A Bunch of Quotes I Really Like

. . .and for some reason, it hadn't occurred to me till now to post them.



"Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought."
-- Lin Yutang

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"To announce there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-- T. Roosevelt

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"The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except
yourself."
-- Rita Mae Brown

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"Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail."

An unnamed youth in a letter to Kurt Vonnegut, calling the sentence
the key to Vonnegut's books. Vonnegut agreed.

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"The word "liberal" has a fine, upright meaning and is symbolic of a great historic tradition."

-J. Edgar Hoover

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The cop comes up to Heisenberg's car, asks him, "Do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says "No, but I know where I am."

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"Really I shall not be the least surprised if, for example, in the midst of the future universal good sense, some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a derisive and reactionary air, suddenly springs up out of nowhere, puts his arms akimbo and says to all of us, 'Come on, gentlemen, why shouldn't we get rid of all this calm reasonableness with one kick, just so as to be able to send all these logarithms to the devil and be able to live our lives at our own sweet will?' That wouldn't matter either, but what's really mortifying is that he would find followers: that's the way men are made." --Dostoevsky

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"No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous. Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him." --Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon

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"Technical Blandishmentiser" gives his version of the dialogue between the U.S. and France vis-a-vis Iraq:

A: Don't do it. You'll regret it. There are better ways, let's work it out.

B: FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I'M GOING TO DO IT! FUCKING ASSHOLE! FUCK YOU! (ad nauseam)

(B does it. B fucks up C's life, and it looks like B is well on the way to fucking up B's own life)

B: Ow, fuck! Help me! Give me $5000.

A: Tell you what. I want to help C too, but I'm not just going to give you $5000 of my hard-earned money. Let's go to the Club, and they'll help you take care of C. Of course, the Club's going to want a say in how they spend their money on C.

B: Look, just gimme the $5000!

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"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." --Walt Whitman

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In a world devoted to material wealth, art connects us to the qualitative and non-material. In a world addicted to consumption and power, art celebrates emptiness and surrender.

--John Luther Adams

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The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

William Butler Yeats

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"The last blitz game I played was on a train in 1929."

--Mikhail Botvinnik

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"I think it's safe to say, that were it not for Al Gore, the internet would not exist, as we now know it" -- Newt Gingrich

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". . .Nazism was anything but a unique phenomenon in history. It wasn't an aberration, and the undercurrents of oppression and totalitarianism that characterized Hitler's regime exist in every modern Western society." --Ted Rall

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"These idiots won't recognize fascism in America unless the jackboots kicking down their doors are the same brand that the Nazis wore." --Odegard Drape

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"I leave them to the symbol-minded."

--George Carlin, on flags

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"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A typical argument used against the Democrats is that they increase govt spending, whereas Republicans cut back govt spending. However, here are the average annual real increases in domestic discretionary spending:

LBJ 1965-69 4.3%
Richard Nixon 1970-75 6.8%
Gerald Ford 1976-77 8.0%
Jimmy Carter 1978-81 2.0%
Ronald Reagan 1982-89 -1.3%
George H.W. Bush 1990-93 4.0%
Bill Clinton 1994-2001 2.5%
George W. Bush 2002-04 8.2%

Note that except for Reagan, every Repug president since LBJ has been a big spender, and the Dems the smallest spenders.

(Source: Club for Growth, based on U.S. Budget, Historical Tables, 2004, courtesy of Bill Bonner)

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Some anagrams for the Republicans' slogan for Bush's 2004 campaign: "Steady Leadership in a Time of Change," courtesy of corrente.blogspot.com:

1. I'm a hypertense, death-dealing fiasco

2. I am a deathless deafening hypocrite

3. I am a tone-deaf, highly-paid erectness

4. I'm the fanatic, grandiose sleepyhead.

5. Oafishly indecent pig's ear meathead

6. Slimy, cheapish deafening toadeater

7. Oedipean cheating defames trashily.

8. Flag hype, eh? Administration decease

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There are different schools of thought concerning the phenomena of fan-hitting excrement, and no one school is qualitatively more correct than another. Varieties of excrement alone can cause false lab results; a road built of false fecal data will only end up as a slippery slope.

It is also quite possible that, if the fan were to be turned around, any feces striking it from the back would be flung towards a neighboring planet. Steady leadership in a time of flying shit!

--MortalJiveStar (via Atrios)
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"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on."

--Richard Clarke
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An observation by the Scottish Historian Professor Alexander Tyler, circa 1787, on the decline and fall of the Athenian Republic.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."

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Part of the problem is that the crooks rig the rules, then when
the rules dont work, they argue we shouldnt have any.

--Herb Dye

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"Beyond the Euphrates began for us the land of mirage and danger, the sands where one helplessly sank, and the roads which ended in nothing. The slightest reversal would have resulted in a jolt to our prestige giving rise to all kinds of catastrophe; the problem was not only to conquer but to conquer again and again, perpetually; our forces would be drained off in the attempt."

Emperor Hadrian, AD 117-138

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REPORTER: I'd like to direct this question to messrs. Lennon and McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they referred to "Day Tripper" as being about a prostitute...
PAUL: Oh yeah.
REPORTER: ...and "Norwegian Wood" as being about a lesbian.
PAUL: Oh yeah.
REPORTER: I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.
PAUL: We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all.

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What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?

--Kurt Vonnegut

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Always ask questions about what you don't know. If you want to be smart, you have to be willing to look stupid. --Odegard Drape

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Don't care how conservatives respond anymore
Don't care about the fundies or the Military Corps
Don't care what the pundits parse or pitch into their pundit stew
All that I care about is replacing Double U

You can torture me, you can slander me, smear me or impugn
You can haul me off to Gitmo and leave me there till June
You can try to make the government a kind of Christian Church,
Just as long as Double U is knocked clean off his perch

Goodbye Commander Flight Deck!
Goodbye 'ol Beady Eyes!
Goodbye to Preznit Turkee
Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye
Goodbye to Captain "Bring 'em On,"
Goodbye to Yellow Cake
Goodbye to his whole family
All they do is take
All they do is take

+++
MJS | Email | Homepage | 05.06.04 - 10:32 pm | # (via Atrios)

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On the torture of Iraqi prisoners:

"While we are hardly at the level of the Holocaust, and we aren't taking over as many countries as possible in the name of "Lebensraum," the distinctions between American foreign policy and Nazi Germany deserve study in a dispassionate manner.

What, after all, do we mean by the epithet "Good German"? Is there a sliding scale between "good soldier" and "good Nazi", and how do we stay at the right end of it? Is there a scale between "good citizen" and "I didn't know what that smell from Buchenwald was"?

Obviously there is a distinction. But is it also a slippery slope? German history indicates it is. Are we on it?

It's a question always worth asking, if only to temper all of our aims with appropriate humility.

Although following the course of "love your enemies" and "do to others what you want them to do to you" (even Kant thought that was the basis of a rational ethical system), would be much easier.

But the initial set of questions arises out of the latter directive. So you get back to them anyway....

Robert M. Jeffers | Email | Homepage | 05.06.04 - 10:37 pm | # " (From the comment boards at atrios.blogspot.com)