The concepts presented in "Food for Thought" do not constitute an endorsement of the ideas by the editor. The editor assumes no control nor responsibility for how these ideas are used, nor does the editor advocate or suggest any illegal and/or immoral behavior, nor is any warranty expressed or implied. Further, the editor recommends the retention of legal council before any action whatsoever, as ignorance of the law IS NO EXCUSE.
ABILITY ADVERSITY ADVERTISING AFTERLIFE AGING AGNOSTICISM AMBITION ANARCHY APATHY ART ATHEISM AVARICE BEAUTY BELIEF BIBLE BIRTH BIRTH CONTROL BIZARRE BUREAUCRACY CAPITALISM CATS CENSORSHIP CHARACTER CHASTITY CHILDREN CHRISTIANITY CIVILIZATION CLICHE COMMUNICATION CONFORMITY CONSCIENCE CONSCIOUSNESS CONSTITUTION CONSUMERISM COURAGE CRAP CREATION CRIME CRITICISM CULTURE CURIOSITY CYNICISM DEATH DEMOCRACY DESIRE DEVIANTS DOGMA DOGS DREAMS DRINK DRUGS DRUG WAR DUTY ECOLOGY EDUCATION EGO EMOTION ENLIGHTENMENT EPITAPHS EVIL EXPERIENCE FAITH FAME FANATICISM FASCISM FEAR FEMINISM FOOLS FORTUNE COOKIES FREE SPEECH FRIENDSHIP GENIUS GOD GOVERNMENT GRAVE GRIEF GUNS HABIT HAPPINESS HASH HOUSE HARRIERS HATE HEAVEN HELL HISTORY HONESTY HOPE HUMILTY HUMOR IDENTITY IGNORANCE IMAGINATION IMMORTALITY INDIVIDUALITY INDOCTRINATION INQUIRY INTELLECT JEST JUSTICE KNOWLEDGE LANGUAGE LAST WORDS LAW LEGISLATURE LIBERTY LIFE LITERATURE LOVE LUCK MADNESS MANKIND MARRIAGE MAXIMS MEDIA MEDICINE MIND MODERATION MORALITY MORTALITY MURPHY'S LAW MUSIC NATURE NEEDS NEUROSIS PARANOIA PATRIOTISM PESSIMISM PHILOSOPHY POLITICAL CORRECTNESS POLITICS PORNOGRAPHY POWER PREJUDICE PROGRESS/CHANGE PROPAGANDA PUNISHMENT REALITY REASON RELIGION REVENGE REVOLT RIGHTS SARCASM SCIENCE SECURITY SELF-DEFENSE SEX SIN SLAVERY SLEEP SPIRITUALITY STATE STUFF STUPIDITY SUFFERING SUICIDE SUPERSTITION TAXES TECHNOLOGY TELEVISION TEMPTATION THEOLOGY TIME TRANSCENDENCE TRUST TRUTH TYRANNY VIOLENCE VIRTUE WAR WEALTH WISDOM WIT WONDER WORK
QUOTATIONS ON QUOTATIONS ---------- -- ---------- Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Journals (1843) Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. - Winston Churchill (1874-1965) "My Early Life" (1930), ch.9 It is better to be quotable than to be honest. - Tom Stoppard (b.1937) Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly. - Simeon Strunsky (1879-1948) I improve on misquotation. - Cary Grant (1904-1986) The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. - Robert Benchley (1889-1945) Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. - Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy Leigh Sayers, "Gaudy Night") (1893-1957) A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion. - Robert Chapman Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external. - Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) "I must claim the quoter's privilege of giving only as much of the text as will suit my purpose," said Tan-Chun. "If I told you how it went on, I should end up by contradicting myself!" - Cao Xueqin A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire (1694-1778) Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything. - Andre-Georges Malraux (1901-1976) Anti-censorship address, 12 Nov 1966 After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) on Shakespeare An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. - E.P. Whipple ******************************************************************************** ABILITY ------- Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) ******************************************************************************** ADVERSITY --------- Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant. - Horace (65-8 BC) Adversity is the first path to truth. - Lord Byron (1788-1824) Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. - Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885) Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it. - Horace (65-8 BC) Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise. - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. - Harry S Truman (1884-1872) Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. - unknown Common and vulgar people ascribe all ills that they feel to others; people of little wisdom ascribe to themselves; people of much wisdom, to no one. - Epictetus (c.55-c.135) To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete. - Epictetus (c.55-c.135) Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. - William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions. - Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen. - James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. - Victer Marie Hugo (1802-1885) The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character. - Walter Scott (1771-1832) To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know. - Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day. - Matthew 6:34 Men often bear little grievances with less courage than they do large misfortunes. - Aesop (620-560 BC) Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you? - Quran The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them. - Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) _Les Enfants Terribles_ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do? I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him? To shrug. - Francisco d'Anconia ******************************************************************************** ADVERTISING ----------- What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public. - Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man. - Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. - Norman Douglas (1868-1952) Advertising is legalized lying. - Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. - George Orwell (1903-1950) Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it. - Stephen Butler Leacock (1869-1944) Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, especially if the goods are worthless. - Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. - Louis Kronenberger (b.1904) Sanely applied advertising could remake the world. - Stuart Chase (1888-?) Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve their economic status. - Ralph S. Butler ******************************************************************************** AFTERLIFE --------- We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so at the moment after death. - Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. - Anatole France (1844-1924) We are bound to our bodies like an oyster is to its shell. - Plato (428-348? BC) Dying is like getting out of a car. You leave a shell behind, but you're the same person as ever. - Pres. Klein The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. - Richard Bach, _Illusions_ If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. - Albert Camus (1913-1960) We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we yearn for another that will be eternal. - Anatole France (1844-1924) ...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line. - Tom Robbins (b.1936) _Skinny Legs and All_, 1990, p. 305. ******************************************************************************** AGING ----- Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears the journey's end. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man. - Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. - Mark Twain (1835-1910) I know I'm going to get old and be one of those crazy women who sits on balconies and spits on people and screams, 'Get a haircut!' I know this, and I don't really fear it. I'd just like to move toward it with as much grace and dignity as possible. - Carrie Fisher (b.1956) _Postcards From the Edge_ I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot. - Clive Barker (b.1952) ******************************************************************************** AGNOSTICISM ----------- Agnosticism is the philosophical, ethical and religious dry-rot of the modern world. - F.E. Abbot Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and that is the folly of the people that says with its head that it does not know whether there is a God or not. - Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster. - Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876 Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only be incessant- ly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness.... - Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876 ******************************************************************************** AMBITION -------- You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not? - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) "Back to Methuselah" Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Ah, but a man's grasp should exceed his reach, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning (1812-1889) "Andrea del Sarto" Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly. - Horace (65-8 BC) ******************************************************************************** ANARCHY ------- 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 D. Brandeis (1856-1941) As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy. - Will Durant (1885-1981) To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say. - Lionel Tiger (b.1937) Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. - Edward Abbey (b.1927) I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, - 'That government is best which governs not at all.' - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Inside every anarchy lurks an old boy network. - Mitchell Kapor Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit. - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) _The Education of Henry Adams_, Ch.16 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Following a bit of the recent debate/discussion, i read a great quote from "Benjamin Ricketson Tucker and the Champions of Liberty", an anthology put out by Michael Coughlin and his great press. It comes from pages 170-171. "Anarchy," Tucker insisted, "means a slow growth of the principles of liberty and justice; the gradual dropping of the 'thou shalts' and the 'thou shalt nots' of laws and consitutions as men slowly learn that it is better to be governed by reasonable and intelligent conviction from within than by compulsion from without..." And the first step in this procedure, he held, is to disabuse oneself of the idea that government, even when that government takes the form of parliamentary democracy functioning after the principle of majority rule and minority rights, is capable of assuring the individual freedom or of brining about a condition of harmonious relations among people. If mankind is ever to realize justice in its actual social relations, the notion that the individual citizen has a moral obligation to the State must be completely abandoned. We anarchists, Tucker proclaimed, "look upon all obligations, not as moral, but as social, and even then not really as obligations except as these have been consciously and voluntarily assumed." And this means nothing less than that the State, which is to say formal government itself, must be discarded as an instrument of social control. ******************************************************************************** APATHY ------ Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy. - Richard Linklater "Slacker" 1991 Apathy is a sort of living oblivion. - Horace Greeley (1811-1872) ******************************************************************************** ART --- I don't know art, but I know what I like. - unknown (O.W. Holmes?) People don't know what they like, but they like what they know. - anonymous He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes. - James Grover Thurber (1894-1961) The demand of readers for brand new material which is just like what they've already read is a publishing reality, and it can be found behind virtually every best seller. (The same principle applies - even more strongly - to the less literate media: television, movies, popular music.) - Ted White Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards. - Soren F. Petersen An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't usually know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. - William Faulkner (1897-1962) Great art is a irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. - George Jean Nathan Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us. - Roy Adzak quoted in "Contemporary Artists", 1977 We have art in order not to die of the truth. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) We all know that art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realize truth -- at least the truth that is given us to understand. - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art. - John Trudell Life without industry is guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality. - John Ruskin (1819-1900) The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. - Max Eastman (1883-1969) The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. - John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) _Conduct of Life: Wealth_ Art isn't something you marry, it's something you rape. - Edgar Degas (1834-1900) What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. - Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization. When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying. The "mass mind" has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap. - Elie Faure (1875-1937) The highest problem in every art is, by means of appearances, to produce the ilusion of a loftier reality. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) _Truth and Poetry_, Book xi Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) _Hyperion_, Book iii, ch. 5 The man who never in his mind and thought travelled to heaven, is no artist.... Mere enthusiasm is the all in all.... Passion and expression are beauty itself. - William Blake (1757-1827) Gilchrist, _Life_, i, 310 Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. - Susan Sontag (b.1933) "Against Interpretation" ******************************************************************************** ATHEISM ------- If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries... - Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests. - George Santayana (1863-1952) The athiest has no hope. - James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) To be an athiest requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which athiesm would deny. - Joseph Addison (1672-1719) I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. - George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924) "Free Inquiry" magazine, Fall 1988 ******************************************************************************** AVARICE ------- The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears the journey's end. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) Avarice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) Avarice is the vice of declining years. - George Bancroft (1800-1891) Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing. - Barrow If an emergency strikes, a man should be able to leave his home with nothing more than the clothes on his back without feeling that he has left something behind. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) If you would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) *Want* is a growing giant whom the coat of *have* was never large enough to cover. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) ******************************************************************************** BEAUTY ------ There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626) I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas? - Jean Kerr (b.1923) ******************************************************************************** BELIEF ------ We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears beauty. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do. - John Ruskin (1819-1900) I hear and I forget. I see and I believe. I do and I understand. - Confucius (551-479 BC) Conceptions without experience are void; experience without conceptions is blind. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. - James Anthony Froude (1818-1894) Belief is not the beginning but the end of all knowledge. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. - Charles Lamb (1775-1834) We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence. - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded. - Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. - Voltaire (1694-1778) The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) The believer is happy; the doubter is wise. - Hungarian proverb To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) So as this only point among the rest remaineth sure and certain, namely, that nothing is certain.... - Pliny The Elder (AD 23-79) Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) _Human, All Too Human_ A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Theory: when you have ideas. Ideology: when ideas have you. - anonymous Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) It is easier to fight for principles than to live up to them. - Alfred Adler (1870-1937), 1939 To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures. - Anatole France (1844-1924) There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion. - Anatole France (1844-1924) Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him. - Paul Eldridge (b.1888) 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 (b.1927) Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief. - Arthur Schnitzler (1882-1931) A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. - Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem. - John Galsworthy (1867-1933) The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions. - Maurice Chapelain (b.1906) We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles. - Mark Twain (1835-1910) If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows. - Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet. - Edward Abbey (b.1927) Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. - Edward Abbey (b.1927) ...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous in- habitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustrated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality. - Steve Allen (b.1921) from _The Courage of Conviction_ edited by Philip Berman The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties. - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) "Prejudice" You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. - Timothy Leary (b.1920) Cursed is he that does not know when to shut his mind. An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or may be found a little draughty. - Samuel Butler (1835-1902) Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though, perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturb them. - John Locke (1632-1704) If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. - unknown It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative. - John Burroughs (1837-1921) It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. - W.K. Clifford British philosopher, circa 1876 Those who obstinately oppose the most widely held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats. - Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't have to...I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. - Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) Nova: "The Best Mind Since Einstein" The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be. The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith (1723-1790) There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. - Alfred Korzybski The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) "Marriage and Morals" (1929) What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) For what a man would like to to be true, that he more readily believes. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626) ******************************************************************************** BIBLE ----- The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. - Alfred North Whitehead The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) All Bibles are man-made. - Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the bible is filled, it would seem more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. - Thomas Paine (1737-1809) The Book says BURN and DESTROY repent and redeem and revenge and deploy and rumble thee forth to the land of the unbelieving scum 'cause they don't go for what's in the Book and that makes 'em BAD. So verily we must choppeth them up, and stompeth them down.... - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. - Mark Twain (1835-1910) And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords. - Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973) "The Good Book" -- one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined. - Ashley Montagu ******************************************************************************** BIRTH ----- It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. - James James Augustine (1882-1941) _Ulysses_ ******************************************************************************** BIRTH CONTROL ------------- 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. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956) Oh yes, the sentimentality for "unborn babies," but apparent lack of concern for "born babies." What are you once you *are* born? Pre-dead? - Arne Adolfsen Prevention of birth is precipitation of murder. - Tertullian (c.160-c.240) I will not give to a woman an instrument to procure abortion. - Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 BC) However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the innocent. - Pius XI (1857-1939) Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State. - Edward Abbey (b.1927) Griswold v. Connecticut first established and guaranteed the `right of privacy' in the conjugal act. Sexual love, however, in a most profound way is anything but `private.' Its very purpose is to break the bonds of privacy by physical consummation of an unreserved gift of self. The contraceptive, however, denies the meaning of marital love by falsifying its bodily expression. Love is no longer unreserved; something is held back. `I cannot love all of you,' the contraceptive says, `because I cannot love all that might be created by you.' - Edmund Miller Anti-Abortion Commentator Fidelity magazine, 10/89 (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies. - Randall Terry Executive Director, Operation Rescue I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure. - Joseph Schiedler Director, Pro-Life Action League ...the Pro-Life Action League opposes *all* forms of contraception.... - Joseph Scheidler Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League from The Wanderer, August 10, 1989 (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) You can't stop abortion without fighting contraception: it is the gateway to abortion. Not one of the 81 countries I've worked in has `clean' contraception without abortion -- not one. Once there's contraception -- separating sexual activity from procreation and teaching people to use each other's bodies for selfish pleasure -- abortion is always used as a backup. - Fr. Paul Marx President, Human Life International, "Pro Life/Family Catalog", 1991 (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) Once contraception is accepted and the purposes of sex are separated from procreation and marriage, sterilization and abortion become acceptable, and then infanticide, the precursor of outright euthanasia. Furthermore, homo- sexuality and unnatural sexual activities become `natural and normal,' the venereal diseases get out of control, divorce and illegitimacy rates mount, and the family swiftly disintegrates. - Valerie Riches Family Planning Educator in her brochure, Contraception's Legacy, (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) For instance, several years ago we tracked down a twelve-year-old girl who was going to have an abortion so that we could talk her out of it. Talking a woman out of having an abortion is not news. But tracking her down using a private detective is. - Joseph Scheidler Executive Director, Pro Life Action League "Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion", 1985 (from "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) I don't think we should punish the criminal [a rapist] by killing his child. - Dr. John Wilke President, National Right to Life Committee, "Search for Common Ground", taped for television 4/89, (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) I would never give artificial birth control to an unmarried person... - Judie Brown President, American Life League "Nightline", 7/21/89 (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) To be against abortion and not against contraception -- it makes no sense because both of them are the same mentality. - Nancy O'Brien Anti-Choice Activist, introducing Joan Andrews, 3/11/89, (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. - Florynce Kennedy It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily married. - Phillis Steward Schlafly (b.1924) Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions. - Phillis Steward Schlafly (b.1924) What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood. - Phillis Steward Schlafly (b.1924) President, Eagle Forum, 2/81, (quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet) I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her...the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand. - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) _Mein Kampf_ ******************************************************************************** BIZARRE ------- The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country. - John Mitchell Attourny General, 1969-1972 The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be mis- interpreted.... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911) Presidential candidate, 1979 Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911) "Sierra", 10 September 1980 I have flown twice over Mt. St. Helens out on our west coast. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that that one little mountain has probably released more sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere of the world than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind that people are so concerned about. - Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1980 (b.1911). Actually, Mount St. Helens, at its peak activity, emitted about 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide per day, compared with 81,000 tons per day by cars. Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911) A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at? - Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1966 opposing expansion of Redwood National Park What would this country be without this great land of ours? - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911) This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911) "People" magazine, 26 December 1985 The State of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911) Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they? - George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924) during a tour of Auschwitz, 28-SEP-87 I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions -- but I don't always agree with them. - George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924) The final lesson of Viet Nam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. - George Herbert Walker Bush (b.1924 Inaugural Address, 1989 I just don't believe in the basic concept that someone should make their whole career in public service. - J. Danforth Quayle (b.1947) Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest. - Jimmy Swaggart Christians maintain a higher enjoyment level in the intimacy of their love life than the population in general. - Beverly LaHaye, President, Concerned Women of America, in her book, _The Act of Marriage, The Beauty of Sexual Love_, 1976, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet For those who say I can't impose my morality on others, I say just watch me. - Joseph Scheidler Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League "Pro-Life Action News", 8/8/89, from "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet I see a divine hand in this AIDS thing. - Dr. John Wilke President, National Right to Life Committee, "Planned Parenthood and Sex Clinics", Fundraising Audiotape Mailout for Dr. James C. Dobson's "Focus on the Family", winter '87, from "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet Indeed, to quarantine a person with AIDS or the AIDS virus does entail a loss, in the short run, of human freedom. Agreed. But the idea of human freedom isn't now, and never has been, absolute. Besides, in the long run, as I have noted, all people with AIDS die. - John Lofton, Anti-Choice Columnist The Washington Times, 3/31/89, quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet You can't just let nature run wild. - Wally Hickel (b.1919) Alaskan governor We shall never understand peace, justice and the living of life until we recognize that all people are human and that humans are the most precious things on earth. - Wally Hickel (b.1919) Alaskan governor People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history. - J. Danforth Quayle, 09/88 (b.1947) There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. - William James (1842-1910) under nitrous oxide; 1882 Just say no! - Nancy Davis Reagan (b.1923) Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them. - Madonna Louise Ciccone (b.1958) If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin. - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) If the day should ever come when we [the Nazis] must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction. - Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) Who says I am not under the special protection of God? - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell. - Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88 We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today...our battle is with Satan himself. - Reverend Jerry L. Falwell (b.1933) In our society, sometimes you have to penalize (innocent) people for the good of everybody else. - a Pittsburgh cop 10/16/93 My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns. - James Watt (b.1938) "The Washington Post", 24 May 1981 We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand. - James Watt (b.1938) You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you take a gun and shoot him. - Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson (b.1930) about Muammar Kadhafy I would rather see my four daughters shot before my eyes than to have them grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see those kids blown into Heaven than taught into hell by the Communists. - Pat Boone (c.1962) One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature's law; why try to contradict it? - Jean Jacques Rousseau "Emile, ou de l'education", 1762 I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains. - Doris May Lessing (b.1919) There is growing evidence that smoking has pharamacological...effects that are of real value to smokers. - Joseph F. Cullman III Pres. of Phillip Morris Annual Report to Stockholders, 1962 I take Him shopping with me. I say, "OK, Jesus, help me find a bargain." - Tammy Faye Bakker ******************************************************************************** BUREAUCRACY ----------- A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants. - Alben W. Barkley (1877-1956) U.S Vice President (1949-1953) There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function. - Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956) _Prejudices: Sixth Series_ (1927): "Life under Bureaucracy", pp.241-2 No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets. - Edward Abbey (b.1927) ******************************************************************************** CAPITALISM ---------- Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) The forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. - Jawaharlal Nehru The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. - Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) But owing to our wage system, this increase of wealth -- due to the combined efforts of men of science, of managers, and workmen as well -- has resulted only in an unprecedented accumulation of wealth in the hands of the owners of capital; while an increase of misery for the great numbers, and an insecurity of life for all, have been the lot of the workmen; the unskilled labourers, in continuous search for labour, are falling into an unheard-of destitution. And even the best paid artisans and skilled workmen labour under the permanent menace of being thrown, in their turn, into the same conditions as the un- skilled paupers, in consequence of some of the continuous and unavoidable fluctuations of industry and caprices of capital. - Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) _Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles_ The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell. - Confucius (551-479 BC) Capitalism will kill competition. - Karl Marx (1818-1883) Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land...but because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive. - John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) But surely no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of un- employment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labor market, to ensure a supply of cheap labor. - Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal, but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal.... Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country. - Norman Cousins Free enterprise ended in the United States a good many years ago. Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and drive out the small entrepreneur. In their conglomerate forms, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the legitimacy of the state. - Gore Vidal (b.1925) Only in time of peace can the wastes of capitalism be tolerated. - F.R. Scott The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony...it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing -- even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters? - Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good. - Ralph Barton Perry ******************************************************************************** CATS ---- They smell, they snarl and they scratch; they have a singular aptitude for shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery; they're sneaky, selfish and not at all smart; they are disloyal, condescending and totally useless in any rodent-free environment. - Jean-Michel Chapereau The scalded cat fears even cold water. - Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it--and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit on a hot stove lid again--and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. - Mark Twain (1835-1910) Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. - Arnold Edinborough (b.1922) Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect. - Steven Wright (b.1955) Curiosity got the cat wet. - Bev Colostomy killed the cat. - Me A chronic disposition to inquiry deprives domestic felines of vital qualities. - unknown 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. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) when asked to describe radio The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domesticated animal. - Compton MacKenzie (1883-1972) If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat. - Mark Twain (1835-1910) When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not more of a pastime to her than she is to me? - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) Cats are like Baptists. They raise hell but you can't catch them at it. - unknown Cats don't adopt people. They adopt refrigerators. - Solomon Short Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for more assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance. - Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) (1870-1916) The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. - Mark Twain (1835-1910) ...But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) _Orthodoxy_ ******************************************************************************** CENSORSHIP ---------- Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. - Plato (428-348? BC), "The Republic" I am...mortified to be told that, in the United States of America...a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate.... Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold and what we may buy? Shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read?.... It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard. - Alexander Cockburn (1802-1880) [The Nation, 4 February 1991] The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is uncapable of exercising real discretion... in the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subserviance. - Henry Steel Commager (b.1902) Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. - Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. - Harry S Truman (1884-1872) At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted. - Eric Idle (b.1943) They have a right to censure that have a heart to help. - William Penn (1644-1718) A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to. - Granville Hicks (1901-1982) A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. - John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) An older person or a teenager can look at this (rock videos) and see the humor in it, but an eight- or ten-year-old isn't anesthetized yet. - Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson "Tipper" Gore Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret police and laws similar to those in the USSR, there are thousands of underground publications, a legal independent Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first and only independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is an affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor. There is literally a world of difference between Poland - even in its present state of collapse - and Soviet society at the peak of its "glasnost." This difference has been maintained at great cost by the Poles since 1944. - David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a gateway from EARN (European Academic Research Network) to Poland If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers.... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted faggots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. - Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938) at the Scopes Monkey Trial Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its bill of rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law. - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) about the Scopes Monkey Trial Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) "The Rejected Statement" Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there. - Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written, That is all. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist. - A. Trevor Hodge To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor. - Alexander Pope (1688-1744) The chief enemy of creativity is "good" taste. - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) ******************************************************************************** CHARACTER --------- The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. - Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples. - Charles Dickens (1812-1870) The discipline of desire is the background of character. - John Locke (1632-1704) The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves. We injure our own cause in the opinion of the world when we too passionately defend it. - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) If you wish to appear agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you know already. - Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber? ... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows. - Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536) The Praise of Folly The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence. To yield to its blandishments is so easy. The wrong, it seems, is venial... Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of adventurous youth. - Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1870-1938) There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler than he is by nature. - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) You are only what you are when no one is looking. - Robert C. Edwards Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) _Torquato Tasso_, i. 2 Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none. - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) _Poor Richard_, 1756. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt others. - The Dalai Lama (b.1935) Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) "Friendship" ******************************************************************************** CHASTITY -------- It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. - Voltaire (1694-1778) It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color. - Voltaire (1694-1778) Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest. - Anatole France (1844-1924) Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity. - Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915) We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition. - Alexander Comfort (b.1920) ******************************************************************************** CHILDREN -------- Children are the periscopes of the dead. - Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky (b.1933) Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) I think an embryo/fetus/baby becomes a "person" when it is smarter than a non-primate like a dog. By those standards, chimpanzees and gorillas are persons (although somewhat cognitively impaired -- kind of like Fundamentalist Christians), but human newborns are not. - Dave Touretzsky Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be too big for the bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one. - Gore Vidal (b.1925) Conversations With Gore Vidal - 1981 When I was a baby I kept a diary. Recently I was reading it. It said: (1)Still tired from the move. (2)Everybody keeps talking to me like I'm an idiot. - Steven Wright (b.1955) ******************************************************************************** CHRISTIANITY ------------ If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere. - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) One Christian is no Christian. - Harvey Gallagher Cox (b.1929) The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? ...Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created. - Julian The Apostate (332-363) The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine. - George Washington (1732-1799) The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity. - John Adams (1735-1826) I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. - Friedrick Nietzsche (1844-1900) Christianity makes suffering contagious. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty -- I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant. - Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), "What's Wrong with the World" The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell. - Saint Augustine (340-430) There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith. - William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) There is one single fact which we may oppose to all the wit and argument of infidelity, namely, that no man ever repented of being a Christian on his death bed. - Hannah More (1745-1833) Unless you hate your father and mother and wife and brothers and sisters and, yes, even your own life, you can't be my disciple. - Jesus Christ (Luke 14:26) Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) "Thus Spake Zarathustra" As to Jesus of Nazareth...I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. - Thomas Paine (1737-1809) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian.... To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said: And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible. Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. - Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961) in Psychological Types (Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church). ******************************************************************************** CIVILIZATION ------------ Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures.... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies.... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with dis- contented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable. - Isabelle Eberhardt _The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt_ by Annette Kobak (found in RE/Search's Angry Women) The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom. - Cyril Parkinson ...technical advance could actually be an impediment to utopia: unlike in previous centuries, technology in the twentieth century has made necessity increase rather than diminish. - Cristovam Buarque A descent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) (Boswell, _Life_, ii, 130) The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets. - Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980) The difficulty with this is, of course, that Modern Man does not see, hear, or most importantly _believe_ anything which does not take place before the glassy stare of the television camera. How inconvenient, then, that millions of starving children and fallen heroes lack the foresight to die in the right places for the right causes. - Zaccariah Michaelson _Essays_on_the_Inhuman_Race_ To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age). - Robert Ranke Graves (1895-1985) Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. - Mark Twain (1835-1910) America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. - Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) 1 December 1945 (also attributed to Oscar Wilde) The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs. - Eric Berne (b.1910) I think it would be a good idea. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) (When asked what he thought of Western civilization) When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to pause and wonder. - David Ross Brower (b.1912) Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta. - Brian Aldiss (b.1925) The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. - Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881) The slum is the measure of civilization. - Jacob Riis (1849-1914) The flush toilet is the basis of Western civilization. - Alan Coult 1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b.1922) _Breakfast of Champions_ In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed--amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke. - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) _Either/Or_, Diapsalmata Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor. - Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else. - Julian Jaynes Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. - Ayn Rand (1905-1982) _The Fountainhead_ I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us. - Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903-1989) Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I remain convinced that Man is the missing link between apes and civilized beings. - Solomon Short The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistica- tion, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?' - Douglas Adams (b.1952) _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ You can't say civilization isn't advancing: In every war, they kill you in a new way. - Will Rogers (1879-1935) It's so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the Devil when he is the only explanation of it. - unknown When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized. - E.C. Stakman Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones -- you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states. - Plato (428-348? BC) "The Republic" Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite. - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) The desire to impose upon the disorder of nature some orderly pattern or arrangement makes men into poets, painters and gardeners; it also makes them prey to the illusion that a highly organized state will be civilized and preferable to a disorganized and muddled one. - Len Deighton (b.1929) What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better for us than to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go and take artificial exercise in order to preserve our health. - George Wharton James, 1908 The man who first abused his fellows with swear-words instead of bashing their brains out with a club should be counted among those who laid the foundations of civilization. - John Cohen Civilization is paralysis. - Paul Gaugin (Cournos, _Modern Plutarch_) Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see? - George Santayana (1863-1952) _Life of Reason_, Vol. ii, 127 ******************************************************************************** CLICHE ------ Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches. - Marvin G. Gregory Develop your own set of cliches. - Robert Fripp (b.1946) ******************************************************************************** COMMUNICATION ------------- When people have trouble communicating, the least they can do is to shut up. - Tom Lehrer The fantastic advances in the field of communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual. - Earl Warren (1891-1974) Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. - (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics. - Voltaire (1694-1778) There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. - Christian Nestell Bovee ******************************************************************************** CONFORMITY ---------- If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, how- ever measured or far away. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) "Walden", 1854 The rewards...in this life are _esteem_ and _admiration_ of others - the punishments are _neglect_ and _contempt_.... The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger - and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone.... - John Adams, 1805 (1735-1826) Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. - Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) "An Enemy of the People", 1882 If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity. - Bill Vaughan Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity. - Eric Hoffer (b.1902) When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. - Eric Hoffer (b.1902) There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. - Ayn Rand (1905-1982) How is it that the American, once he has attained his majority, appears to us as the perfect conformist. It is, perhaps, because he has exhausted during his childhood and adolescence practically all his indiscipline and anarchy, so that he has no difficulty later in life in integrating himself into a collect- ive society, which he himself fully accepts. - Andre Siegfried (1875-1959) Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion. - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best to, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. - e.e. cummings (1894-1963) "A Miscellany" How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says, or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy. - Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from. - Peter Alexander Ustinov (1871-1945) On applause: They named it Ovation from the Latin _ovis_, a sheep. - Plutarch ******************************************************************************** CONSCIENCE ---------- Conscience...is merely instinct socialized into guilt. - Robert Coover (b.1932) ******************************************************************************** CONSCIOUSNESS ------------- Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness. - William James (paraphrase) (1842-1910) Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They _make use_ of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. - William James (1842-1910) The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist. - William James (1842-1910) Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. - Stephen Jay Gould (b.1941) It is by undermining the idea of reason, of order, of harmony, that we gain consciousness of ourselves. - B.M. Cioran, _The Temptation to Exist_ ******************************************************************************** CONSTITUTION ------------ The U.S. Constitution isn't perfect -- but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now.... - unknown ...the value of the constitution depends on the good will of government itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Rights should not interfere with the important business of government (which they have done on at least two occasions), then the constitution is meaningless. - John Kormylo ******************************************************************************** CONSUMERISM ----------- In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. - Ivan Illich (b.1926) No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956) The American people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956) Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. - Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928) If you can persuade your customer to tattoo your name on their chest, they probably will not switch brands. - an Indiana University professor re: Harley-Davidson owners The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. - William Seward Burroughs (b.1914) _Naked Lunch_, 1959 I do not without a certain inner resistance and resentment accept a system of marketing in which all the decisions have been taken out of both the shopkeeper and the customer and put under the remote control of the market researcher and the packaging expert, the advertising agency and the wholesale distributor. Those who have grown up in this packaged world accept such external controls and compulsions as normal. Their loss of choice, their loss of taste; they do not even notice for they have never known anything different. - Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) from his autobiography I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike. - Emile Henry Gauvreay Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches television. - Germaine Greer (b.1939) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Occupational regulation has served to limit consumer choice, raise consumer costs, increase practitioner income, limit practitioner mobility, deprive the poor of adequate service, and restrict job opportunities for minorities -- all without a demonstrated improvement in quality or safety.... Critics of this hypothesis believe to the contrary, however, that regulators' and professional groups' self-interest has been and still is the primary motivator of regulatory legislation. And indeed the evidence shows that consumers rarely engage in campaigns to license occupations. If the purpose of licensing were to improve the quality of service, one would expect consumers, who might be the prime beneficiaries, to promote licensure, but licensing is systematically promoted by practitioners.... - The Rule of Experts - Occupational Licensing in America. By S. David Young. Cato Institute, 1987. ISBN 0-932790-62-3 (paper). 99 pages. ******************************************************************************** COURAGE ------- It is easy to be brave from a safe distance. - Aesop (620-560 BC) The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. - Ralph W. Sockman (b.1889) ******************************************************************************** CRAP ---- "99.9% of everything is crap" is Sturgeon's law, named for its originator, Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985). If memory serves, it came up in a conversation with then-editor of _Amazing_ John W. Campbell, in which Cambpell lamented to Sturgeon that "90% of what passes for science fiction today is crap." Sturgeon is said to have replied, "But John, 90% of _everything_ is crap." And another aphorism was born. ******************************************************************************** CREATION -------- The first creation of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense, the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of the spirit. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626) God created the world out of nothing, but the nothingness still shows through. - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. - Paul Valery (1871-1945) Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was He before creation? How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression.... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. - The Mahapurana, Jinasena Si Dios no hubiera descansado el domingo habria tenido tiempo de terminar el mundo. (If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world. - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b.1928) "Los Funerales de Mama Grande", 1974 The universe is one of God's thoughts. - Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing). - Albert Camus (1913-1960) _The Myth of Sisyphus_ ******************************************************************************** CRIME ----- Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it. - Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862) The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime. - Max Stirner (1806-1856) Poverty is the mother of crime. - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (490-575) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. *Crimes* are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. *Vices* are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime -- that is, the design to injure the person or property of another -- is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practises his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property. For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth. - Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) "Vices Are Not Crimes" ******************************************************************************** CRITICISM --------- It is much easier to be critical than to be correct. - Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) Speech at the House of Commons 24 January 1860 Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do. - Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed. - Herman Melville (1819-1891) ******************************************************************************** CULTURE ------- The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of becoming. - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) _Essays: J.P.F. Richter_ ******************************************************************************** CURIOSITY --------- Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. - Arnold Edinborough (b.1922) The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. - Ellen Parr Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect. - Steven Wright (b.1955) Curiosity got the cat wet. - Bev ******************************************************************************** CYNICISM -------- The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom. - Bergen Evans (1904-1978) American lexicographer ******************************************************************************** DEATH ----- Vivi, mortuus sum, non curo (I lived, I'm dead, I don't care). - unknown Ars longa, vita brevis. - unknown If we don't know life, how can we know death? - Confucius (551-479 BC) This is my death...and it will profit me to understand it. - Anne Sexton (1928-1974) Death is the best part of life. That's why they save it for last. - Solomon Short There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it. - Owen Meredith (1831-1891) Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his own death; a thousand doors open on to it. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65) For certain is death for the born / And certain is birth for the dead; / Therefore over the inevitable / Thou shouldst not grieve. - Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2:27 It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind. - Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) The goal of all life is death. - Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Come now, don't you know that dying is also one of life's duties? Besides, since there's no fixed number of duties laid down which you're supposed to complete, you're leaving no duty undone. Every life is, without exception, a short one. As it is with a play, so it is with life - what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you end. End it wherever you will - only make sure that you end it up with a good ending. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65) We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary. - Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) Death is psychosomatic. - Charles Manson (b.1934) Esquire, 1971 One must not die unreconciled. - Albert Camus (1913-1960) Those who live, live off the dead. And death too must live; and there's nothing like an insane asylum to tenderly incubate death, and to keep the dead in an incubator. - Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) _Artaud Le Momo_ Anyway: I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death is a release and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them. - Neil Gaiman (b.1960) The Sandman #20: Facade Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other. - Francis Bacon (1561-1626) _Of Death_ When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death. - James Patrick Donleavy (b.1926) Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There's the shock of that sharp cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then accepting is a swim in reality. - Richard Bach, _Illusions_ Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) Pryor's Observation: How long you live has nothing to do with how long you are going to be dead. The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. - Thomas Browne (1605-1682) Be happy while y'er leevin, For y'er a lang time deid. - Scottish motto for a house By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death. - Titus Lucretius Carus To die is landing on some distant shore. - John Dryden (1631-1700) Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) To have died once is enough. - Virgil (70-19 BC) Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. - William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Do not seek death; death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment. - Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961) Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. - Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) quoted in "Time", 1981 Death is a comingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) For good men but see death, the wicked taste it. - Johnson Death is life's answer to the question 'Why?' - unknown I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day. - Albert Camus (1913-1960) If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when every- thing in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. - Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) Again I'm asked, how much heat does it take to cremate a cadaver in a crematorium? About 2200 degrees Fahrenheit for 90 minutes, then 1800 degrees F for another 60 to 150 minutes. - The Informed Source If life must not be taken too seriously -- then so neither must death. - Samuel Butler (1835-1902) 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. - Voltaire (1694-1778) Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality. - William Ernest Hocking To the atheist, death is the end; to the believer, the beginning; to the agnostic, the sound of silence. - unknown When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily. - Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) Life as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, dismemberment, disintegration, and with it the crucifixion of our hearts with the passing of the forms we have loved. - Joseph Campbell (1881-1944) Death is nothing to us: for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us. - Epicurus (341-271 BC) _Principal Doctrines_, II -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ELYOT: Death's very laughable, such a cunning little mystery. All done with mirrors. AMANDA: Darling. I do believe you're talking nonsense. ELYOT: So is everybody else in the long run. Let's be superficial and pity the poor philosophers. Let's blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school children. Let's savor the delight of the moment. Come kiss me darling, before your body rots and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets. - Noel Coward "Private Lives," Act II (1930) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And as we stand on the edge of darkness Let our chant fill the void That others may know In the land of the night The ship of the sun Is drawn by The grateful dead. - Tibetan "Book of the Dead," c.4000 BC ******************************************************************************** DEMOCRACY --------- The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. - Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) The tendencies of democracies are, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal. - James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) The right to vote is a *consequence*, not a primary cause, of a free social system -- and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. - Ayn Rand (1905-1982) In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) I never vote for anyone; I always vote against. - W.C. Fields (1880-1946) The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. - Karl Marx (1818-1883) Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least. - Robert Byrne Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an 'inconvenience.' We have opted instead for an authoritarian system *disguised* as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there. - Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Atti- tude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, with- out restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy. - U.S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928-1932), since withdrawn. The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. - Charles de Secondat Montesquieu (1689-1755) The imposition of stigma is the commonest form of violence used in democratic societies. - R.A. Pinker -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats, We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice? - Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968) letter to British suffragist, 1911 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (that is, excessive gratuities) 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 results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have pro- gressed through this sequence: 1. From bondage to spiritual faith. 2. From spiritual faith to great courage. 3. From courage to liberty. 4. From liberty to abundance. 5. From abundance to selfishness. 6. From selfishness to complacency. 7. From complacency to apathy. 8. From apathy to dependency. 9. From dependency back again into bondage. - Professor Alexander Tyler The previous was written over 200 years ago while our original 13 colonies were still a part of Great Britain. At the time, the author was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic over 2000 years earlier. ******************************************************************************** DESIRE ------ There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind. - Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. - William Blake (1757-1827) Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled. - William Blake (1757-1827) He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence. - William Blake (1757-1827) Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after. - Alexander Pope (1688-1744) The passions are the only orators that always persuade. - Francois La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) The passions often engender their contraries. - Francois La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life. - Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) Reason, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 The passions and desires, like the two twists of a rope, mutually mix one with the other, and twine inextricably round the heart; producing good if moderately indulged; but certain destruction, if suffered to become inordinate. - Burton ******************************************************************************** DEVIANTS -------- Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth. - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom...Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S. - William Seward Burroughs (b.1914) _Yage Letters_ Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made. - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) _The Soul of Man Under Socialism_ Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history, the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively he won his own kingdom -- Lucifer. - Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972) You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. - Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948) The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial...he cannot go along with currents and trends. - Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great. - Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. - Henry Louis Mencken (1800-1956) I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b.1922) Traveling there was really boring so I headed for the ditch. It was a rough ride but I met more interesting people there. - Neil Young (b.1945) Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from. - Jodie Foster (b.1962) To create a community of radical scholars, men and women who recognize that rules and social conventions are arbitrary, but have mastered them nonetheless-- a community which shares such a scorn and disrespect for the present society that it can embrace the whole bundle of rules and subvert them thereby--that should be our goal. - Howard Adelman (b.1938) If you sincerely desire a _truly_ well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty". You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, _no matter what_. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket...even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the _telepathic pressure alone_ of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality. - Rev. Ivan Stang _High Weirdness By Mail_ 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. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) The weirder you are going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person. - P.J. O'Rourke (b.1947) You know why there are so few sophisticated computer terrorists in the United States? Because your hackers have so much mobility into the establishment. Here, there is no such mobility. If you have the slightest bit of intellectual integrity you cannot support the government.... That's why the best computer minds belong to the opposition. - an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity ...there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already. - Robert Anton Wilson _The Illuminatus! Trilogy_ There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment -- and nothing more corrupting. - Alan John Percivale Taylor (b.1906) The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal. - Dr. Karl Menninger "The Human Mind", 1930 Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) ******************************************************************************** DOGMA ----- What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) All dogmas perish the thinking mind, especially ones you agree with. - Adam Richardson The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism. - William Osler ******************************************************************************** DOGS ---- The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic. - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism! - David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) ******************************************************************************** DREAMS ------ Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. - William Dement, in "Newsweek", 1959 All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. - Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935) _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ If I'm dreaming, never let me wake. If I'm awake, never let me sleep. - old chinese fellow I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. - Chuang-tzu (c.369-c.286 BC) All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. - Daniel Keys Moran _The Last Dancer_ I had a dream, which was not all a dream. - Lord Byron (1788-1824) "Darkness," line 1 In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) _The Idler 32_. Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams? - Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) _The Higher Pantheism_. ******************************************************************************** DRINK ----- Teetotaler, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 Five stages of drunkness: Verbose, jocose, lachrymose, bellicose, comatose. - anonymous There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation. - John Ciardi Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water. - W.C. Fields (1880-1946) Bibo, ergo sum (I drink, therefore I am.) - Fredirect Toyou 'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it. - W.C. Fields (1880-1946) My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle. - Henny Youngman (b.1906) Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it, and that a very severe one. - Hannah Moore (1745-1833) How can you waste beer like that!! Don't you realize there are sober children in Africa!! - unknown [Alcoholic beverages] sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it reliseth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickeneth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from snaffling, the teeth from chattering, and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking. - Anonymous (13th Century) Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker. - Odgen Nash (1902-1971) "Reflections on Ice-breaking" Do you think that the grave is too deep? Well, then, take a drink. Take one or two or three: You'll die happier. - Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795) Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkeness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. - William James (1842-1910) _The Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1961 ******************************************************************************** DRUGS ----- The drug user drowns in the same pool mystics swim in. - Joseph Campbell (1881-1944) In brief, the really possible Utopia would be this world experienced by a psychophysique at full aperture. - Gerald Heard (1889-1971) _The Five Ages of Man_ There are experiences that most people avoid talking about because they do not fit into the reality of everyday life and defy rational explanation. - Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906) Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its pro- found effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. - Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906) The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it possible with their help, and after suitable internal and external preparation...to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug. - Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906) I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonder child. - Dr. Albert Hofmann (b.1906) When the conscious becomes unconscious, you're drunk. When the unconscious becomes conscious, you're stoned. - anonymous From the conscious mind comes intellect; from the unconscious, wisdom. - anonymous (found in _Exploring Inner Space_, p.69) Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system. - P.J. O'Rourke (b.1947) Ram Dass' (b.1931) retrospective dictum regarding the psychedelics: "When you get the message, hang up." There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory, decreased short term memory, and I forget the third. - Timothy Leary (b.1920) I don't like the word 'drugs' at all.... It's a complete misnomer when it refers to psychedelics, which have nothing to do with drugs that make you lethargic, dull, sleepy. The psychedelics wake you up. They wake you up in such startling ways that they can give you very disorienting experiences. - Nina Graboi (interview in bOING bOING #8, p.37) I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. - Hunter S. Thompson (b.1939) ...only drugs make you feel as good as people in TV ads appear to be. - Hakim Bey Opiate, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1843-1914) _The Devil's Dictionary_, 1911 I do not take drugs, I am drugs. - Salvador Dali (1904-1989) _Diary of a Genius_, 1966 I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough. - Maurits Corneille Escher (1898-1970) If God dropped acid, would he see people? - Steven Wright (b.1955) Drugs affect adults differently than they affect children. - David Byrne (b.1952) Chemistry is applied theology. - Augustus Owsley Stanley (b.1935) Drugs don't take people, people take drugs - Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) When one wants to get rid of an unsupportable pressure, one needs hashish. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it and didn't inhale and never tried it again. - Gov. William Jefferson Clinton (b.1946) I can say with confidence I know a fair bit about LSD. - Dan Rather (b.1931) Being stoned on marijuana isn't very different from being stoned on gin. - Ralph Nader (b.1934) I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast. - Ronald Wilson Reagan (b.1911) Drugs are the product of Satan. Drug users need to be saved by the Holy Power of Jesus Christ. - William Bennett Marijuana is like Coors beer. If you could buy the damn stuff at a Georgia filling station, you'd decide you wouldn't want it. - Billy Carter Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves. - Lenny Bruce (1923-1966) In short, the commonly used illegal drugs -- narcotics, hallucinogens, marijuana, amphetamines, and cocaine -- are much less dangerous medically than alcohol and less addicting than cigarettes.... I would also rate them much less dangerous medically than many drugs used widely in clinical practice (including many antibiotics and antihypertensives). I do not believe there are any valid medical arguments against the choice of drugs as a means to satisfy the need for periodic episodes of altered consciousness. - Andrew Weil MD (Harvard) _The Natural Mind_ (1986 edition) ******************************************************************************** DRUG WAR -------- These are the two Americas. No other line you can draw is as trenchant as this. On one side, people of normal human appetites, for food and sex and creature comforts; on the other, those who crave only the roar and crackle of their own neurons, whipped into a frenzy of synthetic euphoria. The Crack Nation. It is in our midst, but not a part of us; our laws barely touch it on its progress through our jails and hospitals, on its way to our morgues. - "Crack" Newsweek cover story 28-NOV-88 It's almost a suicidal technique. You can't lie to kids. Drug education is a uniformed policeman coming into the first grade and telling all these fucking lies [about marijuana] so that by the time [the kids are] in junior high and they've tried it, they know you're full of shit. Marijuana _is_ a gateway drug - it teaches you disrespect for authority. - Timothy Leary (b.1920) The act of consuming the forbidden fruit was politicized by the mere fact that it was illegal. When you smoked marijuana, you immediately became aware of the glaring contradiction between the way you experienced reality in your own body and the official descriptions by the government and the media. That pot was not the big bugaboo that it had been cracked up to be was irrefutable evidence that the authorities either did not tell the truth or did not know what they were talking about. Its continued illegality was proof that lying and/or stupidity was a cornerstone of government policy. When young people got high, they knew this existentially, from the inside out. They saw through the great hoax, the cover story concerning not only the narcotics laws but the entire system. Smoking dope was thus an important political catalyst, for it enabled many a budding radical to begin questioning the o