Maddow radio show

“You don’t really love that guy you make it with now do you?” — REM/Michael Stipe, Superman

“I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.” — Dubya

“Thank you for calling Global Solutions, Inc. Your call is important to us, but your time isn’t. Please continue to hold until you give up in frustration. Honestly, can’t you be a little more resourceful than by resorting to calling us and describing some problem that is not possible for us to solve? Do you really want us to employ some shmoe at minimum wage to deal with your shit? Our CEO just made your annual salary in the time it took for you to listen to this.” — Me

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” — Mozart

On risk: {

“Every time we choose safety, we reinforce fear.” — Cheri Huber

“I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.” — Thoreau

} (Alright, but if this backfires on me, I’ll know who to harrumph at)

“Mr. Ness, I do not approve of your methods.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not from Chicago.” — The Untouchables

“You wanted to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” –Obama to McCain. One of my favorite putdowns of the campaign. Yes, McCain and other Republicans love the notion of bombing other-ethnicity children in foreign countries. McCain was especially war crazy.

“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” — Aliens, 1986. I can’t believe 1986. I remember that Aliens was one of the first R rated movies I was allowed to watch, having reached age 12. Oh, how I loved that movie (and still do). I hate trying to get a group to reach consensus, as Ripley has to in this cene. Ripley’s the smartest one in the bunch, and eventually, one of the only survivors (not surprisingly), so the dimwits can’t argue anymore.

“Egypt was a civilization of stone…papyrus is perishable…Sumer was a civilization of clay. They made their buildings of it and wrote on it, too. Their statutes were made of gypsum, which dissolves in water…So all the data of the Sumerians have survived. Egypt left a legacy of art and architecture; Sumer’s legacy is its megabytes.” – Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, p. 215. We also learned on p. 210 that Sumerian language was an agglutinative tongue, a collection of morphemes or syllables, making it very unusual. The book suggests it sounds like glossolalia–speaking in tongues used by some religions (like the Pentacostal fatties in Borat).

The next point is that the Sumerian language disappeared, despite the existence of clay tablets that formerly made up the walls of buildings which lay scattered in the desert, like so many web sites. A neurolinguistic virus killed the language; a Snow Crash that could do the same to us. I would suggest it’s already happening, with the rise of texting. Those texters might think us, with our complete sentences (good, or so we think) and culture wars (bad, trust me), a bit…quaint.

“When you use the words of your opposition, you are basically accepting their definition and therefore their conclusion.” — Frank Lutz, conservative strategist who helped kick Shrum’s, and my party’s, ass, over and over. Too bad for him, he picked an opponent capable of learning from the opposition (albeit at a glacial pace).

“If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.” — W. Somerset Maugham

“Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be.” — Rita Rudner (those people are called conservatives)

“I love work, I could watch it all day.” –Dunno.

“I have never been afraid of a little hard work.” — Homer Simpson

“I’m going crazy there over at the lake.” — Fargo

“Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room.” — 1408

“I don’t read the script. The script reads me.” –Kirk Lazarus, the dude playin’ a dude, disguised as another dude.

“If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.” — Dubya, demonstrating a textbook “false choice.” Choices don’t get much more false than this.

“Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” — Tom Delay, on causes of the Colu_mbine High school shooting massacre. Those goddamned working mothers popping their birth control pills; I am changing my registration right now and joining the Republican party.

“I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me.” — Dave Barry

“What could be more important to the “culture of life” than keeping life going on planet earth?” — Bill Maher, on the subject of how mass extinctions are preceded by runup in greenhouse gases and temperature rise. See, eg, this article.

“166: The number of countries and governmental entities that have signed the Kyoto protocol on climate change, which the United States has not signed.

20: The number of feet below sea level the Bush family’s boat launch in Kennebunkport will be if either the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheet melts.” — Daniel Kurtzman

“President Bush is going to establish elections there in Iraq. He’s going to rebuild the infrastructure. He’s going to create jobs. He said if it works there, he’ll try it here.” — David Letterman

“36 percent: Bush’s approval rating at the end of six years in office.

66 percent: Bill Clinton’s approval rating when he was impeached.”

–Daniel Kurtzman

“Thurmond devoted much of his life to the cause of racial segregation, but when it came to separating whites and blacks, he did make an exception for his penis.” — Jon Stewart, on the fact that Thurmond fathered an illegitimate daughter at age 22 after a tryst with a 16 year old African-American girl working as the family maid.

“Newt Gingrich, Paragon of Family Values. The former House Speaker married his high school geometry teacher a year after graduating. Years later, he declared she wasn’t “young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the president,” and served her with divorce papers while she was in the hospital for cancer treatment. He asked his second wife for a divorce by phoning her on Mother’s Day, after carrying on an affair with a congressional staffer twenty-three years his junior–all while decrying Bill Clinton’s moral failings and orchestrating his impeachment. As Bill Maher observed, “This to me is unbelievable. Someone fucked Newt Gingrich?” — Daniel Kurtzman

“I have never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.” Ann Cunter–er, Coulter–on the 9/11 widows

“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.” -E.B. White

“Pick me up, love, from the bottom
Up onto the top, love, everyday
Pay no mind to taunts or advances
I’m gonna take my chances on everyday”

–Dave Matthews Band

“It is not the strongest of the species who survive, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin.

“What’s a painting party?”
“It’s a party where people come to help you paint your house.”
“Sounds like a terrible party.” — from the David Fincher film Zodiac. I went to one once, “hosted” by my then boss. Fincher’s right, it is a terrible party. I don’t know how the man knows me so well. Although for me, it’s slightly better than the stand-around-and-talk-while-consuming-alcohol-party.

“But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” — Life of Brian

“You have a center right? A place inside of you that’s just you, that hasn’t been spoiled… And I think it’s really important to try and keep that space sacred. In some sense, on some level, but… sex or relationships cloud that space… or, they cloud me I guess, they make it difficult to be just me and not have to worry about… being somebody else. I sound like a big asshole, don’t I.” — Character Peter Evans, in the 2006 film Bug, a pretty good horrorish film based on a play, about paranoia and the self. Still wish I had more sex.

“I don’t believe in failure. It’s not failure if you enjoyed the process.” — Oprah Winfrey

My rhymes are so potent that in this small segment
I made all of you lady listeners pregnant
Yea that’s right my lyrics are sometimes sexist
But you lovely bitches should know I’m trying to correct this.
–Hiphopopotamus v. Rhymenoceros, Flight of the Conchords

“Conservatives believe life begins at conception and ends at birth.” — Barney Frank

“I read somewhere how in life it is not necessarily important to be strong but to feel strong.” –Into the Wild. Granted, the speaker died of starvation after self-imposed exile in the woods.

“I don’t like people trying to take advantage of that [outreach]. This is why actually if you watch my political interactions. I am always best as a counter-puncher. You know, somebody comes at me I will knock them out. If not, I will try to understand their point of view and that actually serves me well. I give people the benefit of the doubt; I try to understand their point of view — if I perceive that they try to take advantage of that then I will crush them.”

– Obama. Perfect. Honest. Real. You have to crush the jerks and the bullies, or they do it to you. This is the secret of being a nice guy–one should only be nice to a point. That is, until, as Patrick Swayze’s character in Roadhouse says, “until it’s time to not be nice.”

“There is a thin line between politics and theatrics.” — Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP. Also acted in a sketch with Garrett Morris where he explained Swiftian theory that light skinned blacks are smarter than darker skinned ones.

“My belief is that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then becomes a lie. I don’t think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don’t be Christian, be Christ-like. Don’t be Buddhist, be Buddha-like.” — Wayne Dyer

“My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.” — Abe Lincoln.

“Assertiveness is saying what you want and what you mean without losing control.” — Read this somewhere. Assertiveness is the key to promoting harmony, as opposed to always holding one’s tongue, supposedly. Assertiveness is the preventive measure to avoid blow ups.

“She doesn’t want you to understand her. She knows that’s impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.” — Snow Crash, p. 410.

“Life is a thin line between hope and despair.” — Heard this (or something similar) on Bill Moyers; he didn’t know who to credit.

“Buddhism uses intelligence to control the emotions. Through meditative practices, awareness can be trained and focused on the contents of the mind to observe ongoing experience. Such techniques are of growing interest to Western psychologists, who increasingly see depression as a disorder of emotional mismanagement. In this view, attention is hijacked by negative events and then sets off a kind of chain reaction of negative feeling, thinking and behavior that has its own rapidity and inevitability.” – Psychology Today

“Ordinarily I don’t like to be around interesting people, because it means I have to be interesting myself.” — Steve Martin

“I’m not gonna sit here and debate. I will say this though: what Shep told us didn’t make a whole lot of sense.” — Fargo

“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.” — James Thurber

“The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.” — Anna Garlin Spencer, Unitarian minister

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. – H.L. Mencken

“The thing with Dickie… it’s like the sun shines on you, and it’s glorious. And then he forgets you and it’s very, very cold…When you have his attention, you feel like you’re the only person in the world, that’s why everybody loves him so much.” — The Talented Mr. Ripley

“The world of men has become agonizing to you?…Didn’t you know beforehand how the world of men is? Sometimes we have to let go of things we like. What you like, others will also like! Is it so unbearable for you?” — The Buddhist master in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring to a man jilted by a woman.

“Richard’s rule about traveling in India is a sound one: Don’t touch anything but yourself.” – Eat Pray Love, p. 159. I wasn’t as austere in Mexico, but I did avoid the tap. It was hard to remember it for things like brushing teeth. It seems like paranoid overkill, but on the other hand, you’d rather not spoil your trip by catching some bug that doesn’t agree with your intestines.

“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” — Sun Tzu

“You can do Yoga. But Yoga too hard. Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. . .Let your conscience be your guide. If you have Western friends come to visit Bali, bring them to me for palm-reading. I am very empty in my bank since the bomb.” — Gilbert, p. 231. Referring to that terrorist bombing which devastated Bali’s tourism industry.

“Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.” — Willem Buiter (Took me a few moments to parse the meaning of this one)

“All the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people…Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way.” Eat Pray Love p. 260-261. I can only half-believe this one, though. Yes, Hitler was unhappy, at least until he got to be Fuhrer. Happy people cause car accidents; successful, happy parents in the workplace cause other people not to get the promotion they wanted; and on and on. It’s also easy to be miserable without causing trouble for others, in fact it takes a special kind of motivation to make trouble for others that often unhappiness robs you of.

“The fun is over, Oskar. They’re shutting us down. Sending everyone to Auschwitz.” — Schindler’s List

“It’s Hebrew. It means he who saves one life, saves the world entire.” — Schindler’s List

“I could have got more. I could have got more…I could have got one more person, and I didn’t.” — Schindler’s List. He saved 1100 Jews from extermination at Auschwitz by spending his war profiteering earnings on bribing officials to keep his workers at a shell plant that produced no working shells during the final months of the war. Today there are more than 6000 living descendants of those he saved.

“I’m southern Brazilian. I can keep a broken heart going for ten years over a woman I never even kissed.” — EPL, p. 277

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

“Why did life ever seem difficult?” – EPL, p. 297 I’ve felt like this a time or two, on vacation!

“libertarianism is good because it helps conservatives pass off a patently probusiness political agenda as a noble bid for human freedom…The reason we have so many well-funded libertarians in America these days is not because libertarianism suddenly acquired an enormous grassroots following, but because it appeals to those who are able to fund the ideas.” — Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew, p. 115, in discussing how a few Republican elites cooked up the idea of libertarianism as a political movement to pawn off on the freedom-bamboozled masses. As Frank points out, libertarianism has undue representation in D.C. — compared to its followers in the U.S., it is massively overrepresented in that one area of the country by lobbyists, funding, and subscribers.

“American conservatism defines government as a meddling in the market, which is, in turn, conceived as a force of godlike omniscience; Rooseveltian liberalism, on the other hand, understands that markets are unstable and must be controlled by the organized intelligence of mankind.” — Frank, p. 128.

“The professional civil service is an organizational form that every advanced society adopted a hundred years ago for the same reason: to ensure the state would not be the tool of money. That its wrecking has coincided with the greatest wave of political corruption in living memory is no mere coincidence.” — Frank, p. 137. Since 1980, we have been steadily devolving, and then from 2000-2006, we were fully regressed into a society that even southern Italy could look down on.

“I’ve long argued that we haven’t paid enough attention to the staggering number of murders committed in this country — well over 150,000 every 10 years or so.” — Bob Herbert

“Ghostbusters, whaddya want?” — The receptionist in Ghostbusters.

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.” — Oscar Wilde (really? doesn’t seem cutting enough for him!)

“I’m a man of very little conviction…at least I think I am.” — Christopher Hampton

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” — Chinese proverb

“I’ve been quite open about this around the office, I don’t want this parks department to build any parks because I don’t believe in government, I think that all government is a waste of taxpayer money. My dream is to have the parks system privatized and run entirely for profit for corporations, like Chucky Cheese; they have an impeccable business model–I would rather work for Chucky Cheese.” — Ron Swanson, on the brilliant Amy Poehler show Parks and Recreation. I never thought a sitcom on NBC would sum up the entire conservative movement of the past forty years so succinctly and effectively.

“In the year 3000 YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook will merge into one super time-wasting site called YouTwitFace.” — Conan O’Brien

“The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.” — Dorothy Day

“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?” — Dorothea Lange

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“…The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.”

 — Emma Goldman

“Once people believed in human sacrifice — not any more. Once people believed in slavery — not any more. Once people believed that women should not vote — not any more. In your lifetime I hope your children can say: Once people believed in war as the answer — not any more.” — Frances Crowe

“The main threat to democracy comes not from the extreme left, but from the extreme right, which is able to buy huge sections of the press and radio and wages a constant campaign to smear and discredit every progressive and humanitarian measure.” — George Seldes

“…Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. …the dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is that they are working for “clean coal.”
The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.” — James Hansen

“In Southern West Virginia we live in a war zone. Three and one-half million pounds of explosives are being used every day to blow up the mountains. Blasting our communities, blasting our homes, poisoning us, trying to intimidate us. I don’t mind being poor. I mind being blasted and poisoned. There are no jobs on a dead planet.” — Judy Bonds

“…jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.”

 — Noam Chomsky

“After the invasion of Iraq, I again heard from Vietnamese the excuse that Americans were good people who happened to have bad leaders. I wondered how long we can get away with that one. My fear is that we are no longer a nation at war but have become a nation of war. My hope is that we will pull back from empire and once again embrace our republic.”

 — Peter Davis

“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” — Rosa Parks

“Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need.” — Bill Maher

“Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.” — Camille Paglia (boy that’s one tough lady. though i’ve been known to occasionally write things of that nature)

“The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.” — G.K. Chesterton

“A lawyer starts life giving $500 worth of law for $5 and ends giving $5 worth for $500.” — Benjamin H. Brewster