For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is slavery. ~Jonathan Swift

What is the great Amercican sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of "concentrated indignation" as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed....The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin. ~Joseph Fort Newman, Atlantic Monthly, October 1922

Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations. ~Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837

In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America's leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem. ~President John F. Kennedy (Remarks prepared for delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas, November 22, 1963 - never delivered)

The promotion of the individual rights of the people of America necessarily involves resistance to war in any form, as war inevitably must destroy those rights and clamp additional governmental rule down upon the people... only those who resist war to the utmost, and with their last breath and last ounce of energy, can be considered as truly fighting to save this country for democracy. ~William James Sidis

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

You can only have power over people so 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

Only fools seek power, and the greatest fools seek it through force. ~Lao Tsu

The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else. ~Bill Moyers

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

April is the cruellest month.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths -your abilities and your failings.

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

In my beginning is my end.

It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

This love is silent.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

You are the music while the music lasts.

~T. S. Eliot

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Even a little dog can piss on a big building.

Little ol' boy in the Panhandle told me the other day you can still make a small fortune in agriculture. Problem is, you got to start with a large one.

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.

The Bible declares that on the sixth day God created man. Right then and there, God should have demanded a damage deposit.

The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

~Jim Hightower

“If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”

“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

“The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery”

“Consider Christmas—could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating—all in the name of the lowly Jesus?”

~Upton Sinclair

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson." ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have
been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless." ~U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomas Jefferson

We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.” ~Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another, ~Joseph Addison

"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." ~Woodrow Wilson

"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy ... The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States." ~Boutros Boutros-Ghali

"Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions." ~Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. ~James Madison, Federalist 47.

"Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sleeping in your garage
makes you a car." ~Garrison Keiler

"Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they’re part of the crime." ~Olavo de Cavarlho

"In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection
it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to
serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the
press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the
Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of
government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can
effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the
responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the
government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to
die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell." ~Justice Black. NYT v. US. 403
US 713

Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better
that you fear the media, for they will steal your Honor. That awful power, the
public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant,
self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up
in journalism on their way to the poorhouse. ~Mark Twain

"Ability wins us the esteem of the true men; luck that of the people."

"Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."

"If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength."

"No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does."

"Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise."

"Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side."

"The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so."

"The intellect is always fooled by the heart."

"We all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others."

"We always get bored with those whom we bore."

"We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves."

"We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all."

"Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person."

~François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. ~Benjamin Franklin

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." ~General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. ~Krishnamurti

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth.

~Mark Twain

I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet.

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

When I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better.

Don't let a man put anything over on ya 'cept an umbrella.

~Mae West

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow. ~Dorothy Thompson

I recognize Israel's right to defend itself as I recognize the US's right to defend ourselves as I recognize Lebanon's and Iraq's right to defend themselves---but I do not, cannot, and will not recognize anyone's right to commit wholesale slaughter on babies and children. I refuse to recognize that right no matter who does it---terrorists or state-sanctioned wars of terror---I refuse to recognize the right to slaughter and, whether it makes a difference or not, I refuse to be silent about it.
It must stop: For my children, your children and their children. They are all our children.
~Cindy Sheehan

Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.

My grandmothers are full of memories, Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, With veins rolling roughly over quick hands, They have many clean words to say, My grandmothers were strong.

Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age.

When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

White folks needs what black folks got just as much as black folks needs what white folks got, and we's all got to stay here mongst each other and git along, that's what.

You is born lucky, and it's better to be born lucky than born rich, cause if you is lucky you can git rich, but if you is born rich and you ain't lucky you is liables to lose all you got.

~Margaret Walker

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

I am mentally bifocal.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

Love alone could waken love.

Love dies only when growth stops.

Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.

Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors.

One faces the future with one's past.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.

The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband's bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.

We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

~Pearl S. Buck

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Big Brother is watching you.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

The main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

~George Orwell

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs, is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato

"Anyone who tells you that 'It Can't Happen Here' is whistling past the graveyard of history. There is no 'house rule' that bars tyranny coming to America. History is replete with republics whose people grew complacent and descended into imperial butchery and chaos." ~Mike Vanderboegh

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." ~Thomas Jefferson

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave." ~Frederick Douglass

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins." ~Benjamin Franklin

"Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown." ~Prince Peter Kropotkin

"Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they achieved, in the words of Paul Hawken, 'precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse.' The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding important issues." ~David C. Korten

"I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden." ~Richard Rumbold

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." ~John Stuart Mill

"Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right." ~Joseph Sobran

"Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all? ~Samuel Adams

"Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches." ~Catherine of Siena

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." ~Samuel Adams

"If the innocent honest Man must quietly quit all he has for Peace sake, to him who will lay violent hands upon it, I desire it may be considered what kind of Peace there will be in the World, which consists only in Violence and Rapine; and which is to be maintained only for the benefit of Robbers and Oppressors." ~John Locke

"Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it." ~Thomas Paine

"COWARDICE, n. A charge often levelled by all-American types against those who stand up for their beliefs by refusing to fight in wars they find unconscionable and who willingly go to prison or into exile in order to avoid violating their own consciences. These 'cowards' are to be contrasted with red-blooded, 'patriotic' youths who literally bend over, grab their ankles, submit to the government, fight in wars they do not understand (or disapprove of), and blindly obey orders to maim and to kill simply because they are ordered to do so—all to the howling approval of the all-American mob. This type of behavior is commonly termed 'courageous.'" ~Chaz Bufe

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it. ~Edward Abbey

“If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?” ~Joan Baez

The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service. ~Albert Einstein

[I]n such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners. ~Albert Camus

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. ~Ernest Hemmingway

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it. ~Louis Simpson

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. ~Mark Twain

I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,

Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.

Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.

And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment. ~Kahlil Gibran

The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion. ~Voltaire

"The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul." ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821-1881

"A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself." ~Joseph Pulitzer

"Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it responsible?" ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. ~Shel Silverstein.

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That's about it..." Barbara Kingsolver

Our government ... teaches the whole people by its example.
If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. ~Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.”

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.”

“Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.”

“In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come -- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

“Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.”

“The madness of depression is the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.”

“Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.”

“The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.”

~William Styron

"I'm only one person and I can't do everything. But I can do something. I will not let the fact that I can't do everything prevent me from doing what I can." ~Helen Keller

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

~Katherine Anne Porter

I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher. ~William Butler Yeats

“So, then, to every man his chance — to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining golden opportunity — to every man his right to live, to work, to be himself, to become whatever his manhood and his vision can combine to make him — this, seeker, is the promise of America.” ~Thomas Wolfe, “You Can’t Go Home Again”

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

Several times I concluded that there was too much detail; always I returned to continue and enjoy the book.

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

War remains the decisive human failure.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

~John Kenneth Galbraith

Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.
Richard Aldington

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
Arthur C. Clarke

In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.
Arthur Henderson

The drive toward economic nationalism is only part of the general revival of nationalism.
Arthur Henderson

Corporate nationalism to me is a little bit like what would have happened if Hitler had won. It's scary stuff. It's totalitarianism in a different from, under a different flavour.
Lance Henriksen

I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism. ~Bell Hooks

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first. ~Charles de Gaulle

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. ~Albert Einstein

Our true nationality is mankind. ~H. G. Wells

There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and that higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one's country; but by a duty to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization. ~Oscar S. Strauss

Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. ~Thorstein Veblen

TRUTH

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. ~Aldous Huxley

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. ~Thomas Jefferson

There is no god higher than truth. ~Mahatma Gandhi

When I tell any truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do. ~William Blake

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it all about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I am the fellow citizen of every being that thinks; my country is Truth. ~Alphonse de Lamartine

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me. ~Simone de Beauvoir

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable. ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete. ~Vaclav Havel

Liberalism

Liberalism

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved. ~Aristotle

Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of the people, tempered by fear. ~William Gladstone

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom. ~Jimmy Carter

Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right by which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. ~Jose Ortega y Gasset

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future. ~Leonard Bernstein

Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.

I cured with the power that came through me. Of course, it was not I who cured, it was the power from the Outer World, the visions and the ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds.

If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.


A long time ago my father told me what his father had told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called "Drinks Water", who dreamed what was to be... He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back to the Earth, and that a strange race would weave a web all around the Lakotas. He said, "You shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land..." Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.

-------------

Earth Prayer:

Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice. You lived first, and you are older than all need, older than all prayer. All things belong to you -- the two-legged, the four-legged, the wings of the air,
and all green things that live.

You have set the powers of the four quarters of the earth to cross each other. You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties, and where they cross, the place is holy. Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things.

Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice.
At the center of the sacred hoop
You have said that I should make the tree to bloom.

With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather,
With running eyes I must say
The tree has never bloomed

Here I stand, and the tree is withered.
Again, I recall the great vision you gave me.

It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives.
Nourish it then
That it may leaf
And bloom
And fill with singing birds!

Hear me, that the people may once again
Find the good road
And the shielding tree.

----------

The Sunset:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy...

But anywhere is the center of the world.


~Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, 1863-1950

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

The politician in my country seeks votes, affection and respect, in that order. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved.

The politician is trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

To be persuasive we must be belivable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.

~Edward R. Murrow

Patriotism means advocating plunder in the interests of the privileged class of your particular country. The time will soon come when calling someone a patriot will be the deepest insult. ~Ernest. B. Bax

This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism. ~Albert Einstein

A patriot sets himself apart in his own country under his own flag, sneers at other nations and keeps an army of uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries and keep them from grabbing slices of his. In the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man' - with his mouth. ~Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal

Patriotism is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a web of lies and falsehoods, robbing us of our dignity and increasing our arrogance and conceit. ~Emma Goldman

Blind patriotism has been kept intact by rewriting history to provide people with moral consolation and a psychological basis for denial. ~William H. Boyer

Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism. One would expect the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be self-evident to everyone. But the surprising fact is that cultured and learned people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest obstinacy and passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to praise it as beneficent and elevating. ~Leo Tolstoy

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man. ~Hannah Arendt

Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution. ~W. Lance Bennett

Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion. ~William Godwin

The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

What is the great Amercican sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of "concentrated indignation" as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed....The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin. ~Joseph Fort Newman, Atlantic Monthly, October 1922

Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations. ~Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837

Removed

President Bush rightly spoke of an `axis of evil.' But it is not Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Here is a more likely trio calling for herculean efforts to defeat: environmental degradation, pandemic poverty and a world awash with weapons.
(Speaking June 1, 2002 at the installation of John Bryson Chane as the new Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C.)

Human beings who blind themselves to human need make themselves less human.


There are two ways, my friend, that you can be rich in life. One is to make a lot of money and the other is to have few needs.

I'm not OK, you're not OK, and that's OK.

Remember, young people, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent. (Yale Alumni magazine in 1967)

The U.S. government should have vowed "...to see justice done, but by the force of law only, never by the law of force." (After September 11, 2001)

We yearned for a revolution of imagination and compassion that would oppose the very aggressiveness and antagonism that characterized the actions of both Nixon and the Weathermen. We were convinced nonviolence was more revolutionary than violence. (Referring to the organizers of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam)

Without love violence will change the world; it will change it into a more violent one. (June 1968)

Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality. (To the Yale Class of 1968 35th reunion, May 2003)

We can never really love anybody with whom we never laugh.

Love is in the giver, not the gift.

He told me that once he forgot himself and opened up like a door with a loose latch and everything fell out and he tried for days to put it all back in the proper order, but he finally gave up and left if there in a pile and loved everything equally.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

In life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions.

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.

Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.

Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word -- to science, to history, to what reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.

All of life is the exercise of risk.

When a man is drowning, it may be better for him to try to swim than to thrash around waiting for divine intervention.

So don't let money tell you who you are. Don't let power tell you who your are. Don't let enemies and -- for God's sake -- don't let your sins tell you who you are. Don't prove yourself. That's taken care of. All we have to do is express ourselves. It's difficult, but we're a lot more alive in pain than in complacency.

There is no smaller package in the world that that of a person all wrapped up in himself.

A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.

God's love doesn't seek value; it creates it. It's not because we have value that we are loved, but because we're loved that we have value. So you don't have to prove yourself -- ever. That's taken care of.

God knows it is emotionally satisfying to be righteous with that righteousness that nourishes itself on the blood of sinners. But God also knows that what is emotionally satisfying can be spiritually devastating.

There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel with their country, a reflection of God's lover's quarrel with all the world.

When we live at each other's mercy, we had better learn to be merciful.

If your heart is full of fear, you won't seek truth; you'll seek security. If a heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind.

The goal of the Christian life is not to save your soul but to transcend yourself, to vindicate the human struggle of which all of us are a part, to keep hope advancing.

The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man and the man in every woman.

The temptation to moralize is strong; it is emotionally satisfying to have enemies rather than problems, to seek out culprits rather than the flaws in the system.

~William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

He slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Life is a dead-end street.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent-slimy, sneaking and abominable.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combatted at the public expense, and not fostered.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -and both commonly succeed, and are right.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

~H. L. Mencken

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. ~Thomas Mann

And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people. ~Hannah Arendt

Where liberty is, there is my country. ~Benjamin Franklin

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. ~Henry D. Thoreau

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. ~Mark Twain

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence. ~Benjamin Franklin

How soon not now becomes never. ~Martin Luther.

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Luck is believing you're lucky.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Make voyages! Attempt them... there's nothing else.

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out and death's the other.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

This country of endured but unendurable pain.

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.

~Tennessee Williams

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Nobody was ever meant, To remember or invent, What he did with every cent.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

The best way out is always through.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The middle of the road is where the white line is - and that's the worst place to drive.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man-fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut off from them.

Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

~Robert Frost

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.

~Flannery O'Connor

When griping grief the heart doth wound,
and doleful dumps the mind opresses,
then music, with her silver sound,
with speedy help doth lend redress.
~William Shakespeare

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust. ~Samuel Johnson

Whatever we well understand we express clearly, and words flow with ease. ~Nicholas Boileau

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he _becomes_ polite. ~Jean Kerr

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher. ~Victor Hugo

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

~John Updike

"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."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."

"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."

"God is subtle but he is not malicious."

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."

"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."

"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."

"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."

"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."

"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

"No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

"Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever."

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."

"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

~Albert Einstein

[(c)Kevin Harris 1995]

"Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken."

“As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.”

“All things are like visions beyond the reach of the human mind.”

“But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”

“You can’t have birth without existence and you can’t have death without birth.”

"...Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH..."

“My witness is the empty sky.”

“Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation.”

“My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..."

“You’d be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday.”

“It’s like old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street.”
-- response to a question about fame

“I’d rather be thin than famous.”

“Dean, don’t drive so fast in the daytime...ah hell, Dean, I’m going in the back seat, I can’t stand it anymore, I can’ look."
-- "On the Road”

“I’m not a beatnik, I’m a Catholic.”

~Jack Kerouac

A people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it. ~ John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, 1861

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
~Ralph Ellison

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

When liberty returns, I will return.
- August 18, 1859 (On when he planned to end his exile from France.)

Popularity? It's glory's small change.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.
- from Hugo's will, written August 2, 1883, when Hugo thought he was near death. (He died in 1885).

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

~Victor Hugo

You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.

So, I learn from my mistakes. It's a very painful way to learn, but without pain, the old saying is, there's no gain. I found that to be true in my life. You miss a lot of opportunities by making mistakes, but that's part of it: knowing that you're not shut out forever, and that there's a goal you still can reach.

Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.

You've got to know your limitations. I don't know what your limitations are. I found out what mine were when I was twelve. I found out that there weren't too many limitations, if I did it my way.

After about three lessons the voice teacher said, "Don't take voice lessons. Do it your way.

~Johnny Cash

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

Every dogma has its day.

I didn't think; I experimented.

I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us.

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

~Anthony Burgess

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. ~Malcolm Muggeridge

As happy a man as any in the world, for the whole world seems to smile upon me!

I find my wife hath something in her gizzard, that only waits an opportunity of being provoked to bring up; but I will not, for my content-sake, give it.

I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition.

Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.
Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.

Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them.

Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.

But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.

In appearance, at least, he being on all occasions glad to be at friendship with me, though we hate one another, and know it on both sides.

I did not like that Clergy should meddle with matters of state.

He that will not stoop for a pin will never be worth a pound.

~Samuel Pepys

The greatest dignity and respect you can give [victims of war] is to show the horror they suffered, the absolute gruesome horror. ~War Photographer David Lesson

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.

But what of black women? . . . I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.

One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.

As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.

~W.E.B. DuBois

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an elite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Art is born of humiliation.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

Composing mortals with immortal fire.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say: Sanctity is the state about which theology has nothing to say.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.

It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.

Now is the age of anxiety.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too "personal" style.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at.

~W. H. Auden

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

Don't expect me to cry for all the reasons you had to die.

Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self esteem.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.

I really haven't had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I'd rather tell a story about somebody else.

I wanted to move to Seattle, sell my ass, and be a punk rocker, but I was too afraid.

I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time. Something different from heavy metal, a different attitude.

I'm so happy because today I found my friends - they're in my head.

I'm too busy acting like I'm not Naive. I've seen it all, I was here first.

I've always had a problem with the average macho man - they've always been a threat to me.

If you die you're completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I'm not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I've got.

If you ever need anything please don't hesitate to ask someone else first.

It's okay to eat fish because they don't have any feelings.

My generation's apathy. I'm disgusted with it. I'm disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.

Never met a wise man if so it's a woman!

Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster's terms, 'nirvana' means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

Rather be dead than cool.

That's what music is entertainment. The more you put yourself into it, the more of you comes out in it.

The worst crime is faking it.

Thought the sun is gone, I have a light.

Vandalism is as beautiful as a rock in a cop's face.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.

We're so trendy we cant even escape ourselves.

What people don't realize is that the so-called Seattle grunge scene grew out of several close-knit gourmet supper clubs - we would only pick up guitars to pass the time while our dishes were simmering, baking, boiling, etc.

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.

If it's illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

I used to try to make my head explode by holding my breath, thinking that if I blew up my head, they'd [mom and dad] be sorry.

By definition pop is extremely catchy, whether you like it or not," Cobain says. There are some pop songs I hate but I can't get them out of my head. Our songs also have the standard pop format: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.

We were just amazed we were putting out a record. We were, and are, still learning. But we've never cared much for professionalism as long as the energy was there. Like our live shows: We're out of tune and use a lot of feedback. That's not on purpose or because we don't care, we're just musically and rhythmically retarded and we play so hard that we can't tune our guitars fast enough.

~Kurt Cobain

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish. ~Albert Einstein

And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Passion is never enough; neither is skill.

The function of freedom is to free somebody else.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

Bit by bit . . . she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

I have my own list of objections that I can peruse at my leisure, not least of which is an almost comic obtuseness regarding women, ... generous; impractical; often wrong; always engaged; mindful of, and often amused by, his own power.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.

Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty per cent of useful work of the world.

Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.

The loneliest woman in the world is the woman without a close woman friend.

Bit by bit . . . she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

(Love) is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion—because hatred is involved in it, too.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

There is really nothing more to say -- except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, 'Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?' I could have spoken up, 'I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.'

~Toni Morrison

We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful what we pretend to be. ~Kurt Vonnegut

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgement upon anything new.

Wine is sunlight, held together by water.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

What greater stupidity can be imagined than that of calling jewels, silver, and gold 'precious,' and earth and soil 'base'? People who do this ought to remember that if there were as great a scarcity of soil as of jewels or precious metals, there would not be a prince who would not spend a bushel of diamonds and rubies and a cartload of gold just to have enough earth to plant a jasmine in a little pot, or to sow an orange seed and watch it sprout, grow, and produce its handsome leaves, its fragrant flowers, and fine fruit. It is scarcity and plenty that make the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water.

Doubt is the father of invention.

But where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant, either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin ofcommonwealths and the subversion of the state.

~Galileo Galilei

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. ~Mark Twain

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
I adore life but I don't fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible.

~Georges Simenon

All creeds that use suppression of facts show a lack of robust-ness and a lack of confidence in the reasonableness of their own beliefs. What is true will emerge as true from the fullest consideration of events. ~Bertrand Russell, 1934

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

An American Monkey after getting drunk on Brandy would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the 'race is for the strong' and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.

I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

...doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue...

I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?

~Charles Darwin

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.

Let me not be understood as saying that there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be religiously observed.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

I would rather be defeated with this expression ('house divided against itself cannot stand') in the speech, and uphold and discuss it before the people, than be victorious without it.

Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.

...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, God bless the women of America!

Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

I have stepped out upon this platform that I may see you and that you may see me, and in the arrangement I have the best of the bargain.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny.

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend it'.

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

You think slavery is right and should be extended; while we think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

Stand with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and PART with him when he goes wrong.

This is where I part with Abe:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.

~Abraham Lincoln

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion.

Of all religions, Christianity is without a doubt the one that should inspire tolerance most, although, up to now, the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

The punishment of criminals should be of use; when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.

To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted.

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.

We owe respect to the living. To the dead we owe only truth.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

If Christians want us to believe in a Redeemer, let them act redeemed.

The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all, and others to persecute those who reason.

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

Better is the enemy of good.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Common sense is not so common.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.

Everything is for the best in this best of possible worlds.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

He who thinks himself wise, O heavens! is a great fool.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

I advice you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying you annuities.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.
Voltaire

Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Nature has always had more force than education.

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

Prejudice, friend, govern the vulgar crowd.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Slavery is also as ancient as war, and was as human nature.

Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare The truth thou hast, that all may share; Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

Though one sits in meditation in a particular place, the Self in him can exercise its influence far away. Though still, it moves everywhere... The Self cannot be known by anyone who desists not from unrighteous ways, controls not his senses, stills not his mind, and practices not meditation.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Judge of a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

Love truth, and pardon error.

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

Prejudice is opinion without judgement.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

~Voltaire

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.

For the villainy of the world is great, and a man has to run his legs off to keep them from being stolen out fom underneath him.

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

A man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time he'll give him sixpence. But the second time it'll only be a three penny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll have him cold-bloodedly handed over to the police.

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

Don't tell me peace has broken out.

Everyone needs help from everyone.

Grub first, then ethics.

Life is short and so is money.

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men.
For though the bastard is dead, the bitch that bore him is again in heat.

He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is right at their heels.

Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

Right is its own defense.

Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste.

The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

War is like love; it always finds a way.

What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.

What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

~Bertolt Brecht

Hope has two beautiful daughters Their names are anger and courage;
anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain
the way they are. ~St. Augustine

The effects of kindness are not always seen immediately. Sometimes it
takes years until your kindness will pay off. Sometimes you never see
the fruits of your labors, but they are there, deep inside of the soul
of the one you touched. ~Dan Kelly

If you always assume the person sitting next to you
is the Messiah waiting for some human kindness -
You will soon come to weigh your words and watch your hands.
And if he/she chooses not to reveal him/herself in your time -
It will not matter. ~Author Unknown

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they will not be here
tomorrow. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you
can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will
never be the same again. ~Og Mandino

When I was young, I admired clever people.
Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

~Rabbi Abraham Heschel

No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

Tell the truth, have you ever found God in a church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I evr felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God. (The Color Purple

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. (The Color Purple)

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

In order to be able to live in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

~Alice Walker

What is a feminist? You are a feminist if you believe:

Women matter as much as men do.
Women have the right to determine their lives.
Women's experiences matter.
Women have the right to tell the truth about their experiences.
Women deserve more of whatever it is they are not getting enough of because they are women: respect, self-respect, education, safety, health, representation, money.

~Naomi Wolf, Fire With Fire

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war. ~Robert Mueller

Because women's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion, and...for lots of other reasons we are part of the women's liberation movement. ~Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, 14 September 1987

Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths. ~Lois Wyse

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less. ~Susan B. Anthony

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing. ~Gloria Steinem

A natural response is to change the word feminist to a word with fewer stigmas attached. But inevitably the same thing will happen to that magical word. Part of the radical connotation of feminism is not due to the word, but to the action. The act of a woman standing up for herself is radical, whether she calls herself a feminist or not. ~Paula Kamen

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. ~Pat Robertson, 1992 Republican Convention

We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth. ~Sigmund Freud

The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it. ~Eleanor Roosevelt

Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions.. for safety on the streets... for child care, for social welfare...for rape crisis centers, women's refuges, reforms in the law." [If someone says] 'Oh, I'm not a feminist,' [I ask] 'Why? What's your problem?' ~Dale Spender

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive. ~Marya Mannes

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint. ~Erma Bombeck

Women consititute half the worlds population, perform nearly two thirds of the world's work, receive one tenth of the world's income and own less than one hundredth of the worlds wealth.
~UN findings from 1975-1985 Decade of Women

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful... The UK beauty industry takes £8.9 billion a year out of women's pockets. Magazines financed by the beauty industry teach little girls that they need make-up and train them to use it, so establishing their lifelong reliance on beauty products. ~Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ~Roseanne Barr

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. ~H.L. Mencken

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom. Make no mistake; all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
~William S. Burroughs

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination.

The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

Men weren't really the enemy -- they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework - an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

~Betty Friedan

"La plus perdue de toutes journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri." [The most wasted of all days is that when one did not laugh.] ~Chamfort, french writer of the 18th century.

[thx rpc]

“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.”

“Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education. That so many of us are still dying on account of ancient myths is as bewildering as it is horrible, and our own attachment to these myths, whether moderate or extreme, has kept us silent in the face of developments that could ultimately destroy us. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past.”

“We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words— ‘Jesus,’ ‘Allah,’ ‘Ram’—can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books.

How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so.

Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.”

“We live in a world of unimaginable surprises—from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light’s dancing for eons upon the earth—and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise.

This is wondrously strange. If one didn’t know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.”

~Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Words of Aung San Suu Kyi

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.

I think I should be active politically. Because I look upon myself as a politician. That's not a dirty word you know. Some people think that there is something wrong with politicians. Of course, something is wrong with some politicians.

It is often in the name of cultural integrity as well as social stability and national security that democratic reforms based on human rights are resisted by authoritarian governments.

Peace as a goal is an ideal which will not be contested by any government or nation, not even the most belligerent.

The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.

The provision of basic material needs is not sufficient to make minority groups and indigenous peoples feel they are truly part of the greater national entity. For that they have to be confident that they too have an active role to play in shaping the destiny of the state that demands their allegiance.

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.

Confidence-building is not something that can go on forever. If it goes on forever then it becomes counterproductive.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. ~Elie Wiesel

Coretta Scott King 1927-2006

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation.

The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members, ... a heart of grace and a soul generated by love.

If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.

I learned that when you are willing to make sacrifices for a great cause, you will never be alone, because you will have divine companionship and the support of good people. This same faith and cosmic companionship sustained me after my husband was assassinated, and gave me the strength to make my contribution to carrying forward his unfinished work.

I believe all Americans who believe in freedom, tolerance and human rights have a responsibility to oppose bigotry and prejudice based on sexual orientation.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.

The value of life in our cities has become as cheap as the price of a gun.

In this country. we vigorously regulate the sale of medicine and severely limit the advertising of cigarettes because of their effect on human health. But we allow virtually anyone in America to buy a gun and virtually everyone in the nation to see graphic violence.

The more visible signs of protest are gone, but I think there is a realization that the tactics of the late sixties are not sufficient to meet the challenges of the seventies.

Virtually every step forward in our history has been a liberal initiative taken over conservative opposition: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, rural electrification, the establishment of a minimum wage, collective bargaining, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and federal aid to education, including the land-grant colleges, to name just a few. Many…were eventually embraced by conservatives only after it became clear that they had overwhelming public approval for the simple reason that almost every American benefited from them. Every one of these liberal efforts strengthened our democracy and our quality of life. I challenge my conservative friends to name a single federal initiative now generally approved by both of our major parties that was not first put forward by liberals over the opposition of conservatives. ~George McGovern

The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. ~Thomas Paine

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. ~Thomas Paine

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. ~Thomas Paine

Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out. ~Anton Chekhov

You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no result. ~Gandhi

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. ~Gandhi

Today democracy is a facade of plutocracy. Because the peoples will not tolerate naked plutocracy, power is nominally turned over to them, while real power rests in the hands of the plutocrats. In democracies, whether republican or monarchical, the statesmen are marionettes, and the capitalists are the wire pullers: they dictate the political guidelines, they control the voters by buying public opinion, through business and social connections [they control] higher government officials ... The plutocracy of today is more powerful than the aristocracy of the past, because nothing stands above it except the state, which is its tool and helper. ~Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, "Praktischer Idealismus ("Practical Idealism"), Vienna, 1925.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed? ~John Milton

If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance for you to contribute to making a better world. That's your choice. ~Noam Chomsky

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed. I feel, at this moment, more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless. ~Lincoln in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins on November 21, 1864

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest... and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war. ~Plato

To initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. ~Nuremberg Tribunal

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. ~John Stuart Mill

A true revolution of values will say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.'… I call on Washington today, I call on every man and woman of goodwill all over America today: Take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late; a book may close. And I don't know about you -- I ain't going to study war no more. ~Martin Luther King

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell. ~Edward Abbey

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, science for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignorable war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder. ~Albert Einstein

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. ~Edward Abbey

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State. ~Edward Abbey

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. ~Thomas Paine

Things you have to believe to be a Republican today

Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.

“Standing Tall for America” means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.

A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.

Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.

If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.

A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.

Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

Global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.

A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

The public has a right to know about Hillary’s cattle trades, but George Bush’s driving record is none of our business.

You support states’ rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.

What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the ’80s is irrelevant.

Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
~unattributed
[thanks Pam]

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan.

To be a Negro in America is to hope against hope. ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967


A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

[special thanks to Monica]

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. ~Carl Jung

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. ~Harper Lee

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. ~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a li