"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails
at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it."
--Woodrow Wilson
"Time wins more converts than reason."
--Thomas Paine, COMMON SENSE
"When the citizens of a nation will no longer volunteer to defend it, then it is probably not worth saving. No nation has the right to survive with conscript troops, and in the long run, no nation ever has."
--Robert Heinlein
"Patriotism is not 'my country right or wrong'; patriotism means loving the ideals for which America stands and having the courage to speak up when these ideals are distorted for personal or political gain.
The American government was instituted to be the servant of the people, not our master."
--Robert Heinlein
"The State must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people happily will endure almost any curtailment of liberty."
--Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who is believed to have been giving an ironic translation of Adolf Hitler's statement made on page 403 of his book MEIN KAMPF
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
--Eric Hoffer
"I do think it actually matters what is true. The search for the truth is an important search, and if it isn’t, we’re lost in all kinds of ways. We’re lost in the fields of Holocaust denial. We’re lost in being able to compare what is good and what is bad because we can’t agree what actually happened. We’re lost when it comes to guarding minorities against populist agitation. Nobody’s going to die from saying Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, but in other areas, when the truth suffers, our decision making suffers. When there is no authority to the truth, prejudices thrive."
--David Aaronovitch,
http://www.salon.com/books/history/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/02/03/david_aaronovitch_conspiracy_theories
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
--Arthur Schopenhauer
Variation of above quote by Schopenhauer about truth:
"First we laugh at it, then we get scared of it, then finally we swear to each other that we (and only we) knew it was right all along..."
--quote from an old physics lecturer a friend used to know.
Question: "If you were Big Brother and wanted to create a surveillance society, where would you begin?"
"I would start by creating dossiers on kindergarten children so that the next generation could not comprehend a world without surveillance. I'd also scare the public with stories about terrorists, pedophiles and drug dealers. In fact, that's exactly what's going on right now."
--Andre Bacard,
http://www.andrebacard.com/privacy.html
"As long as some Americans are allowed to treat some other Americans like complete shit over things that hurt no one, there is no greatness in this country."
--Lord Galen,
http://www.snipeme.com/rants.php?rant=virginia
"To all those who might e-mail me saying 'We're better than most other places when it comes to gays! At least we don't kill them like Uganda!' Well, that's true. Being a gigantic fucking asshole is better than being a murderer. So, congratulations for only being a gigantic fucking asshole, America! We're better than those other countries, so that means it's totally OK to still be huge douchebags! Hope you're proud..."
--Lord Galen, ibid
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Whenever any government, or any church, or anyone else for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects: 'This book you may not read, this film you may not watch, this image you may not see, this knowledge you may not have,' then the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives."
--Robert A. Heinlein, "If This Goes On..."
"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
--Edmond Burke
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
--Benjamin Franklin, "Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor", November 11, 1755.
"Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves."
--Robert Kennedy
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
--Robert Kennedy
"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."
--Robert Kennedy
"All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity."
--Robert Kennedy
"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
--Robert Kennedy
"Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market."
--John Taylor Gatto,
New York State Teacher of the Year (twice)
New York City Teacher of the Year (three times)
"It is always unconscionable for the government to punish people for expressing an idea merely because government officials -- or the majority of citizens -- decide that those ideas are 'dangerous' or 'wrong.' That is a power nobody ought to possess."
--Glenn Greenwald, http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/11/fruits-of-hate-speech-laws.html
"I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish. The first banning of an association because it advocates hated ideas -- whether that association be called a political party or not -- marks a fateful moment in the history of a free country..."
--Justice Black, http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0367_0001_ZD1.html
"Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
--Margaret Mead
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
--Thomas Paine
"Many a man has decided to stay alive not because of the will to live, but because of the determination not to give assorted surviving bastards the satisfaction of his death."
-- Brendan Francis
“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
--Socrates
"It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
-- J. Krishnamurti
"Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment."
-– R.D. Lang
“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.”
--Mark Twain
"Have the nerve to look a guy in the face as you're fucking him up the ass!"
--Nick Fury, from the graphic novel FURY by Garth Ennis
"It's not dying that's bad; it's how you do it."
--Leon Isaac Kennedy, as spoken by his character Leon "The Lover" Johnson in the 1981 version of the movie Body and Soul
"What do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power?"
--Cornelius Vanderbilt (ultra-wealthy tycoon)
"Never get vengeance and justice mixed up."
--Robert Spencer
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws."
--Edward Abbey
"Hell hath no fury like the lawyer of a woman scorned."
-- Unknown
"I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury."
--Groucho Marx
"A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police."
--Ludwig von Mises (the greatest economist of the 20th century)
"Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?"
--Martin Luther
"There are none so intolerant as those who preach tolerance."
--Edward Steele (attorney)
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."
--Groucho Marx
"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation."
--Thomas Reed
"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves."
--William Pitt (British Prime Minister, 1783)
"A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master, who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression."
--Edward Gibbon (English historian)
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated. But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
--C.S. Lewis
"The Golden Rule of dis-informers: Always accuse your adversary of whatever is true about yourself."
--Unknown
"How ridiculous and unrealistic is the man who is astonished at anything that happens in life."
--Marcus Aurelius Antonious (Roman historian)
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
--Henry David Thoreau
"Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that Christians had access to the lions."
--Judge Earl Johnson, Jr.
"Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid."
--Col. David Hackworth (military historian)
"The word heretic means 'being the one who is able to choose.' Being called a heretic means having chosen a way different from whatever is now the mainstream. Being punished as a heretic happens in a society, a state, a church, a community of the like-minded (say in this era, scientists) where the predominant philosophy is 'believe like me, think like me, and act like me, or I will bury you.' Being proud to be a heretic is to honor one's own uniqueness. I have been a heretic in many lifetimes. I still am proud to be one!"
--Ellen Mogensen
"You may be whatever you resolve to be."
--Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
"There is nothing too strange to have happened. There are only things too strange to be believed."
--Thomas Hardy
"For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those 'It might have been.'"
--John Greenleaf Whittier
"Every man is my superior, for I may learn from him."
--Thomas Carlyle
"Hatred corrupts the subject (the one who hates) not the object (the one who is hated)."
--Lacey Baldwin Smith
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
--Rita Mae Brown, SUDDEN DEATH
"Holding on to anger is like holding on to a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. You are the one who gets burned."
--Gautama Buddha
"Yesterday is but a memory, Tomorrow an uncharted course,
So live today so it will be a memory without remorse."
--Edgar Cayce
"The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing."
--Unknown
"Fiat justitia, ruit coelum. Translation: 'Let justice be done, even if Heaven falls.'"
--Roman legal maxim
"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."
--Jimi Hendrix
"The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing."
--Michael Gerber
"Cripple them, and you get a Sir Walter Scott or a Florence Nightingale. Lock them in a prison cell, and you get a John Bunyan or a Susan B. Anthony. Pit them against impossible, overwhelming odds, and you get a George Washington or a Joan of Arc. Raise them in abject poverty, and you get an Abraham Lincoln or a Mother Theresa. Strike them down with terrible illness, and you get a Franklin Roosevelt or a Charlotte, Emily, & Anne Bronte. Deafen them, and you get a Ludwig von Beethoven or a Helen Keller. Have them born black in a society filled with racial hatred and discrimination, and you get a Booker T. Washington or a Marian Anderson. Call them slow learners, 'retarded', or write them off as uneducable or crazy, and you get an Albert Einstein or a Marie Curie… and so it is that life is 20% what happens to us and 80% the way we respond to it."
--Ted Engstrom and Ellen Mogensen
"The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds."
--Mark Twain
"I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do."
--Theodore Roosevelt
"We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds."
--Hanmer Parsons Grant
"Faith is often the step into the light that feels like a leap in the dark."
--Unknown
"Nursing a grudge will never make it better, it will only keep it alive."
--Unknown
"Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first, and the lesson afterward."
--Unknown
"Discontent is the first step in the progress of an individual or a nation."
--Chinese proverb
"This life is a test. It is only a test. Had it been an actual life you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do!"
--Unknown
"What we do in life echoes through eternity."
--the character Maximus in the movie Gladiator, written by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson
"He who walks outside in the winter without shoes and socks very often ends up with cold feet."
--John Boyd (a friend and former co-worker of mine)
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
--George Orwell
"The real test of honor is not how you die, but how you live."
--Superman, from the episode "War World Part 2" in season 1 of the Justice League TV series, written by Stan Berkowitz
"Fortune favors the bold."
--Terence (2nd century BC playwright), from his play Phornio
"No obstacle is insurmountable if the desire to surmount it is great enough."
--Black Manta, ADVENTURE COMICS Vol. 1 #452, written by David Michelinie
"...for values to retain worth they must not only be preached, but lived..."
--David Michelinie (writer), ADVENTURE COMICS Vol. 1 #453
"Beneath the thin veneer of culture the wild beast lurks…
"But the beast is not tamed by locking it up in a cage. There is no morality without freedom."
--Carl Jung
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
--Chinese proverb
"Having people do bad things is the price we pay for freedom. There is a cost to all liberty. Having to hear upsetting or toxic views is the price we pay for free speech; having propaganda spewed by large media outlets is the price we pay for a free press; and having some horrible, dangerous criminals go free is the price we pay for banning the Police from searching our homes without a warrant (the Fourth Amendment) and mandating due process before people can be imprisoned (the Fifth Amendment). The whole American political system is predicated on the idea that we are unwilling to accept large-scale abridgments of freedom in the name of safety, and that Absolute Safety is a dangerous illusion. There is a new report today that a police officer in Tuscon stopped Jared Loughner's car for speeding shortly before his rampage, but was unable to search his car because he lacked probable cause to do so. Obviously, that's regrettable -- if you're a family member of one of his victims, it's horrifying -- but the alternative (allowing Police the power to search whomever they want without cause) is worse: that's the judgment we made in the Bill of Rights."
--Glenn Greenwald, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/01/12/galston/index.html
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
--Anatole France
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few."
-David Hume, FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT
"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
--Winston Churchill
"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
"Generally speaking, the people who know little speak a lot and the people who know a lot speak little."
--Rousseau (French philosopher)
"While 'most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence,' the research found that actually 'we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions.' These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal with reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the 'Do Not Disturb' sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths."
--Bill Moyers, "Facts Still Matter," keynote speech, History Makers, January 27, 2011, New York City, www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-facts-still-matter67571
"I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."
--Marshal McLuhan
"...the measure of a man lies not in what he says but what he does."
--Superman, from ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #6, written by Grant Morrison
"...our Geese are but Geese tho' we may think 'em Swans; and Truth will be Truth tho' it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful."
--Benjamin Franklin, "A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain" (1725)
"I think opinions should be judged of by their influences and effects, and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous; which I hope is the case with me."
--Benjamin Franklin, MEMOIRS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Volume 1
"He that spits against the Wind, spits in his own Face."
--Benjamin Franklin, letter to unknown recipient (1757)
"If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?"
--Benjamin Franklin, ibid
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power."
--Benjamin Franklin, POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC (1738)
"There never was a good war or a bad peace."
--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Josiah Quincy (1783)
"Remember me affectionately to good Dr. Price and to the honest heretic Dr. Priestly. I do not call him honest by way of distinction; for I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic."
--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan (1788)
"...in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy (1789)
"Most People dislike Vanity in others whatever Share they have of it themselves..."
--Benjamin Franklin, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY Part 1
"Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults."
--Benjamin Franklin, POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC (1756)
"...as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of Others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
--Benjamin Franklin, ibid Part 3
"We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
--Richard Penn, MEMOIRS OF A LIFE, CHIEFLY PASSED IN PENNSYLVANIA, WITHIN THE LAST SIXTY YEARS (1811)
"Love is that condition which causes another person's happiness to be important to your own."
--Robert Heinlein
"Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man."
--Jesuit maxim
"Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so."
--William Shakespeare
"A pedestal is as confining as any other small space."
--Gloria Steinem
"History is often a patina of real come the light of tomorrow."
--Greg Saunders (a.k.a., the Vigilante), "From a Cub To a Wolf," SUPERMAN'S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN SPECIAL #1, written by James Robinson
"Standing by our principles in theory is easy. It's when we stand by them when we're tested that defines us."
--Superman, SUPERMAN: THE WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON #5, written by James Robinson and Greg Rucka
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at."
--Bruce Lee
"As you think, so shall you become."
--Bruce Lee
"Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them."
--Bruce Lee
"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering."
--Bruce Lee
"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."
--Mark Twain
"Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
--Mark Twain
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
--Mark Twain
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."
--Mark Twain
"Don't let schooling interfere with your education."
--Mark Twain
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree."
--Albert Einstein
"Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
--Albert Einstein
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
--Albert Einstein
"You know, there are some words I've known since I was a schoolboy: 'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.' The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged."
--Captain Jean-Luc Picard, from the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "The Drumhead," written by Jeri Taylor
"We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
--Captain Jean-Luc Picard, from the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "The Drumhead," written by Jeri Taylor
"...villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged."
--Captain Jean-Luc Picard, from the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "The Drumhead," written by Jeri Taylor
[Regarding a witch-hunting Admiral] "...she, or someone like her, will always be with us, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness. Vigilance...that is the price we have to continually pay."
--Captain Jean-Luc Picard, from the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "The Drumhead," written by Jeri Taylor
"You can't rape the willing."
--legal expression
"It has been said that there is nothing more uncommon than common sense."
--Unknown, first known citation in NATURAL THEOLOGY Book 2 by Thomas Chalmers
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
--Arthur C. Clarke
"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
--Bertrand Russell
"Censorship is a sign of a society's weakness. It demonstrates that the censors are afraid of ideas that are different from their own. It suggests that some people are too weak to deal with words or images with which they disagree. The First Amendment, however, supposes that the American people are strong enough to deal even with ideas and words that they abhor. The First Amendment is a statement of belief in the strength of the American citizen."
--Paul Verhoeven (famous film director)
"I knew I finally made it as a performer when I began hearing rumors that I was gay."
--attributed to Dustin Hoffman (actor)
"Hatred is gained as much through good works as through evil."
--Niccolo Machiavelli
"The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him."
--Niccolo Machiavelli
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
--Albert Einstein
"Childhood...it takes us our entire adulthood to get over it."
--Amy Toy (professional psychic and writer)
"He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well."
--John Milton
"If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar."
--BIBLE verse, 1 John 4:20
"That which doesn't kill me, makes me stronger."
--Voltaire
"If God didn't exist, we'd have to invent him."
--Voltaire
"Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots."
--H.P. Lovecraft
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
--Albert Einstein
"I think that everyone should get married at least once, just to see how silly and outdated an institution it is."
--Madonna (famous singer/actress)
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
--Oscar Wilde
"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."
--George Bernard Shaw
"You can't mudsling if you're both covered in poop."
--M. Asher Cantrell (columnist), http://www.cracked.com/article_19268_5-ways-your-telecom-company-screwing-you.html
"...life's most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view."
--Steve Gerber (writer)
"If you can look at a crime where everything points to one answer and not see it, you're a dumb-ass. And if you can look at the deficit and not see that the problem is that the rich stopped paying taxes, you're a Republican."
--Bill Maher
"The best manner of avenging ourselves is by not resembling he who injured us."
--Jane Porter, TARZAN OF THE APES, written by Edgar Rice Burroughs
"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
--Leon Trotsky
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
--Albert Einstein
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and...I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
--Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
--Henry David Thoreau
"Never underestimate your own worth to yourself. You know yourself to be worth something, even if that worth is not evident to the world at large. Only when you lose faith in yourself can you actually hate yourself."
--Zen Ivan
"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the
world."
--Arthur Schopenhauer
"No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or charted an
unknown land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit."
--Helen Keller
"Where there is no vision, the people perish."
--Proverbs 29:18
"If an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it."
--Albert Einstein
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture
beyond into the impossible."
--Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
--Arthur C. Clarke
"You cannot depend upon your ideas when your imagination is out of
focus."
--Mark Twain
"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible."
--M.C. Escher
"It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will
speak."
--William Shakespeare
"You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back."
--Beverly Rubik
"'Time Travel is against reason,' said Filby. 'What reason?' asked the
Time Traveler."
--H.G. Wells, THE TIME MACHINE
"Everything goes through three stages:
"Impossible.
"Possible, but nonsense.
"I told you it was a good idea!"
--Robert Heinlein
"Never cast pearls before swine."
--Robert Heinlein
"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
--Albert Einstein
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."
--Albert Einstein
"The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it."
--Albert Einstein
"With fame, I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon."
--Albert Einstein
"It is my fate to be considered an authority, since I spent my youth rebelling against it."
--Albert Einstein
"Offering a hand up is not a hand-out."
--Clara Barton
"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."
--Winston Churchill
"He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail."
--Abraham Maslow
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
--Robert Heinlein
"I would rather be arrested as a traitor than fight a war for Wall Street."
--Eugene Debs (social activist), 1917
"The population is kept fat, satiated and ignorant by an antiquated education system, fast food, and a thousand channels of garbage in high definition..."
--The Hood, PUNISHER: DEAD END, written by Rick Remender
"As any lawyer will tell you, anyone can make a case for anything when they’re in exclusive possession of all the relevant evidence and are the only side from whom one is hearing; all evidence becomes less compelling when it’s subjected to adversarial scrutiny."
--Glenn Greenwald, http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/06/execution_by_secret_wh_committee/singleton/
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
--Gerald Seymour
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Oppression is what creates terrorists, not ideology."
--Alex Park (21st century philosopher)
"Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice."
--Jacques Martin Barzun
[When asked in an interview if he believed there was any important issue that the people will never change their opinion on]: "I think it is an extremely difficult struggle, but if I really believed that it were not going to happen, I wouldn’t bother to wake up in the morning and go to work on these issues. I tell people who express this kind of morose defeatism that their defeatism is unwarranted, because any human institution, no matter how invulnerable it seems, can be modified or torn down by other human beings. That’s the lesson of the Arab Spring. If you’re not winning, that’s just because you haven’t figured out how to win, not because it’s impossible. I do think things can change, but there are formidable barriers. I think that Americans have been inculcated with this learned helplessness and have been trained into accepting their own impotence."
--Glenn Greenwald, http://www.thepolitic.org/articles/86/a-conversation-with-glenn-greenwald-columnist-for-saloncom
"Nothing in the world is what it oughtta be. It's harsh. It's cruel. But that's why there's us: Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done, or suffered--or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be."
--Angel, in the Angel episode "Deep Down," Season 4, written by Steven S. DeKnight
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
--Hermann Goering (Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda)
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
"The Chinese were correct to say that living in interesting times was a curse. The blessing was in living through them."
--Ivan Ronald Schablotski (writer)
"You can't beat evil by doing evil."
--Buffy Summers, in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "First Date," Season 7, written by Jane Espenson
"I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with the fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible."
--William James
“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views...which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”
--The Doctor, from the Doctor Who episode, "The Face of Evil," Season 14, written by Chris Boucher
“Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another.”
--The Doctor, from the Doctor Who episode, "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy," Season 25, written by Stephen Wyatt
"The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes."
--Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, "Compassion and the Individual," http://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion
"Inter-dependence, of course, is a fundamental law of nature. Not only higher forms of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without any religion, law or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an innate recognition of their interconnectedness."
--Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, "Compassion and the Individual," http://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion
"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from evil."
--Alex Parks (21st century philosopher), using an insightful riff on one of Arthur C. Clarke's famous quotes
"The greatest Jihad is a word of truth spoken in the face of a tyrant."
--Hasan Tabarani, Sunnah proverb
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
--Winston Churchill
"History informs us that extraordinary things not only can happen, but
eventually do happen."
--David Kennerly (social activist)
"We must allow ourselves the essential benefit of hope since it is the
only way in which great things have ever been achieved."
--David Kennerly (social activist)
"...no witch hunt has ever been sustained into perpetuity."
--David Kennerly (social activist)
“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
--Anatole France
"I am a red man. If the Great Spirit wanted me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place."
--Sitting Bull
"The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it."
--Sitting Bull
"A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."
--Edmund Burke
"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."
--Edmund Burke
"He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper."
--Edmund Burke
"In a democracy, the majority of the citizens are capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority."
--Edmund Burke
"Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all."
--Edmund Burke
"One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good."
--Edmund Burke
"People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous."
--Edmund Burke
"The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth."
--Edmund Burke
"The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse."
--Edmund Burke
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."
--Edmund Burke
"To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely."
--Edmund Burke
"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature."
--Edmund Burke
"When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people."
--Edmund Burke
"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."
--Edmund Burke
"I know what it's like to be rejected. You feel ashamed of who you are. You feel worthless. But being rejected doesn't mean you get a free pass to take it out on the rest of the world."
--Superman, "Revenge of the Rejects," ACTION COMICS Vol. 1 #862, written by Geoff Johns
"...with the right amount of genius and a touch of perceived insanity, science can conquer anything."
--Brainiac 5, FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF 3 WORLDS #4, written by Geoff Johns
"Faith is never an answer. It's just a restatement of a question."
--Superboy, SUPERBOY Vol. 4 #4, written by Scott Lobdell
"It's good to keep an open mind, as long as you do not do so to the extent that your brain falls out of your head."
--Lars Thomas, WEIRD WATERS
"There's a difference between keeping an open mind and believing something because you want it to be true."
--Commander T'Pol, from the Star Trek: Enterprise episode, "Cold Front," written by Stephen Beck and Tim Finch
"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him."
--David Brinkley
"Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture."
--Lydia M. Child
"Don't aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally."
--David Frost
"Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other."
--Erma Bombeck
"Failure is success if we learn from it."
--Malcolm Forbes
"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune."
--Jim Rohn
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
--Bill Cosby
"I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed."
--Michael Jordan
"An accusation alone does not establish whether a crime has occurred. That remains for a dispassionate process of adjudication to decide. Under the best ideals of U.S. law, burden of proof falls to the prosecution, not the defense, and, moreover, that burden is a substantial one: proof beyond reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty. These legal standards stem from neither humanitarian soft-heartedness nor liberal soft-headedness; they serve as important safeguards against the power of the state to lock us up or take our lives. They are critically undermined whenever we side with 'the victim' before any legal determination has been made that a crime has actually occurred or when we treat law as a political spectator sport in which everyone roots for the home team.
"I dwell on the subject because there is today a strong temptation to regard sexual accusations that seem to convey wider sociological or political truths as more substantial, more credible, than those that do not."
--Roger N. Lancaster, SEX PANIC AND THE PUNITIVE STATE
"Legal truth is not sociological truth; its 'norms' are of a different order from statistical norms, although both involve rule and measure. Even less is it political truth. Rational law, at its best, serves as a hedge against 'what everyone already knows'—prejudice. The integrity of legal truth turns on being able to stand against mob-like rushes to judgment. Whenever individual legal cases are made to shoulder the burden of either commonly held beliefs or wider social grievances, justice is subverted, by definition. No menace, no emergency, no fear warrants departure from these foundational principles."
--Roger N. Lancaster, SEX PANIC AND THE PUNITIVE STATE
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
--Sun Tzu, THE ART OF WAR
"Which brings me to Christmas lights. I can't tell you how many people I talked to last December who thought they were actually helping the war effort by having monstrous front lawn displays. Why did they think it was a help? Well, they were a little fuzzier on that. Something about 'or else they win' and a big slice of 'it makes me feel better,' which, after all, is the goal of any war machine. To make us feel better. Us. Not the kid from the ghetto or poor rural town who's in the Army guarding the oil."
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
"Before 9/11, our government got involved in protecting us from all sorts of hazards, from the Budweiser frog to asbestos, from road rage to Internet porn and Bill Clinton's penis. And by watching the nightly news, you'd think the greatest threat to our personal safety was either shark attacks or mold. But then came our 9/11 'wake-up call,' and everything...
"Please. If everything changed, how come we're still fighting the old, stupid wars alongside the real war? Why are decent citizens still being jailed for smoking the wrong plant, easing the suffering of the terminally ill, or accepting cash for sex instead of the customary dinner and drinks?"
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
"Our mindset is, 'If you've got it, flaunt it'— not 'If you've got it, share it.' And we pretend being religious makes us moral and charitable."
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
"America represents less than 5% of the world's population, yet we consume 30% of its resources. We are bogarting the Earth. We could feed the world with just the garnish off our plates, and yet we pay farmers not to grow crops. We actually produce more than enough grain to feed every person on Earth, but the part of it we don't let rot to keep prices up we feed to our livestock so we can enjoy meaty, inefficient diets that sap our resources, deteriorate our organs and pollute more groundwater than industry."
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
"And make no mistake, it is about the poverty. Many times I've heard the argument, 'the 9/11 hijackers were not poor,' and many of them weren't. But that doesn't mean poverty isn't a root cause of terrorism. Hungry people tend to follow the ideology of those willing to feed them and resent those who don't. Desperate, poor young Muslim men in many countries are sponsored by wealthy Saudi Arabia, which is guided by the fanatical Wahhabi sect, to attend madrasses, which are hotbeds of Muslim fanaticism and anti-American indoctrination. They go for the room and board, they stay for the hate."
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
"There's a reason why the top-selling prescription drugs in America are all different chemical elixirs for ulcers, bloating, indigestion, high cholesterol—because no one ever says to Americans, 'Maybe you should change your diet.' There's money in eating badly, and there's money in the pills that put out the fires set by eating badly."
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
"People say, 'I'm not interested in politics,' like it's just another hobby, like 'I'm not into skiing or needlepoint.' But freedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that, 'Oh, I don't get involved in politics,' as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable. And foreign adversaries would have to calculate the savvy of our people into their nefarious plans."
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
[Regarding the allegations from right-wingers just after 9/11 that Bill Maher's statements contending that the 9/11 kamikaze pilots weren't cowards constituted dissent] "No, what I said was not dissent but an uncomfortable truth, which is different. That's more about timing, and it's another reason we desperately need to fight for free speech in wartime. Because people who get in trouble for what they say aren't necessarily wrong. Athenians made Socrates drink the hemlock, but not because his warnings about their downfall had been mistaken; he was right, and they hated him for it. Kind of like Al Gore in a toga. The Smothers Brothers got thrown off TV in 1969 for saying the Vietnam War was immoral and un-winnable. By 1979 that was such an accepted mainstream opinion you'd have a hard time finding someone to argue the reverse..."
--Bill Maher, WHEN YOU RIDE ALONE YOU STILL RIDE WITH BIN LADEN
"Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionists," MAN AND SUPERMAN (1903)
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them."
--George W. Bush
"Some slaves don't even realize they're in chains."
--Lt. Nyota Uhura, STAR TREK/LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #3, written by Chris Roberson
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
--Albert Einstein
"Learning without liberty is indoctrination, not education."
--David Moshman (educational psychologist and author)
"Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just."
--Blaise Pascal
"Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity."
--H.P. Lovecraft
>“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
-—Louis D. Brandeis
[On the matter of social mythology] "The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.
"Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one."
Ann Oakley, WOMAN'S WORK: THE HOUSEWIFE, PAST AND PRESENT
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals."
-–George Orwell
"The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He hears nothing, he sees nothing, he takes no part in political life. He doesn't seem to know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines, all depend on political decisions. He even prides himself on his ignorance, sticks out his chest and says he hates politics. He doesn't know, the imbecile, that from his political non-participation comes the prostitute, the abandoned child, the robber, and worst of all, corrupt officials, the lackeys of exploitative multinational corporations."
--Bertolt Brecht
"As in any social setting, your friends are the ones you consider your equals. But your best friends--your closest friends--are the ones you consider your betters."
--Superman, "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" from JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol. 2 #0, written by Brad Meltzer
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
--Anais Nin (French surrealist novelist)
"Justice and judgment lie often a world apart."
--Emmeline Pankhurst
"It's always been my conviction that when no one can see what the government is doing, what the government is doing becomes abusive."
--Batman, "Sanctuary Part 1," JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol. 2 #17, written by Alan Burnett
"...part of the thrill of being rich is watching the poor suffer."
--Brian Azzarello (writer)
"A coin that's come up tails nine thousand times in a row still has a 50 percent chance of coming up heads on the next throw."
--the Phantom Stranger, "The Ninth Age of Magic," DAY OF VENGEANCE INFINITE CRISIS SPECIAL #1, written by Bill Willingham
"Those who glorify themselves have no merit, those who are proud of themselves do not last."
--Lao Tzu, TAO DE CHING, chapters 22 & 24
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
--Susan B. Anthony
"Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self."
--Terry Goodkind
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
--Eleanor Roosevelt
"Stop pretending that it's OK to be stupid just because your stupidity got you hurt by someone slightly less stupid than you."
--Lord Galen, webmaster of Snipe Me
"School boards these days take it upon themselves to broaden their mission well beyond education."
--John G. Roberts, Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
"If you accept -- and I do -- that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don't say or like or want said."
--Neil Gaiman (writer)
"Freedom of expression 'except for things I don't like' isn't freedom of expression at all."
--mbwh, a commenter on THE GUARDIAN online
"No matter how sick the content we view [in a film] may be, it doesn't ultimately affect people's behaviour[;] their upbringing and mental state does that. If depravity in art was to blame for depravity in society, I'd hate to think of all the horrific things that happened after people first read fairy tales, or saw a Jacobean revenge tragedy."
--Lovecat, a commenter on THE GUARDIAN online
"Few things are bitter than to feel bitter. A man's own venom poisons himself more than his victims."
--Charles Buxton
"Anyone who holds a single way of thinking is blind to the truth."
--old Asian proverb
"Sometimes you just have to be your own best friend."
--Cissy Houston
[On the general question of whether it's a better choice to be wise or strong] "It is better to be wise... and to be wise, you choose to be both."
--Odin, WORLD WAR HULKS: SPIDER-MAN VS. THOR #2, written by Kieron Gillen
"Our world desperately needs exciting, challenging visions in order to help us see beyond the dull details of ordinary life. A culture that does not dream of the stars is doomed to stagnation."
--Kerry O'Quinn (writer and artist), STARLOG #8
"BELIEVE nothing because it is said to be of divine origin. BELIEVE nothing because a wise man said it. BELIEVE nothing because its belief is generally held. BELIEVE nothing because it is written in ancient books. BELIEVE nothing because someone else believes it. BUT believe only what you yourself know to be true."
--old Buddhist proverb
"If we have learned anything from the past, it is that change comes suddenly and when it is least expected, and it comes for reasons that become evident only in retrospect."
--Andrew Levine, "Our Missing Left Opposition," http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/19/our-missing-left-opposition/
"The world is full of Kings and Queens, who will blind your eyes and steal your dreams."
--Viktor Kowalski (pen name shared by two authors), "The Spirit of Metal"
"When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy."
--Lord Henry Wotton, THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY, written by Oscar Wilde
"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take toward life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do."
--Lord Henry Wotton, THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY, written by Oscar Wilde
"Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality."
--Lord Henry Wotton, THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY, written by Oscar Wilde
"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives."
--Lord Henry Wotton, THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY, written by Oscar Wilde
"The most important lesson of the excesses arising from the 9/11 attacks should be this one: that the dangers of overreacting and succumbing to irrational fear are far, far greater than any other dangers posed by these type of events."
--Glenn Greenwald, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions
"Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters."
--Rambo, FIRST BLOOD [novel], written by David Morrell
"The greatest enemy of creativity is 'good taste.'"
--Picasso
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
--Voltaire
"People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages."
--C. Wright Mills
"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on Earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic."
--Gore Vidal
"Any law that ultimately creates crime rather than curtailing it... isn't much of a statute."
--Lamont Cranston (a.k.a., one of the Shadow's guises) [speaking about Prohibition], THE SHADOW: YEAR ONE #1, written by Matt Wagner
"War is the national industry of empire."
--Honoré Gabriel Riqueti
"Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain."
--Marquis de Sade
"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud."
--Émile Zola
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
--Stephen Jay Gould
"Philanthropy is when you send a few malaria nets to an orphanage where celebrity’s children are incubated."
--Jennifer Matsui
"Nepotism is the most guaranteed route to success..."
--Jennifer Matsui
"That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord and cultivate predjudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable."
--Thomas Paine
"There are always flowers for those who want to see them."
--Henri Matisse
"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."
--John Steinbeck
“Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.”
--Bertrand Russell
"Sooner or later, we all go through a crucible... Most believe there are two types of people who go through a crucible: The ones who grow stronger from the experience, and survive it; and the ones who die. But there's a third type: The ones who learn to love the fire... those who choose to stay in their crucible because it's easier to embrace the pain when it's all you know anymore."
--Alderman Sebastien Blood, "Crucible," Season 2 episode of Arrow TV series, written by Andrew Kriesberg & Wendy Mericle
"Living is not for the weak."
--old Asian proverb
"The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen."
-—Aldous Huxley
"Populism is the exacerbated expression of the people’s place within democratic institutions, particularly at times when the political systems do not function properly, when tensions become too acute, when the channels for expressing discontent work badly, or when the political elites are perceived as breaking faith with those they represent."
-–Meny and Surel
“A persistent feature of the literature on populism is its reluctance – or difficulty – in giving the concept any precise meaning.”
--Ernesto Laclau
[Extrapolating from Laclau's above definition of "populism"]:
"As a result, anyone can be a populist. Rush Limbaugh drinks $300 bottles of wine and vacations in the south of France, and he’s a populist. The Koch brothers are two of the ten richest Americans, and they’re populists. Rand Paul is a goldbug, and he’s a populist. The requirements are easy to meet: you just have to be angry, anti-intellectual, bigoted, demagogic, and right wing. (You know who else was a populist? Hitler.) And as I’ve found, all good liberals, Democrats, radicals, and political scientists steer clear of populism."
--John Emerson, "A Short History of Populism in America," November 5, 2013 issue of COUNTERPUNCH
“Success will kill you. Failure you can live with your entire life and survive.”
--Jason Miller, quoted from the documentary on his life
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
--James Madison
"The only way you're going to sway anybody's opinion is by being a dude or damsel they want to have a beer with."
--Brendan McGinley, "4 Mortal Sins Pretty Much Every American Is Guilty Of," http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-modern-sins-pretty-much-every-american-guilty-of_p2/#ixzz2la7hpf3g
"It's unfortunate that the moral enlightenment of the human race isn't keeping pace with its scientific discoveries."
--Dr. Clarke Wildman, written by Lester Dent [quoted from DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Phillip Jose Farmer]
"Society prepares the crime, and the criminal only commits it."
--Dr. Clarke Wildman, written by Lester Dent [quoted from DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Phillip Jose Farmer]
"Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing."
--Jimmy Breslin
"I know that 2 and 2 make 4 - and should be glad to prove it too if I could
- though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into 5
it would give me much greater pleasure."
--Lord Byron
............
"...Faith is more than being given what you hope for. It is finding hope in what you are given."
--Vine priest, "Planet Death Part Four," X-O MANOWAR Vol. 2 #14, written by Robert Venditti
"It's unfortunate that the moral enlightenment of the human race isn't keeping pace with its scientific discoveries."
--Dr. Clarke Wildman, written by Lester Dent [quoted from DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Phillip Jose Farmer]
"Society prepares the crime, and the criminal only commits it."
--Dr. Clarke Wildman, written by Lester Dent [quoted from DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Phillip Jose Farmer]
"Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing."
--Jimmy Breslin
"I know that 2 and 2 make 4 - and should be glad to prove it too if I could
- though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into 5
it would give me much greater pleasure."
--Lord Byron
"...Faith is more than being given what you hope for. It is finding hope in what you are given."
--Vine priest, "Planet Death Part Four," X-O MANOWAR Vol. 2 #14, written by Robert Venditti
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you read? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
--Franz Kafka
"There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be. People like to set the bar high. I like to put the bar on the ground and barely step over it. I like to keep the expectations really low. After something like Mallrats (1995) or Jersey Girl (2004), the expectations are in the toilet. People are like, 'He's over, he's done.' So it's easier to be, like, 'Ta-da, I'm not.' It's a much more comfortable place to work from. When you have an escalating career, and every time you have to outdo yourself, I couldn't handle that kind of pressure. But having to outdo Jersey Girl (2004)? Not very difficult."
--Kevin Smith [actor/writer/director/producer]
"Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out. That's why I'm always hoping society never collapses because the first ones to go will be entertainers."
--Kevin Smith [actor/writer/director/producer]
"As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."
--Theodor W. Adorno
"Werner Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep. He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat--that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me."
--Klaus Kinski
"All I ever needed to be good was to be loved for myself."
--Erik, a.k.a., the Phantom of the Opera, from the eponymous novel, written by Gaston Leroux
"There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you."
--Amiri Baraka
"If we are bystanders to injustice and choose to do nothing, we invite injustice to come our way."
--Unknown
"The greatest fool is one who criticizes a thing about which they have limited knowledge."
--Plato
"I know I can't win... but as long as I don't give [in]... you can't win either."
--Dan Drieberg while facing overwhelming odds, "Some Things Are Inevitable," BEFORE WATCHMEN: NITE OWL #2, written by J. Michael Straczinsky
"It has always seemed strange to me: The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
--John Steinbeck, CANNERY ROW
"Violence doesn't engender understanding."
--Yamato Takeru, "The Three Treasures," scripted by Ryûzô Kikushima and Toshio Yasumi
"I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life."
--Maya Angelou
"The law goes silent during warfare."
--old Roman maxim
"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied, but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing."
--John Berger
"Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme has always been revolt."
--Alberto Moravia
"Freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one."
--A.J. Liebling (famous journalist)
"You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."
—-Junot Diaz
"I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;' who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"A culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment."
--James Hillman
“The supernatural is only something in the laws of nature of which we have been hereto ignorant.”
--Edward Bulwer-Lytton
"There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society."
--Karl Polanyi
"You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there."
--Edwin Louis Cole
"Civilization is the occasional, and always temporary, interruption of the jungle."
--Will Durant
"Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant."
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."
--Hunter S. Thompson
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made--through disobedience and through revolution."
--Oscar Wilde
"A big part of why I'm hated is because I stick my neck out, and in that way, I guess I disturb the herd, and the herd does not like being disturbed. That's the one way in which society treats good and evil equally. A certain amount of either is tolerated, but make too much noise and you're screwed."
--Cal McDonald, CRIMINAL MACABRE: THE EYES OF FRANKENSTEIN #4, written by Steve Niles
"I do not know how to find out anything new without
being offensive."
--Charles Fort
"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power--he's free again."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"On the most obvious level, it's worth noting that books are among the few remaining forms of entertainment not sustained by, and meant to further, the interests of advertising. Television, newspapers, films, and magazines are busily instilling us with new desires and previously unsuspected needs, while books sell us only themselves. Moreover, the time we spend reading is time spent away from media that have a greater chance of alchemically transmuting attention into money."
--Francine Prose
"The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress."
--Terry Eagleton
"If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want."
—-Oscar Wilde
"Don't cry because it came to an end, smile because it happened."
--Maria Garcia Marquez
"The mind that perceives the limitation is the limitation."
--attributed to Buddha
"They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard."
--Alexander Cockburn
"The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich."
--CLR James
"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers."
--Jose Narosky
"The rich march on Washington every day."
--I.F. Stone
"Every time we exterminate a predator, we are in a sense creating a new predator."
--David Rains Wallace
"Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss."
--Banksy
"The connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct. American attitudes to American 'greatness,' to hierarchies of race, to the perils of 'other' revolutions (the American revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured, the realities of empire, while apologists for overseas American interests have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom."
--Edward Said
“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
--C. S. Lewis
"The point is not for women simply to take power out of men's hands, since that wouldn't change anything about the world. It's a question precisely of destroying that notion of power."
--Simone de Beauvoir
"In a way, Che Guevara's fate was far worse than Simon Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete: his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes stores in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man or mocking his ideas than making him fashionable. That Che succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy."
--Paul Theroux
"Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realized that you either became a power or you were crushed."
--Joe Strummer
"What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did."
--Peter Singer
"The disposition to admire, and even to almost worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or at least to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
--Adam Smith, THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS (1759)
"The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."
--Theodore Roosevelt (U.S. president)
"Delusional Democrats—represented by a flap-eared donkey—wouldn’t hesitate to put a fascist in office so long as there was a communist standing in opposition. Nothing seduces like the lesser evil argument—a simple rhetorical palliative that enervated classes can hastily ingest before ignoring politics for another four years."
--Jason Hirthler
"Everybody is a genius. But if u judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
--Einstein
"What matters most is how well you walk through the fire."
--Charles Bukowski
"Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street."
--Frantz Fanon
"The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts."
--Ivan Illich
"The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything, you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized by our masters, and no one in politics dares even to use the word favorably, much less track ANY problem to its root. But then a ruling class that has been able to demonize the word 'liberal' is a master at controlling--indeed stifling--any criticism of itself. 'Liberal' comes from the Latin 'liberalis', which means pertaining to a free man."
--Gore Vidal
"Fear has two meanings: forget everything and run or face everything and rise! The choice is yours."
--Zig Ziglar
"In America you can say whatever you want--as long as it doesn't have any effect."
--Paul Goodman
"The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a
fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this."
--Ernesto Che Guevara
"Fate is simply a future that you didn't try to change."
--Philosophical proverb