This site was created in February 2003.

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Do I contradict myself? 
Very well then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.
 -Walt Whitman

A witty saying proves nothing.
 -Voltaire

While passing to & fro
The reaper sang Thy Praise
UP standing in a row
I rose and saw the sheavers
Thou hast work to DO
An angel waked ME
I slept the summer through
The noontide heat was sore
My couch I made
Under green sweeping boughs
In Passion's red arrayed
When summer walked the land
With child's soft feet
To count the heights of toil
I cried it is not meet
Youth is a time for Joy
Above a skylark's wing
There was a Blue, blue heaven
It too was young with Spring
Spring white browed and young
Go Thee at evening
But empty pleading hands
No hard won gifts I bring
Be pitiful my GOD
MEA CULPA
 -Ethna Carbery (sometime in February 2004 this poem was written with different colors of 
chalk on a sidewalk in downtown El Paso, Texas, next to a park where homeless men sleep)

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A Slow & cautious way
The stars about my head
About my feet the sea
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch-
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience
 -Emily Dickinson 
(another poem written in chalk on the ground in downtown El Paso in February 2004)

Day breaks, it's said
    When night is ended.
I stay in bed
    Until it's mended.
 -Philosophy of a Late Riser, Richard Armour

At dawn of day, when you dislike being called, have this thought ready: 'I am
called to man's labor; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going out to do
what I was born to do and what I was brought into the world for? Is it for this
that I am fashioned, to lie in bedclothes and keep myself warm?' 'But this is
more pleasant.' 'Were you born then to please yourself; in fact for feeling,
not for action? Can't you see the plants, the birds, the ants, the spiders,
the bees each doing his own work, helping for their part to adjust a world?
And then you refuse to do a man's office and don't make haste to do what is
according to your nature.' 'But a man needs rest as well.' 'I agree, he does,
yet Nature assigns limits to rest, as well as to eating and drinking, and you
nevertheless go beyond her limits, beyond what is sufficient; in your actions
only this is no longer so, there you keep inside what is in your power. The explanation
is that you do not love your own self, else surely you would love both your
nature and her purpose. But other men who love their own crafts wear themselves
out in labors upon them, unwashed and unfed; while you hold your own nature in
less honor than the smith his metal work, the dancer his art, the miser his coin,
the lover of vainglory his fame. Yet they, when the passion is on them, refuse
either to eat or sleep sooner than refuse to advance the objects they care about,
whereas you imagine acts of fellowship to bring a small return and to be deserving
of less pains.'
 -Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near, as it were your own?

It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they're better left unsung
I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall, you fall alone
If you should stand, then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way, I would take you home
 -Ripple by The Grateful Dead, a song that was liked by two relatives who have passed away

But you read a lot of books, I'm thinking. Hard to have faith, 
ain't it, when you've read too many books?
 -Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
                                                                        
People make mistakes in life through believing too much,
but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.
 -James Hilton, Lost Horizon

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that 
a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your 
cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.
 -H.G. Wells

Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years 
and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.
 -J.W. Goethe, 1817

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks 
to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. 
 -G.K. Chesterton

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
 -Emily Dickinson

Don't use the telephone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
 -Jack Kerouac

Poetry is news that stays news.
 -Ezra Pound

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson
                                                                    
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have 
a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
 -T.S. Eliot

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? 
Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason!
 -Sir John Harrington, 1561-1612

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing.
One that sounds good, and a real one.
 -Pierpoint Morgan

Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of error,
lest you get your brains kicked out.  
 -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Most everybody I see knows the truth but they just don't know that they know it. 
 -Woody Guthrie

If you want to tell people the truth be sure to make them laugh. 
Otherwise, they will kill you.
 -George Bernard Shaw

The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those who have not got it.
 -George Bernard Shaw

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere
in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.
 -Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

I'd gladly let my tongue be cut out altogether, from sheer gratitude, if things could be
arranged in such a way that I myself would never have the wish to stick it out anymore.
 -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales.
 -Aesop

A true friend stabs you in the front.
 -Oscar Wilde

I am more resolute because all have denied me, than I could ever have been had all accepted me;
I heed not, and have never heeded, either experience, cautions, majorities, nor ridicule;
And the threat of what is call'd hell is little or nothing to me;
And the lure of what is call'd heaven is little or nothing to me; 
 -Walt Whitman

Ah, but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.
 -Phil Ochs

Never, Marge! Never. I can't live the button-down life like you.  
I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.  
Sure, I might offend a few of the bluenoses with my cocky stride and musky odors- 
oh, I'll never be the darling of the so-called "City Fathers" who cluck their tongues, 
stroke their beards, and talk about, "What's to be done with this Homer Simpson?"
 -Homer Simpson

I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you.
I look at the world and I notice it's turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you.
I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
Look at you all...
Still my guitar gently weeps.
 -The Beatles

Fox in the snow, where do you go
To find something you can eat?
Cause the word out on the street is you are starving
Don't let yourself grow hungry now
Don't let yourself grow cold
Fox in the snow
Girl in the snow, where will you go
To find someone that will do?
To tell someone all the truth before it kills you
They listen to your crazy laugh
Before you hang a right
And disappear from sight
What do they know anyway?
You'll read it in a book
What do they know anyway?
You'll read it in a book tonight
Boy on the bike, what are you like
As you cycle round the town?
You're going up, you're going down
You're going nowhere
It's not as if they're paying you
It's not as if it's fun
At least not anymore
When your legs are black and blue
It's time to take a break
When your legs are black and blue
It's time to take a holiday
Kid in the snow, way to go
It only happens once a year
It only happens once a lifetime
Make the most of it
Second just to being born
Second to dying to
What else could you do?
 -Belle and Sebastian

"good bye," said the fox. "here is my secret. it's quite simple: one sees
clearly only with the heart. anything essential is invisible to the eyes."
 -Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, The Little Prince

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
 -Antoine de Sainte-Exupery

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul
 -Emily Dickinson

A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!
Your prayers, oh Passer by!
From such a common ball as this
Might date a Victory!
From marshallings as simple
The flags of nations swang.
Steady -- my soul: What issues
Upon thine arrow hang!
 -Emily Dickinson
                                                                        
It is better to follow even the shadow of the best than to remain content with the worst. 
And those who would see wonderful things must often be ready to travel alone.
 -Henry van Dyke, The Story Of The Other Wise Man

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.
 -Jack Kerouac

Why travel, if not like a child?
 -Jack Kerouac
 
I have not loved the world, nor the world me...
I stood among them, but not of them, 
In a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.
 -Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

         Let there be joy in baseball
       again, like in the days when Babe
             Ruth chased an enemy
       sportswriter down the streets of
        Boston & ended up getting drunk
          with him on the waterfront &
       came back the next day munching
        on hotdogs & boomed homeruns
               to the glory of God.
       -Jack Kerouac, Escapade, July 1959

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments... Some people crave baseball, 
I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get 
excited about playing the bassoon.
 -Frank Zappa

There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going. 
 -Edna St. Vincent Millay

That the world was, and continues to be, a pigsty
-that I know;
In the year 506, and in 2000 as well!
That there have always been crooks, schemers and suckers
The happy and the embittered, ideals and frauds.
But that the 20th century is unfolding of insolent evil-
No one can deny.
We live wallowing in the mess
And we're covered by all the same mud.
Today it makes no difference
Whether you're honest or a traitor,
Ignorant, wise or a thief,
Generous or crooked;
All's the same, nothing is better.
A donkey is the same as a great professor.
There are no failures, no hierarchies;
Immorality has equalized us all.
If one man lives in imposture
and another steals through ambition.
Its the same if you are priest,
Mattress-maker, King of Clubs,
Huckster or stowaway.
What lack of respect, what an assault on reason!
Anyone is a Gentleman! Anyone is a thief!
No one cares if you were born honest.
He who labors
night and day like an ox
is considered the same as one who lives off others,
one who kills,
one who drinks, 
or one who is outside the law.
 -Chambalache, a tango by Enrique Santos Discepolo, 1935

For love of the Chinhuai River, in the old days I left
    home;
I wandered up and down behind Plum Root Forge,
And strolled about in Apricot Blossom Village;
Like a phoenix that rests on a plane
Or a cricket that chirps in the yard,
I used to compete with the scholars of the day;
But now I have cast off my official robes
As cicadas shed their skin;
I wash my feet in the limpid stream,
And in idle moments fill my cup with wine,
And call in a few new friends to drink with me.
A hundred years are soon gone, so why despair?
Yet immortal fame is not easy to attain!
Writing of men I knew in the Yangtse Valley
Has made me sick at heart.
In days to come,
I shall stay by my medicine stove and Buddhist satras,
And practise religion alone.
 -Wu Ching-Tzu, 1750

From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me-
Till raising my cup, I ask the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring....
I sang. The moon encouraged me
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were born companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
...Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.
 -Drinking Alone with the Moon, by Li Po, a Chinese poet who lived from 701 to 762 AD; 
late one night he was on his boat floating down a river and drinking wine and he saw 
a full moon and he tried to hug the moon and he fell in the river and drowned

Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. 
If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state.
 -Mark Twain 

Where there is hate, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; 
where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; 
where there is darkness, light.
 -Saint Francis of Assisi

Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. 
Inside the house, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure 
and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, 
the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an
experiment or engage in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a
world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks. 
 -G.K. Chesterton

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, 
so as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.
 -Vladimir Nabokov

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
 -Douglas Adams

Beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes.
 -Henry David Thoreau

I need two rooms. When I get tired of sitting in one I go and sit in the other.
 -William Burroughs

Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write 
the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.
 -Kenneth Patchen

I am a great eater of beef and I believe that does harm to my wit.
 -Shakespeare, Twelfth Night                                            

"Religion is the opium of the poor."
"I thought marijuana was the opium of the poor."
 -Ernest Hemingway, The Nun, The Gambler, and the Radio

To beer: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
 -Homer Simpson

Hey, Duffman! I heard you died of liver failure.
 -Lenny
Duffman can never die! Only the actors that play him.
 -Duffman

It's something they made up to scare little kids, like the boogie man or Michael Jackson.
 -Bart Simpson, while selling his soul to Milhouse

Cover me, I'm going after Bart's soul!
If the ayatollah can't have it, no one can!
 -Milhouse, playing with his army men

The code of the schoolyard, Marge! The rules that teach a boy to be a man. 
Let's see. Don't tattle. Always make fun of those different from you.
Never say anything, unless you're sure everyone feels exactly the same way you do.
 -Homer Simpson

Family, religion, friendship: these are the three demons you must slay if you 
wish to succeed in business. When opportunity knocks, you don't want to be 
driving to a maternity hospital or sitting in some phony-baloney church. Or synagogue.
 -C. Montgomery Burns

Kill my boss? Do I dare to live out the American dream?
 -Homer Simpson

Your lives are in the hands of men no smarter than you or I, many of them incompetent boobs. 
I know this because I worked alongside them, gone bowling with them, watched them pass me 
over for promotions time and again. And I say... This stinks!
 -Homer Simpson

Brothers and sisters are natural enemies. Like Englishmen and Scotts. 
Or Welshmen and Scotts. Or Japanese and Scotts. Or Scotts and other Scotts!
Damn Scotts! They ruined Scotland!
 -Groundskeeper Willy

I'm in jail for a crime I didn't even commit.                 
Attempted murder, I mean what is that?
Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?
 -Sideshow Bob

Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside 
you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, 
and rule you like a king. That's why I did this: to protect you from yourselves.  
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a city to run. 
 -Sideshow Bob

No children have ever meddled with the Republican Party and lived to tell about it.
 -Sideshow Bob

I don't belong to any organized party; I'm a Democrat.
 -Will Rogers

A certain agitator, for privacy's sake lets call her "Lisa S."
No that's too obvious, let's say "L. Simpson."
 -Principal Skinner

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
 -Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, 
but the silence of our friends.
 -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Believe me, it is not failing to speak out with promptitude and energy 
that is the matter with you; it is having nothing consistent or valuable to say. 
 -Matthew Arnold

My purpose is not answer questions, it is to ask them.
 -Henrik Ibsen

How different is one man in two hours! Whilst he sits alone in his studies 
& opens not his mouth he is God manifest in flesh. Put him in a parlor 
with unfit company and he shall talk like a fool.
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Never miss a good chance to shut up.
 -Will Rogers

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.
 -Confucius

He who rocks the boat seldom has time to row it.
 -Bryan Munro

In the fight between you and the world, back the world!
 -Franz Kafka 

If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified
in silencing the one than the one- if he had the power- would be justified
in silencing mankind.
 -John Stuart Mill

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, 
and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.
 -Winston Churchill

No man made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
 -Edmund Burke

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light!
 -Edna St. Vincent Millay

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power,
a single salvation... and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering.
Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
 -Hermann Hesse

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
 -Anais Nin

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
 -Pierre Augustin de Beaumarchais

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into.
 -Jonathan Swift

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong,
which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.
 -Jonathan Swift

For writing in the cause of Virtue, and against the fashionable vices,
I am looked upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England.
 -John Gay, writing to Jonathan Swift about the reaction to his Beggar's Opera, 1728

I had nothing to offer anyone but my own confusion.
 -Jack Kerouac

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
 -Thomas Pynchon

Before the claims of those who believe that they are wise, 
I prefer the advice of the people.
 -Simon Bolívar

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging 
their prejudices.
 -William James

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain 
other sets of people are human.
 -Aldous Huxley

In History, stagnant waters, whether they be the stagnant waters of custom or those
of despotism, harbor no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few 
eccentric individuals. In homage to that life &  vitality, the community has to brave 
certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously 
if one wants to live at all.
 -Herbert Read

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, 
how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
 -George Bernard Shaw

Conquest is easy. Control is not.
 -Captain James T. Kirk

We rule with moderate strictness, and in return we are satisfied with 
moderate obedience. And I think I can claim that our people are 
moderately sober, moderately chaste, and moderately honest.
 -James Hilton, Lost Horizon

Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again.
That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.
 -Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; 
it is perhaps because they can be useful to him in this respect that he
tolerates their existence. 
 -Samuel Butler

Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history 
and not new enough to be news.
 -G.K. Chesterton

I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can 
grow no blacker, it worsens,
And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been 
an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the 
wrong persons.
 -Ogden Nash

I can't go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
 -Lewis Carroll

What you do is of little significance. 
But it is very important that you do it. 
 -Gandhi

You may never know what results come from your action. 
But if you do nothing, there will be no results. 
 -Gandhi

One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed 
they must be defended against the heaviest odds. 
 -Gandhi

A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong.
 -Tecumseh Shawnee

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.
 -Carl Jung

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. 
The thought that the state has lost its mind is intolerable, and so the evidence 
has to be internally denied.
 -Arthur Miller

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one,
an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
 -Edmund Burke

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.
 -Confucius

Well, according to my research, the cost of raising a baby from birth to college 
is approximately seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Thanks to my actually 
selling a shoe last week, I'm proud to say we're now just short seven hundred 
eighty thousand dollars. Thank you.
 -Al Bundy, Married With Children

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars
he should start his own religion.
 -L. Ron Hubbard, 1950

As I sit in my poverty-stricken home, looking at the place where the piano used to be 
before I had to sell it to pay my income tax, I find myself in a thoughtful mood.
 -P.G. Wodehouse

I've worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.
 -Groucho Marx

These are my principles, and if you don't like them... well I have others.
 -Groucho Marx

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, 
and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
 -Groucho Marx

And if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more 
like prunes than rhubarb does.
 -Groucho Marx

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
 -Groucho Marx

Don't wake him up. He's got insomnia- he's trying to sleep it off.
 -Chico Marx, A Night at the Opera

To Harpo Marx 
Harpo!  When did you seem like an angel
 	the last time?
 	and played the gray harp of gold?
When did you steal the silverware
 	and bug-spray the guests?
When did your brother find rain
 	in your sunny courtyard?
When did you chase your last blonde
 	across the Millionairesses' lawn
	with a bait hook on a line
	protruding from your bicycle?
Harpo!  Who was that Lion
 	I saw you with?
How did you treat the midget
	and Konk the giant?
Harpo, in your recent night-club appearance
	in New Orleans were you old?
Were you still chiding with your horn
	in the cane at your golden belt?
Was your vow of silence an Indian Harp?
 -Jack Kerouac, 1959

                       Between the idea 
			    And the reality
			    Between the motion 
			    And the act 
			    Falls the Shadow
				 -T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925

I wish so to live as to derive my satisfactions & inspirations from the 
commonest events, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, 
the conversation of my neighbors may inspire me, & I may dream of no 
heaven but that which lies about me.
 -Henry David Thoreau

The world wasn't crowded until we separated everything.
 -Jack Kerouac

Linus: I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. 
Maybe we should think only about today.
Charlie Brown: No, that's giving up. 
I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better.
 -Charles Schulz, Peanuts

"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."
 -Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin

Aha! ... If I know anything about anything, that hole means Rabbit ... 
and Rabbit means Company ... and Company means Food and Listening-to-Me-Humming
and such like. 
 -A.A. Milne's "In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets into a Tight Place", Chapter 2, 1926

I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference anyway.
 -Jack Kerouac

Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness...     
He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; 
he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace.
 -Virginia Woolf

An intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, 
& it is only the fool who becomes anything.              
 -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man attempts to 
adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
 -George Bernard Shaw

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness...
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, - you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
 -Emily Dickinson

You shall know the truth, and it shall make you odd.
 -Flannery O’Connor

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire,
and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
 -Terry Pratchett

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, 
when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. 
And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say:
What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? 
I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!
 -Terry Pratchett, The Truth

Don't go on looking at me like that, because you'll wear your eyes out.
 -Emile Zola

Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something. 
 -Anton Chekhov

Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living that wears you out. 
 —Anton Chekhov

The human face is an empty power, a field of death ...
after countless thousands of years that the human face has 
spoken and breathed one still has the impression that it 
hasn't even begun to say what it is and what it knows.
 —Antonin Artaud, from a text to introduce an exhibition of his portraits & drawings, 
Galerie Pierre, July 1947

The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this 
planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum. 
 -George Bernard Shaw 

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; 
our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
 -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When dealing with the insane, it is best to pretend to be sane.
 -Herman Hesse

The only ones for me are the mad ones.
 -Jack Kerouac

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse. 
 -Cervantes

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
 -Viktor E. Frankl, a psychiatrist who lived through four concentration camps in World War II

I went in search of a bad person; I found none as I, seeing myself, found me the worst.
 -Kabir, saint poet of North India

"If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, 
you know, as we needn't try to find any."
 -Lewis Carroll 

"If everybody minded their own business," the Duchess said, in a hoarse growl, 
"the world would go around a great deal faster than it does."
 -Lewis Carroll

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't- till I tell you. 
I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for	you!'"
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 
"it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master- that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 
"They've a temper some of them- particularly verbs: they're the proudest- 
adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs- however, I can manage 
the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
 -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Ch. VI

A good education is the next best thing to a pushy mother.           
 -Charles Schulz

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching,
but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when
I think of all I might have learned at home by myself. 
 -George Bernard Shaw

It is... nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not 
yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, 
aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreak 
and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching 
can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. 
 -Albert Einstein

The adjective is the enemy of the noun, though it agrees with it in number and gender.
 -Voltaire 

When you catch an adjective, kill it.
 -Mark Twain

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's 
real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and 
exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such 
thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics 
itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the 
general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
 -George Orwell
 
The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. Uncontrolled words- 
circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, uncertified- frighten tyrants.
 -Ryszard Kapuscinski

Words- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, 
how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how 
to combine them.
 -Nathaniel Hawthorne

Genius round the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs 
the whole circle round.
 -Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses, 1850

Am I crazy or am I a genius? I don't think I'm either.
 -John Lennon

But I'm not a genius, why should I suffer?
 -Homer Simpson

For a mass of people to be led to think coherently ... about the real, present world,
is a 'philosophical' event far more important and 'original' than the discovery
by some philosophical 'genius' of a truth which remains the property of small
groups of intellectuals ... it is not a question of introducing from scratch
a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating
and making 'critical' an already existing activity.
 -Antonio Gramsci, "Prison Notebooks" pp. 325, 300

A bandage is mysterious. Removed, it may reveal only a hangnail.
 -Edna Ferber

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us 
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
 -Galileo Galilei 

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. 
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. 
 -Arthur Schopenhauer

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

The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. 
With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.
 -Voltaire 

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
 -Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
 -Voltaire

When it's a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
 -Voltaire

All sects are different, because they come from men; 
morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.
 -Voltaire 

Everybody's got some kinda of belief about the creator, some say openly I don't know
 -Meat Puppets

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
 -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
 -Woody Allen

To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith 
than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.
 -Joseph Addison, 1711

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, 
education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. 
 -Albert Einstein

Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of 
punishment and hope of reward after death.
 -Albert Einstein

The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put 
the worst to death.
 -Nathaniel Hawthorne

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
 —Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

There are so many little dyings, it doesn't matter which of them is death.
 -Kenneth Patchen

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; 
that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
 -Agatha Christie

You can have all the advanced war methods you want, but, after all, 
nobody has ever invented a war that you don't have to have somebody 
in the guise of soldiers to stop the bullets.
 -Will Roger

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that...
Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate.
 -Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ultimate measure of a person is not where one stands in moments of comfort
and convenience, but where one stands in times of challenge and controversy.
 -Martin Luther King, Jr.

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, 
but because of those who look on and do nothing.
 -Albert Einstein

Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of
domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. 
Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, 
wars and class antagonisms.
 -J. Krishnamurti 

Two little Hitlers will fight it out until one little Hitler does the other one's will.
 -Elvis Costello

The Romans and Carthaginians were very different in character and temperament.
The Carthaginians had no ideals. All they wanted was money and helling around
and having a big time. The Romans were stern and dignified, living hard, frugal
lives and adhering to the traditional Latin virtues, gravitas, pietas, simplicitas,
and adultery. Carthage was governed by its rich men and was therefore a plutocracy.
Rome was also governed by its rich men and was therefore a republic.
 -Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, 
the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the 
land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by 
a downright moron.
 -H.L. Mencken 

I AIN'T A GONNA KILL NOBODY
I took a bath this morning in six war speeches, and a sprinkle of peace. 
Looks like ever body is declaring war against the forces of force. That's 
what you get for building up a big war machine. It scares your neighbors 
into jumping on you, and then of course they them selves have to use force, 
so you are against their force, and they're aginst yours. Look like the ring 
has been drawed and the marbles are all in. The millionaires has throwed 
their silk hats and our last set of drawers in the ring. The fuse is lit 
and the cannon is set, and somebody is in for a frailin. I would like to 
see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, 
unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some 
shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks 
wants to fight. Give them the guns.
 -Woody Guthrie

Cry 'havoc!' and let loose the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall 
smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial.
 -Antony, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act III

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, 
whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism 
or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
 -Gandhi

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying 
to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked 
into entering.  
 -Gary Snyder

Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white. 
 -William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

I have always imagined that Paradise would be a kind of library.
 -Jorge Luis Borges

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace 
the hardcover book- it makes a very poor doorstop. 
 -Alfred Hitchcock

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books.
That Tolstoy crap- people shouldn't read that stuff.
 -Mike Tyson, in the San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 1996

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
 -Leo Tolstoy

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over 
and actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages.
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson, June 7, 1841

It does not matter how many books you may have, but whether they are good or not.
 -Seneca

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
 -Joseph Brodsky

The worm thinks it strange and foolish that man does not eat his books.
 -Rabindranath Tagore

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
 -Orson Welles

Television: chewing gum for the eyes.
 -Frank Lloyd Wright

You may remember that on one occasion when a suspicious plainclothes man,
observing that, whereas only two Marxes were seated at a certain breakfast table,
there were nevertheless covers laid for twice as many, said sharply: 'This table
is set for four.' Groucho, in no wise confused, replied, 'That's nothing,
the alarm clock is set for eight.' If nothing else set off the Marx Brothers
from Karl Marx that would. Karl Marx had the sort of mind which, when faced
with the suggestion that the stolen painting was hidden in the house next door,
would, on learning that there was no house next door, never have thought to build one.
Here is where, again, he parts company with the Marx Brothers. The significance of this
divergence becomes clear when it is known that the Marx Brothers recovered the painting.
 -James Thurber

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will
go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
 -James Thurber

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
 -James Thurber

   The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons,
you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the
neighborhood, & particularly with the greengrocer across the street.
 -T. S. Eliot writing to Groucho Marx on June 3, 1964

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set,
I go into the other room & read a book.
 -Groucho Marx

Outside of a dog a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
 -Groucho Marx

If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
 -Will Rogers

If you're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.
 -Martin Luther

Charity is not charity if unacompanied by justice.
 -Saint Vincent de Paul

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the
whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience
usually recognize also the voice of justice.
 -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds,
and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. 
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. 
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
 -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
 -Emma Lazarus

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, 
and the children of men, as a whole, do not experience it... 
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. 
 -Helen Keller

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation
and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in
earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation,
and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with
despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. 
 -Susan B. Anthony

I hate a Roman named Status Quo! Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd 
drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made 
or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was 
such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which 
hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell 
with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.
 -Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The United States is putting together a Constitution now for Iraq. Why don't we just 
give them ours? It's served us well for 200 years, and we don't appear to be using it 
anymore, so what the hell?
 -Jay Leno

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own.
For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
 -James Baldwin

First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, 
so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I 
did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak
out for me.
 -Pastor Martin Niemoller

I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and 
humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, 
never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. 
 -Elie Weisel

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, 
produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to 
promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant 
toward those not of a like mind.
 -Eric Hoffer

We must love them both- those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. 
For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.
 -Saint Thomas Aquinas

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.
 -Agatha Christie

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
 -Tom Stoppard, 1972

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, 
where it is still possible to get things done.
 -Terry Pratchett

Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
 -Eric Hoffer

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to
who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage- torture, imprisonment
without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians- which does not change
its moral color when it is committed by our side... The nationalist not only
does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable
capacity for not even hearing about them.
 -George Orwell

Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda 
it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, 
and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. 
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, 
to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of 
useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to 
reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual 
activities that this age forces on all of us. 
 -George Orwell

Political language- and with variations this is true of all political
parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists- is designed to make lies 
sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of 
solidity to pure wind. 
 -George Orwell

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, 
as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
 -Ambrose Bierce

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their
prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
 -Eric Hoffer

Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.
 -Homer Simpson

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. 
 -James Fenimore Cooper

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, 
knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal. 
 -James Fenimore Cooper

Although the political liberty of this country is greater than that of
nearly every other civilized nation, its personal liberty is said to be less.
In other words, men are thought to be more under the control of extra-legal
authorities, and to defer more to those around them, in pursuing even their
lawful and innocent occupations, than in almost every other country. 
 -James Fenimore Cooper

In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty
should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the publick. 
The publick, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries
kings and aristocrats are to be watched. 
 -James Fenimore Cooper

It makes no difference who you vote for– the two parties are really one party 
representing four percent of the people.
 -Gore Vidal

The members who comprised it were seven-eighths of them, ...the meanest kind of bawling 
and blowing officeholders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, 
fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contracts, kept-editors, spaniels well train'd to carry 
and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail riflers, slave-catchers, 
pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies,
bribers, compromisers, lobbyists, spongers, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, 
monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred 
inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money 
and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combinings 
and born freedom-sellers of the earth.
 -Walt Whitman, commenting on a Democratic Party Convention (sometime between 1840 and 1860)

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost 
every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities 
who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them 
at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not 
worth a brass farthing.
 -Mark Twain

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. 
 -Mark Twain

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is 
patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your 
conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your 
country, let me label you as they may.
 -Mark Twain

Like doctors and lawyers, most of the best minds in police work have been trained since 
puberty to think in terms of patterns and precedents: Anything original tends to have 
the same kind of effect on their investigative machinery as a casually mutilated
punch-card fed into a computer. The immediate result is chaos and false conclusions. 
 -Hunter S. Thompson                                                        

'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying... 
It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
 -G. K. Chesterton

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved,
as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
 -Eugene V. Debs

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

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom. 
 -Robert Frost

Society will never progress until we all learn to pretend to like each other.
 -Leela, Futurama

We're gonna go where people pretend to want to go when they can't afford to go 
someplace good. We're gonna see America. We take no map. We'll follow the sun. 
Stay in cheap motels and steal what we need along the way. We go west, past the 
cheese factories, where the air is fresh, the sky is big, and a man can still 
kill his dinner with his car. Guys, tomorrow we put the pedal to the metal 
and we ride with the wind.
 -Al Bundy, Married With Children

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
 -Kurt Vonnegut

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
 -Albert Camus

I love America more than any other country in this world,
and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize
her perpetually. 
 -James A. Baldwin

The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles,
the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue... There is a perpetual
interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated
in England for a week.
 -Margot Asquith

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. 
Their tastes may not be the same.
 -George Bernard Shaw

The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their
innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred
for a fellow American ... is far more virulent than any antipathy he can 
work up against foreigners ... Should Americans begin to hate foreigners 
wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence 
in their own way of life. 
 -Eric Hoffer

The Americans who are the most efficient people on earth... have invented 
so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a ... 
conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying 
and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of 
big business and fornication. 
 -Somerset Maugham

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference 
of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 
We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to 
reproduce that experience as often as possible.
 -Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

If I can stop one heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one life the aching
Or cool one pain
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again
I shall not live in vain.
 -Emily Dickinson

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is 
to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
 -Honore de Balzac

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
 -G. K. Chesterton

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life
in order to be thankful for a good man.
 -Mae West
Lord make me chaste, but not yet.
 -Saint Augustine

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is:
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments 
that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.
 -Rebecca West

Your face holds all the love in the world. Moonlight steals across
your face so full of Earthly beauty and Grief. For now Death
extends her hands of Life and a band is made between the
thousands of generations who are dead and the thousands of
generations who are to come.
 -Edvard Munch                                                                    

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz or arrow of carnations that 
propagate fire: I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the 
shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom, and carries hidden 
within itself the light of those flowers, and thanks to your love, darkly in my body 
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth. I love you without knowing how, 
or when, or from where, I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in 
this way because I know no other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you; 
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep
it is your eyes that close.
 -Pablo Neruda's Sonnet 17
                                                                        
"I know not love," quoth he, "Nor will I know it, unless it be a boar, and then I'll chase it.
'Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it; my love for love is love but to disgrace it. 
For I have heard it is a life in death, which laughs and weeps, and all but in a breath."
 -William Shakespeare

And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?
And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?
I know a man that's a braver man
Yet women's ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell, -
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well? 
 -Edna St. Vincent Millay

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-- Yet when we came back, late,
from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looked into the heart of light, the silence.
 -T.S. Eliot

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
 -William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

O! lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove.
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart:
O! lest your true love may seem false in this
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.
 -William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXII

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse. 
 -William Blake

Perhaps they were right putting love into books... perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
 -William Faulkner

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Moms. 
Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
 -Nelson Algren

Look, boy, here's my advice on women. Never give them nicknames like Jumbo or Boxcar,
and always get a receipt. Makes you look like a business guy.
 -Homer Simpson

Son, a woman is like a beer. They smell good, they look good, you'd step over your 
own mother just to get one! But you can't stop at one. You wanna drink another woman!
 -Homer Simpson

When a woman says nothing's wrong, that means everything's wrong. 
And when a woman says everything's wrong, that means everything's wrong!
And when a woman says something's not funny, you'd better not laugh your ass off!
 -Homer Simpson

My mother told me any girl who chews [gum] will smoke. If she smokes she'll drink. 
If she drinks she'll do everything bad.
 -Stephen King

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, 
because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror 
is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, 
you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
 -James Baldwin

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous
that you realize just how much you love them.
 -Agatha Christie

The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.
 -Somerset Maugham

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself
constantly walking around in daytime and falling into at night.
 -Edna St. Vincent Millay

I dont know what it is about you that closes and opens, 
only something in your eyes is deeper than all the roses
 -e.e. cummings

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
 -Robert Heinlein

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say 
and to finish without knowing what you have written.
 -Jean Jacques Rousseau

Never's just the echo of forever, lonesome as a love that might have been.
Let me go on lovin' and believin' 'til it's over.
Please don't tell me how the story ends.
 -Kris Kristofferson

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

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
 -Victor Hugo

Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.
 -Herman Hesse

Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person goodnight.
 -Andy Warhol

Getting rid of a man without hurting his masculinity is a problem.
'Get out' and 'I never want to see you again' might sound like a challenge.
If you want to get rid of a man, I suggest saying, 'I love you... I want to
marry you... I want to have your children.' Sometimes they leave skid marks.
 -Jerry Seinfeld

When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson 
to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities. 
 -Matt Groening

People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down
 -the Doors

When in doubt, bet the dark side. 
It is the nature of this business we have chosen.
 -Hunter S. Thompson

     In a Dark Time
     In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
     I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
     I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
     A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
     I live between the heron and the wren,
     Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
     What's madness but nobility of soul
     At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
     I know the purity of pure despair,
     My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
     That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
     Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.
     A steady storm of correspondences!
     A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
     And in broad day the midnight come again!
     A man goes far to find out what he is--
     Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
     All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
     Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
     My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
     Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
     A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
     The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
     And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
     -Theodore Roethke 

Nevertheless, there is a queer quality in that time [the Middle Ages]; 
which, while it was international was also internal and intimate. War, in the 
wide modern sense, is possible, not because more men disagree, but because 
more men agree. Under the peculiarly modern coercions, such as Compulsory
Education and Conscription, there are such very large peaceful areas, 
that they all can agree upon war. In that age men disagreed even about war; 
peace might break out anywhere. Peace was interrupted by feuds and feuds by
pardons. Individuality wound in and out of a maze; spiritual extremes 
were walled up with one another in one little walled town; and we see the 
great soul of Dante divided, a cloven flame; loving and hating his own city.
 -G.K. Chesterton

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I
have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall
dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious,
and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful,
humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that
should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to
the opposite. And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially
a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being
often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship,
humanity, and religion. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have
than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than
by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in
touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what
you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many,
who have the majesty of the state to defend them.
 -Machiavelli, The Prince

              There is no such thing as the State
              & no one exists alone;
              Hunger allows no choice
              To the citizen or the police;
              We must love one another or die.
              —W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland

Artillery is the god of war.
 -Josef Stalin

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices. 
 -Edward R. Murrow

Cowardice asks the question- is it safe? Expediency asks the question- is it politic? 
Vanity asks the question- is it popular? But conscience asks the question- is it right? 
There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, 
nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.
 -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be 
allowed to do the job.
 -Douglas Adams

You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this
most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, 
combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing 
structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do 
your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
 -former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel

Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, 
the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice 
of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
 -Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia

Patriotism is the refuge to which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you the king.
 -Bob Dylan

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
 -Desiderius Erasmus

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
 -Desiderius Erasmus

In all sorts of government man is made to believe himself free, 
and to be in chains.
 -King Stanislaus of Poland, 1763

Things are in the saddle & ride mankind.
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson

I could readily see in Emerson... the insinuation that had he lived in those 
days when the world was made he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
 -Herman Melville

By ringing small changes on the words leg-of-mutton and turnip... 
I could 'demonstrate' that a turnip was, is, and of right ought to be, 
a leg-of-mutton.
 -Edgar Allan Poe

I have great faith in fools- self-confidence my friends call it.
 -Edgar Allen Poe

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape 
those who dream only by night.
 -Edgar Allen Poe

O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
 -Edgar Allen Poe

       What happens to the dream deferred?
                  Does it dry up
                  like a raisin in the sun?
                  Or fester like a sore-
                  & then run?
                  Does it stink like rotten meat?
                  Or crust & sugar over—
                  like a syrupy sweet?
                  Maybe it just sags
                  like a heavy load.
                  Or does it explode?
                             —Langston Hughes

You can't say no to a man with a hand grenade, can you?
 -Salam Pax

During war, the laws are silent.
 -Quintus Tullius Cicero (c.102-43 B.C.), Roman general; brother of Cicero the orator

The ladder of law has no top and no bottom.
 -Bob Dylan

Someone's boring me. I think it's me.
 -Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas comes to see me. He wants a job on the BBC. He is a fat little man, 
puffy and pinkish, dressed in very dirty trousers and loud check coat. I tell him 
that if is to be employed by the BBC, he must promise not to get drunk. I give him ₤1, 
as he is clearly at his wits' end for money. He does not look as if had been cradled 
into poetry by wrong. He looks as if he will be washed out of poetry by whisky.
 -Harold Nicolson, September 12, 1941

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
 -P.G. Wodehouse

In every studio in Hollywood there are rows and rows of hutches, each containing 
an author on a long contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces 
peering out through the bars. You hear them whining piteously to be taken for a walk. 
And does the heart bleed? You bet it bleeds. A visitor has to be very callous not to be 
touched by such a spectacle as this.
 -P.G. Wodehouse, 1929

Now, touching this business of old Jeeves- my man, you know- how do we stand? 
Lots of people think I'm much too dependent on him. My Aunt Agatha, in fact, 
has even gone so far as to call him my keeper. Well, what I say is: Why not? 
The man's a genius. From the collar upward he stands alone. I gave up trying 
to run my own affairs within a week of his coming to me.
 -Bertie Wooster, Jeeves Takes Charge by P.G. Wodehouse

The trouble with being a hypochondriac these days is that antibiotics have cured 
all the good diseases.
 -Caskie Stinett

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you 
actually look forward to the trip.
 -Caskie Stinett

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

We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace 
that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.
 -Albert Einstein

You know that if I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back as a buzzard.
Nothing hates him or envies him or needs him. He is never bothered or 
in danger, and he can eat anything.
 -William Faulkner

One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just beneath my window.
I was woken by a fearful uproar, and, going to the window, saw a man lying
flat on the stones below; I could see the murderers, three of them, flitting 
away at the end of the street. Some of us went down and found that the man 
was quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember
the colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was still on the
cobbles when I came home that evening, and they said the schoolchildren
had come from miles round to see it. But the thing that strikes me in 
looking back is that I was in bed and asleep within minutes of the murder.
So were most of the people in the street; we just made sure that the man
was done for, and went straight back to bed. We were working people, and
where was the sense of wasting sleeping over a murder?
 -George Orwell, Down And Out In Paris And London

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?
The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of potato.
SQUEAK, he said.
Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said.
I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.
 -Terry Pratchett, The Truth

When there is nothing left to think about but death,
they want to bother me with that!
 -Leo Tolstoy, at a party on his 80th birthday

Now now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
 —Voltaire, 1778, on his deathbed, in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan

One world at a time.
 -Henry David Thoreau, on his deathbed, when asked about the afterlife

Alas, I am dying beyond my means. 
Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.
 -Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed

I have not told the half of what I saw.
 -Marco Polo, on his deathbed

There is no end to sorrow.
 -Vincent Van Gogh's last words

While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
 -Leonardo da Vinci

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories,
you might still be alive when you hit bottom. I thought seven stories must be a
safe distance.
 -Sylvia Plath

The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked 
to do things and yet are not decrepit enough to turn them down. 
 -T.S. Eliot

GOD guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song's sake a fool?
I pray- for word is out
And prayer comes round again-
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
 -W.B. Yeats

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. 
It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death. 
What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should 
die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. 
You are kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to 
work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. 
You do drugs, alcohol, you party, and you get ready for high school. You go to
grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, 
you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last 
nine months floating... then you finish off as an orgasm. 
 -George Carlin

I used to be with 'it'. But then they changed what 'it' was.
Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems scary and weird. 
It'll happen to YOU!
 -Abraham Simpson

Age is not an accomplishment, and youth is not a sin.
 -Robert Heinlen

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live,
it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up 
when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. 
It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to 
make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
 -George Bernard Shaw

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
 -Franz Kafka

Every man has three characters: that which he exhibits, 
that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.
 -Franz Kafka

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.
 -Alexandre Dumas

Heroes, like cowards, are people who for one brief moment 
do something out of the ordinary.
 -Joseph Conrad

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, 
and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
 -Joseph Heller

Progress involves risks. You can't steal second with your foot on first.

 -Fred Wilcox

The time when the operation of the machine becomes so foreign, 
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, 
you can't even passively take part, then you've got to put 
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers
and all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop, and you've
got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, 
that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!
 -Malcolm X

Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves?
Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did
nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a jail. 
Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. 
It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
 -Victor Hugo

Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
 -John Donne

That hings his head, an' a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Our toils obscure , an' a' that;
The rank is but the the guinea stamp;
The Man's the gowd for a' that!
What tho' on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, an' a' that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A Man's a Man for a' that!
For a' that an' a' that,
Their tinsel show and a' that;
The honest man, though ne'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that!
Ye see yon birkie ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, and stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that an' a' that,
His riband, star, and a' that;
The Man of independent mind,
He looks an' laughs at a' that!
A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest Man's aboon his might,
Guid faith he maunna fa' that!
For a' that an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that,
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher ranks than a' that.
Then let us pray that come it may -
As come it will for a' that -
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree, and a' that;
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that
That Man to Man the warld o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that!
 -Robert Burns, 1759-1796

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

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
 -William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, 
without sudden turnings. 
 -C.S. Lewis
maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
 -Dante Alighieri

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try 
the one I've never tried before. 
 -Mae West

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face 
to himself and another to the multitude, without finally 
getting bewildered as to which one is true.
 -Nathaniel Hawthorne

Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
 -Anais Nin

Each friend represents a world in us; a world possibly not born until they
arrive, and it is only in meeting them that a new world is born.
 -Anais Nin

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
 -Anais Nin

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
 -Anaïs Nin                                                     	

	Concerning Van Gogh, magic and spells, all the people who have paraded before 
the exhibition of his works at the Orangerie for the last two months are they really 
sure to remember all they did and everything that happened to them every night of the 
months of February, March, April and May 1956? Could there not have been one particular 
night when the atmosphere and the streets became liquid, gelatinous, unstable, and when 
the light of the stars and the celestial vault disappeared?            
	And Van Gogh was not there, he who painted the Arles Café. But I was at Rodez, 
that is to say, still on earth, while all the inhabitants of Paris must have felt, 
all one night, very close to leaving it.         
	And was this not because they had participated in unison in certain generalized 
dirty tricks, when the consciousness of Parisians left its normal level for an hour or two 
and proceeded to another one, one of those mass unfurlings of hatred which I have witnessed  
so many times during my nine years of internment.                  
	Now hatred is forgotten like the nocturnal expurgations that follow, and the same ones
who so many times bared their swinish souls to the whole world now file past...         
	But was it not one of those evenings I have been talking about, that an enormous 
white stone fell on the Boulevard de la Madeleine at the corner of the Rue des Mathurins,
as if shot from a recent volcanic eruption of the volcano Popocatepetl?            
 -Antonin Artaud

Anais Nin and Antonin Artaud were introduced to each other by their psychoanalyst 
(who warned Nin to stay away from Artaud because he was a drug addict and homosexual).

In the end, we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug,
and we shall want to live more musically.
 -Vincent Van Gogh    

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle Autumn's rain.
When you awaken in the morning hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush.
I am the quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there,
I did not die.
 -Hopi Prayer

Last night I dreamt that I was a beautiful butterfly fluttering through the fields.   
Now I awaken. My question is this; how do I know if I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamt          
himself a butterfly, or if I am a butterfly, now dreaming itself Chuang Tzu?
 -Chuang Tzu

I love little children but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases.
 -George Bernard Shaw

Computer viruses are alive.
 -Stephen Hawking  
                                           
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
 -Leonardo Da Vinci

One day the world will look upon research upon animals as it now looks upon 
research on human beings.
 -Leonardo Da Vinci

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims 
he intends to eat until he eats them.
 -Samuel Butler

The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the 
vegetarian miners of Chile who seem to subsist on beans.
 -Charles Darwin

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make
the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies,
though not our own.
 -Robert Louis Stevenson

Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in 
the human heart is the injunction not to take life.
 -Leo Tolstoy

I'm not a vegetarian but I want you to know that my four dogs are safe.
 -Charlton Heston

You see, when there are so many different species 
that people become confused and angry, a poacher is born.
 -Homer Simpson

Litter is my most treacherous foe. I would like to eat its children.
 -Drederick Tatum

Trees have judicial standing, and probably grass too.
 -Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death, even vegetarians.
 -Spock

Why does McDonald's have to count every burger that they sell? 
What is their ultimate goal? Do they want cows to surrender voluntarily?
 -Jerry Seinfeld

But just disease to luxury succeeds, And every death its own avenger breeds; 
The fury passions from that blood began, And turned on Man a fiercer savage... Man
 -Alexander Pope

In the service of God, one can learn three things from a child and seven 
things from a thief. From a child you can learn: 1) Always to be happy  
2) Never to sit idle 3) To cry for everything one wants... From a thief 
you should learn: 1) To work at night 2) If one cannot gain what one wants 
in one night to try again the next night 3) To love one's co-workers just 
as thieves love each other 4) To be willing to risk one's life even for a 
little thing 5) Not to attach too much value to things even though one has 
risked one's life for them- just as a thief will resell a stolen article 
for a fraction of its real value 6) To withstand all kinds of beatings 
and tortures but to remain what you are, and, 7) To believe that your 
work is worthwhile and not be willing to change it.
 -Rabbi Dov Baer, the Mazid of Mezeritch

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
 -Orson Welles

Support your local ska band even though they just might stink,     
support them despite what the real musicians just might think.
It's okay to lower standards in the name of a good cause,               
you can bend the rules for us this time, and give us your applause.
 -Save Ferris

When you invite people to a free show and they start to hiss, 
that's a sign you're on the right track.
 -Conan O'Brien

But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, 
I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible 
police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly 
dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way- he can better answer than 
any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the 
grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a 
sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. 
I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this
 -Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
 -Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael.
 -Bloody Battle in Afghanistan.
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, 
put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage...
 -Herman Melville, Moby Dick

america is redeemed in its cartoons.
 -Moby

My favorite rapper is M.C. Escher!
 -Space Ghost, Space Ghost Coast to Coast

The geometry of space translates to a reoccurring theme in my creations: the tessellation. 
A tessellation is an arrangement of closed shapes that completely covers the plane without 
overlapping and without leaving gaps. The regular division of the plane had been considered 
solely in theory prior to me, some say. I diverged from traditional approaches, and chose 
instead to find solutions visually. Where other mathematicians used notebooks, I preferred 
to use a canvas. To gain access to a greater number of designs, I used transformational 
geometry techniques including reflections, glide reflections, translations, and rotations. 
The result is a 'mathematical tessellation of artistic proportions.'
 -M.C. Escher, 1898-1972

When push comes to shove, you got to do what you love,
even if it's not a good idea.
 -Hermes Conrad, Futurama

You're better than normal. You're abnormal!
 -Philip J. Fry, Futurama

Bees make honey and jelly? How come nothing humans make tastes good?
 -Philip J. Fry, Futurama

The time for maturity has passed.
 -one of the German space aliens,   Aqua Teen Hunger Force

World domination? You guys couldn't take over a bowl of jello.
 -Frylock, speaking to the German space aliensAqua Teen Hunger Force

How many TV's have you broken this year?
 -Frylock, Aqua Teen Hunger Force
More than you have, that's how many.
 -Shake, Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Please, Frylock, make us another TV. What else do I have to live for? 
I got no money, no job, my wife left me and I have no idea if anything
I just said is true.
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

I'm friends with a toilet paper tube, an apple, and a box. I'm crazy in the head.
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

I'm the Incredible Plum!
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Huner Force

Quick! To the Adirondacks!
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Dewey, do you take this headless supermodel with the six-pack to be your
lawfully wedded wife so that you guys can work on the railroad together 
and build supertrains and drive them to Jupiter with Pac-Man? Say 'I do.' 
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Well, real dolls cost money, and I'd rather use the unlimited power of my imagination.
Cause I ain't got no damn money.
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Get the door, Meatwad, it's Dracula.
 -Shake, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Dracula is DEAD, Shake, and I'm going to show you his grave, pack a bag...
We're going to Memphis.
 -Frylock, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Which one of you left the door open and tore it off the hinges and threw it in the yard?
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Amazing. I have yet to see a welfare check, yet this is my second summons in two days.
 -Shake, while on trial for crimes against nature, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

We don't need a toilet. The pile of clothes in the hall has worked fine for us for years!
 -Shake, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Do not drink the choclate milk... Do not drink the choclate milk!
Do not open the trash... do not open the trash!
Do not go outside! Do not go outside!
Do not open the door! Do not open the door!
 -Meatwad, after gaining the ability to see into the future, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

And bring me some chocolate syrup- or your fate is sealed!
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

In summation, we can have our daily tea party in the fifth demension!
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Do not insult what little intellegence I have.
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Now, look, I have a brain. I just took it out so it wouldn't get wet.
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

I'm very sorry, the real spagetti got wet when I was boiling it so its in the dryer.
 -Shake, Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Well, what are we waiting for, its probably dry by now, let's go get it.
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Spirits that haunt this house, come out... and play with me!
 -Meatwad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

"...We're part of a big world. We have to play that part. 
"For example, what about the Muntab question?" 
Nanny Ogg asked the Muntab question. "Where the hell's Muntab?" she said. 
"Several thousand miles away, Mrs Ogg. But it has ambitions hubwards, 
and if there's war with Borogravia we will certainly have to adopt a position."
 -King Verence speaking with Nanny Ogg, Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett

Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least,
it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow.
There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag
people off to dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing was 
bad for business, habit-forming, style-lacking, and very, very dangerous for 
your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job 
than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy.
At least he could tell people he was their fault.
 -Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Ambassadors from Samos came to King Cleomenes of Sparta with a long prepared speech 
to persuade him to go to war against Polycrates the Tyrant. He let them have their 
say and then replied: 'As for your preamble and preface, I no longer remember it;
nor of course your middle bit.' An excellent answer, it seems to me, with a blow 
on the nose of the speechifiers.
 -Michel de Montaigne, paraphrasing Plutarch

No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs
were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that
we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm
and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on
other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours  
regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans 
against us.
 -War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, 1898


Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up
at Mars or Jupiter and think that were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a
curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is 
poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water,
must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are 
merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. 
The thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.
 -George Orwell, Down And Out In Paris And London

The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. 
But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is: No.
 -Leonard Nimoy, on the Simpsons 

And if there's life on other planets
Then I'm sure that He must know
And has been there once already
And has died to save their souls.
 -Christian folk/rock artist Larry Norman, U.F.O

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
 -Arthur C. Clarke

Sphere of Influence: a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor- 
for your neighbor's benefit.
 -Mark Twain

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after    
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; 
He knew human folly like the back of his hand, 
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; 
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
 -W.H. Auden, Epitaph on a Tyrant

A tyrant is still just one. Consequently you can arrange to avoid him, 
if you like, to live far away from him, etc. But where, under a people's government, 
am I to escape the tyrant? Everyone is in a sense the tyrant! 
all he needs is to get hold of a mob, a majority.
 -Soren Kierkegaard

The several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another; and Men are 
always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal 
in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.
 -David Hume

Let Our arms now be carried with
     a spirit which shall teach the
     world that, while we are not
     forward for a quarrel, America
     knows how to crush, as well as
     how to expand!
          —Walt Whitman, in support of the war against Mexico

A strong people needs no leader.
 -Emiliano Zapata

It is better to die on my feet than to continue living on my knees. 
 -Emiliano Zapata

My dream of beauty and my beloved visions of a humanity 
living in peace, love, and liberty will not die with me. 
While there is on earth a painful heart or an eye full 
of tears, my dreams and my visions will live...
 -Ricardo Flores Magon, March 16, 1922

They will end by understanding that our ideal is the 
only one that guarantees the inviolability of human dignity.
 -Ricardo Flores Magon

If we fix it so's you can't make money on war, we'll all forget what we're killing folks for. 
 -Woody Guthrie

Let us then try what Love will do.
 -William Penn, 1693

Well, fighting is bad to begin with, right? So if you're going to fight,
you're already wrong. I mean, you're already at the party, so why not fight dirty?
 -Coach McGuirk, Home Movies

Just squeeze your rage into a bitter little ball and release it at an 
appropriate time. Like that time I hit that referee with a whiskey bottle. 
Remember that, honey? Remember when daddy hit the referee?
 -Homer Simpson

Can a eunuch argue that you should not have sex? What about a priest?
Then can an unarmed person argue about gun control?
 -John Steinbeck

I have as little respect, Sir, for a fighting nation as I have for a fighting individual.
 -John Stuart Mill
                                                                        
After god had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
the vampire, He had some awful substance left
with which he made the SCAB....
A SCAB is a two-legged animal with a
cork-screw soul, a water logged
brain, a combination backbone of jelly
& glue....
When a SCAB comes down the street, men turn
their backs, angels weep in heaven, & the Devil
shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out....
Judas Iscariot was a gentleman compared to
a SCAB. For betraying his master, he had
character enough to hang himself.
A SCAB has not.
 —Jack London 

No, no, no, Lisa. If adults don't like their jobs, they don't go on strike. 
They just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way.
 -Homer Simpson

Satire, if it is to do any good and not cause immeasurable harm, 
must be firmly based on a consistent ethical view of life.
 —Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

And reason... teaches all mankind who will but consult it, 
that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm 
another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.
 -John Locke

Gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for 
the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, 
been very near it, insomuch that if a man calls himself a philosopher, 
and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; 
and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it is an unanswerable 
objection (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about him 
in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.
 -Thomas de Quincey, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

   MILTON! I think thy spirit hath passed away
   From these white cliffs, and high-embattled towers;
   This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours
   Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey,
   And the age changed unto a mimic play
   Wherein we waste our else too-crowded hours:
   For all our pomp and pageantry and powers
   We are but fit to delve the common clay,
   Seeing this little isle on which we stand,
   This England, this sea-lion of the sea,
   By ignorant demagogues is held in fee,
   Who love her not: Dear God! is this the land
   Which bare a triple empire in her hand
   When Cromwell spake the word Democracy!
 —Oscar Wilde

Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy,
which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. In those
transparent moments we know other people's joys and sorrows, and we care about
their concerns as if they were our own.
 -Fritz Williams

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them.
But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams
than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for. 
 -Paulo Coelho

I have no country to fight for: my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
 -Eugene V. Debs

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today,
not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not
satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my
fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under
the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself.
That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of
yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago
the question was asked; "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question has never
yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.
Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is
inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself.
What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and
gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings
starving to death. 
 -Eugene V. Debs, 1908

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. 
No one can eliminate prejudices- just recognize them.
 -Edward R. Murrow, 1908-1965

Uncle Sam needs to concentrate on what's really important:
anti-tobacco programs, pro-tobacco programs, killing wild donkeys, and Israel.
 -OmniTouch Corporation spokeswoman, speaking to Lisa Simpson

The first panacea for a misguided nation is inflation of the currency; 
the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. 
But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
 -Ernest Hemingway

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

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
 -Ernest Hemingway

Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals.
 -Ammon Hennacy

O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!...
& if we live, we live to tread on kings.
 -Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I     

[In 1975] Dylan also said he believed in God. That's why I wrote 'Lay Down Yr 
Mountain'. Dylan said that where he was, 'on top of the Mountain,' he had a choice 
whether to stay, or to come down. He said, God told him, 'All right, you've been on 
the Mountain, I'm busy, go down, you're on your own. Check in later'. And then Dylan 
said, 'Anybody that's busy making elephants and putting camels through needles' eyes 
is too busy to answer my questions, so I came down the mountain'.
 -Allen Ginsberg

If the bible is universally diffused in Hindustan, what must be the astonishment 
of the natives to find that we are forbidden to rob, murder and steal; we who in 
fifty years, have extended our empire... over the whole peninsula ... and 
exemplified in our public conduct every crime of which human nature is capable.  
What matchless impudence to follow up such practice with such precepts! If we have 
common prudence, let us keep the gospel at home, and tell them that Machiavelli is 
our prophet, and the god of the Manicheans our god.
 -The Reverend Sydney Smith, 1771-1845

I bring you the stately matron called CHRISTENDOM
-returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiaochow,
Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines; with her soul full of meanness,
her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies.  
Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.       
Give her the glass; it may from error free her
When she shall see herself as others see her.
 -Mark Twain, December 31, 1900

Beware of the leader who bangs of war in order to whip the citizenry into a 
patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-sided sword. It makes the 
blood so bold, like it constricts the intellect. And if the striking of the war 
drum reached a fiebrige height and the blood is cooking and hating, and the 
intellect is dismissed, the leader doesn't need to reject the citizens' rights. 
The citizens, caught by anxiety and blinded through patriotism, will subordinate 
all their rights to the leader and this even with happy courage. Why do I know that? 
I know it because this is what I did. And I am Gajus Julius Caesar.
 -Gaius Julius Caesar

It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking. 
 -Gaius Julius Caesar

The more one thinks about Latin the easier it is to see why the Roman Empire fell.
 -Lord Derby

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: 
a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
 -Aristophanes 

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
 -Aristotle

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. 
Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom 
they consider god-fearing and pious.
 -Aristotle 

Anyone can become angry- that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, 
to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, 
and in the right way- that is not easy.
 -Aristotle

There are some who, because the point is the limit and extreme of the line,
the line of the plane, and the plane of the solid, think there must be 
real things of this sort. We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.
 -Aristotle

Thinking is sometimes injurious to health.
 -Aristotle

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered 
by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
 -Plato

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that 
you end up being governed by your inferiors.
 -Plato

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
 -Plato            

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; 
the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
 -Plato  

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, 
while bad people will find a way around the laws.
 -Plato
                                                                        
You are a citizen of a great and powerful nation. Are you ashamed that you give 
so much time to the pursuit of money, and reputation, and honors, and care so 
little for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul?
 -Socrates

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that
you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
 -Socrates

It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, 
or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.
 -Socrates

My advice to you is to get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy: 
if not, you'll become a philosopher.
 -Socrates 

The hottest love has the coldest end.
 -Socrates

There is nothing permanent except change.
 -Heraclitus

War is the father and king of all- some he has made gods, and some men;    
some slaves and some free.
 -Heraclitus

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; 
and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace. 
 -Tacitus

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage
and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. 
What is it? Distrust. 
 -Demosthenes  

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, 
that he also believes to be true.
 -Demosthenes

Soldier, stand away from my diagram.
 -Archimedes, supposedly spoken to the Roman soldier who killed him
                                                                        
[Archimedes] being perpetually charmed by his familiar siren, that is, by his geometry,
he neglected to eat and drink and took no care of his person; that he was often carried 
by force to the baths, and when there he would trace geometrical figures in the ashes of
the fire, and with his finger draws lines upon his body when it was anointed with oil, 
being in a state of great ecstasy and divinely possessed by his science.
 -Plutarch

When you think about future fame, you imagine that you assure yourselves a kind of 
immortality. But, if you consider the infinite extent of eternity, what satisfaction 
can you have about the power of your name to endure? If you compare the duration of 
a moment with that of ten thousand years, there is a certain proportion between them, 
however small, since each is limited. But ten thousand years, however many times you
multiply it, cannot even be compared to eternity. Finite things can be compared, but 
no comparison is possible between the infinite and the finite. And so, however long 
a time fame may last, it must seem not merely brief but nothing at all if it is 
compared to eternity.
 -Boethius, 524 AD

Man is the measure of all things.
 -Protagoras
                                                                        
Words are the physicians of a mind diseased. 
 -Aeschylus

I know how men in exile feed on dreams. 
 -Aeschylus

War is a pawnbroker- not of your treasures but of the lives of your men. Not of gold 
but of corpses. Give your man to the war-god and you get ashes. Your hero's exact worth-
in the coinage of war.
 -Aeschylus

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
 -Epicurus

There is a great difference between not wanting to do evil and not knowing how to.
 -Seneca

I want to do what is right but I do not. I do instead the very thing I hate.
 -Saint Paul

Jehovah the bearded & angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness;
after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.
 -Pablo LaFaurge's "The Right to be Lazy & Other Studies"- Karl Marx's Cuban son-in-law,
1907

When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. 
When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist. 
 -Brazillian Archbishop Helder Camara

Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is
ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an
ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said,
"War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away." 
So much for the measures nature takes to lead the human race, considered as 
a class of animals, to her own end.
 -Immanuel Kant 

Many things we affirm and deny, because the nature of words allows us to do so, 
though the nature of things does not. While we remain unaware of this fact, 
we may easily mistake falsehood for truth.
 -Baruch Spinoza

I think I think; therefore I think I am.
 -Ambrose Bierce

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, 
And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
 -Ali ibn-Abi-Talib, 602-661 AD

Bad times, hard times- this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, 
and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
 -Saint Augustine

None save great men have been the authors of great heresies.
 -Saint Augustine

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.
 -Saint Augustine

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
 -Saint Augustine

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.
 -Marcus Aurelius

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
 -Marcus Aurelius

I know of no people, however civilized, however undeveloped, which does not 
recognize the existence of omens and also of some individuals capable of 
understanding these signs and making predictions based on them.
 -Cicero

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
 -Cicero

So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, 
even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. 
The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage 
is pernicious.
 -Cicero

A man who has in mind an apparent advantage and promptly proceeds to dissociate
this from the question of what is right shows himself to be mistaken and immoral. 
Such a standpoint is the parent of assassinations, poisonings, forged wills, thefts, 
malversations of public money, and the ruinous exploitation of provincials and Roman 
citizens alike. Another result is passionate desire— desire for excessive wealth, 
for unendurable tyranny, and ultimately for the despotic seizure of free states. 
These desires are the most horrible and repulsive things imaginable. The perverted 
intelligences of men who are animated by such feelings are competent to understand 
the material rewards, but not the penalties. I do not mean penalties established by law, 
for these they often escape. I mean the most terrible of all punishments: their own 
degradation.
 -Cicero

If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant 
stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect 
for humanity.
 -Cicero
                                                                        
There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.
 -Cicero

The good of the people is the chief law.
 -Cicero

Man who stand on hill with mouth open will wait long time for roast duck to drop in.
 -Confucius

When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. 
When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.
 -Confucius

We can avoid making choices by doing nothing, but even that is a decision.
 -Confucius

We take greater pains to persuade others that we are happy 
than in endeavoring to think so ourselves.
 -Confucius

A child must be regarded with respect! How do you know his future 
will not be equal to our present?
 -Confucius

To lead uninstructed people to war is to throw them away.
 -Confucius

I dislike death, but there are things I dislike more than death.
Therefore there are times when I will not avoid danger. Death before dishonor.
 -Mencius

Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless. 
 -Euripides
                                                                        
Bless us the day, but doubly bless us the night.
 -Euripides

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
 -Sophocles

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our
tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out.
That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives,
and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for
what we are worshipping we are becoming. 
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
 -Anatole France

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor 
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.                 
 -Anatole France

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
 -Robert Frost

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois. 
 -Jean Renard, 1889

In a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply, but protected 
from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, 
industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible,
unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain poor 
are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, ... the idle, the reckless, 
the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the
well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, 
the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and 
godly person.  
 -John Ruskin, Cornhill Magazine, 1860

People like aristocrats, goldsmiths, or money-lenders, who either do no work at all, 
or do work that's really not essential, are rewarded for their laziness or their 
unnecessary activities by a splendid life of luxury. But labourers, coachmen, 
carpenters, and farmhands, who never stop working like cart-horses, at jobs 
so essential that, if they did stop working, they'd bring any country to a 
standstill within twelve months- what happens to them? They get so little 
to eat, and have such a wretched time, that they'd be almost better off if 
they were the cart-horses. Then at least they wouldn't work quite such 
long hours, their food wouldn't be very much worse, they'd enjoy it more, 
and they'd have no fears for the future.
 -Thomas More, Utopia

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, 
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors. 
 -Bertrand Russell

War does not determine who is right- only who is left.
 -Bertrand Russell

Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.
 -Albert Camus

Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreaks solely by 
long contemplation of a landscape... The universal order cannot be 
built from above,in other words through an idea; but rather from below,
in other words through the common basis which... If everything can be   
reduced to man and to history, I wonder where is the place: of nature-  
of love- of music- of art. 
 -Albert Camus   

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, 
see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.
 -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Music even in the most awful places must not offend the ear, but give pleasure, 
that is music must always remain music.
 -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a letter to his father, September 26, 1781

Sentimentality- that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.    
 -Graham Greene

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
 -Anne Frank

I seem to live in a kaleidoscope- the materials are the same yet every morning
when I get up they have formed themselves into a wholly new figure overnight.
 -Mark Twain

I am the joy of the desiring flesh
The days of my living                          
are summer days
The nights of my glory
outshine the blazing wavecaps of the heavens
at their floodtide                          
Mine is the confident hand shaping this world.
 -Kenneth Patchen

Not long before I worked with a poet named Patchen. He was wearing 
his scarlet jacket & sitting on a stool on a little stage in a theatre 
you walk upstairs to down on 14th street. We improvised behind him while 
he read his poems... "I believe in truth," he said, "I believe that every 
good thought I have, all men shall have. I believe that the perfect shape 
of everything has been prepared."
 -Charles Mingus

Genius is childhood recaptured. 
 -Charles Baudelaire

Childhood is life under a dictatorship.
 -Graham Greene

In the little world in which children have their existence,
whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived 
and so finely felt, as injustice.
 -Charles Dickens

Our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves.
 -Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I regret living in a world where sorcerers and soothsayers must live in
hiding, and where in any case there are so few genuine soothsayers . . .
as far as I'm concerned, I find it astounding that fortune-tellers, tarot-readers,
wizards, sorcerers, necromancers and other REINCARNATED ONES have for so
long been relegated to the role of mere characters in fables and novels,
and that, through one of the most superficial aspects of modern thinking,
naivete is defined as having faith in charlatans. I believe whole-heartedly
in charlatans, bonesetters, visionaries, sorcerers and chiromancers, because
all these things have being, because, for me, there are no limits, no fixed
form to appearances.
 -Antonin Artaud, 1927

Repeated meditations first led me to suspect, (and a more intimate analysis of the
human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture 
into full conviction,) that fancy [fantasy] and imagination were two distinct and widely 
different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names 
with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power.
 -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what
the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be
replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another
that states that this has already happened.
 -Douglas Adams

Even if someone offered me sixteen rixdollars I would not take it upon myself
to explain the enigma of life. And why should I? If life is a riddle, the one 
who made it up will probably show up in the end and provide the solution,
once he feels there's no longer any great interest in guessing.
 -Soren Kierkegaard

No, I won't leave the world- I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the 
profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't 
I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means 
when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum-
don't you think I may end up there?
 -Soren Kierkegaard

There is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad.
You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later. 
 -Douglas Adams

I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five years,
and I'm proud to say that I've finally won out over it.
 -Elwood Dowd

What do I know of a man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
 -Samuel Beckett

Our hearts, go forth to battle- be Thou near them!
With them- in spirit- we also go forth from the sweet peace
of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, 
help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; 
help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their 
patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the  
shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste 
their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring 
the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; 
help us to turn them out roofless with their little children  
to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in 
rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer 
and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, 
imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it- for our 
sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, 
protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water 
their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood 
of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him 
Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge 
and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with 
humble and contrite hearts.                        
Amen.  
 -Excerpt from The War Prayer, by Mark Twain   
                                   
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
                                                                        
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
 -Lt. Col. John McCrae, M.D.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless Things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away!
 -Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley

I hate a song that makes you think that you are no good... I am out to fight 
those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out 
to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it’s 
hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it’s   
run you down, and rolled over you, no matter what colour, what size you are,   
how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that will make you take pride        
in yourself and your work.
 -Woody Guthrie

And so people walk up to me and ask, "Do you really believe in what your songs are saying?"
And I have to smile and reply, "Hell, no, but the money's good."
For what else could I say to such a question.
 -Phil Ochs, a native of El Paso, Texas, 1965

     As I went walking, I
             saw a sign there
             On the sign it said
             NO TRESPASSING
             But on the other
             side it didn't say
             nothing
             That side was made
             for you & me!
 -Woody Guthrie, a verse of This Land Is Our Land that is not sung much

America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.
 -A seldom heard stanza of the original version of 'America the Beautiful'- 
not by Guthrie, I don't know who it's by

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over 
the world at the present moment: The millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable 
days - quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish 
were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a 
dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products
of it all will be mainly evil- historically considered. But the historic version is, 
of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, 
apart from their 'causes' and 'effects'... All we do know, and that to a large 
extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual 
success - in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. 
 -J.R.R. Tolkien to his son Christopher, April 10, 1944

Frankly, as a child, I was attracted to the military. Their uniforms looked so smart 
and beautiful. But that is exactly how the seduction begins. Children start playing 
games that will one day lead them into trouble. There are plenty of exciting games 
to play and costumes to wear other than those based on the killing of human beings. 
Again, if we as adults were not so fascinated by war, we would clearly see that to 
allow our children to become habituated to war games is extremely unfortunate. 
Some former soldiers have told me that when they shot their first person they felt 
uncomfortable, but as they continued to kill it began to feel quite normal. In time, 
we can get used to anything. It is not only during times of war that military 
establishments are destructive. By their very design, they are the single greatest
violators of human rights, and it is the soldiers themselves who suffer most 
consistently from their abuse. After the officers in charge have given beautiful 
explanations about the importance of the army, its discipline, and the need to 
conquer the enemy, the rights of the great mass of soldiers are almost entirely 
taken away. They are then compelled to forfeit their individual will, and, in the end, 
to sacrifice their lives. Moreover, once an army has  become a powerful force, there 
is every risk that it will destroy the happiness of its own country. There are people 
with destructive intentions in every society, and the temptation to gain command over 
an organization capable of fulfilling their desires can become overwhelming. But no 
matter how malevolent or evil are the many murderous dictators who currently oppress 
their nations and cause international problems, it is obvious that they cannot harm 
others or destroy countless human lives if they don't have a military organization 
accepted and condoned by society. As long as there are powerful armies, there will 
always be the danger of dictatorship. If we really believe dictatorship to be a 
despicable and destructive form of government, then we must recognize that the 
existence of a powerful military establishment is one of its main causes.
 -the Dalai Lama

Once upon a time, there was a country that was very small and, on the whole,
very good. Its citizens were proud and independent and self-reliant and generally 
prosperous. They believed in freedom and justice and equality. But above all, 
they had faith. They had faith in their religion, their leaders, their country
and themselves. 
And, of course, they were ambitious. Being proud of their country, they wanted 
to make it bigger. First, they conquered the savage tribes that hemmed them in.
Then they fought innumerable wars on land and sea with foreign powers to the east 
and west and south. They won almost all the battles they fought and triumphed in
almost all of their wars.        
It took many generations, but at last the good little country was the richest, 
mightiest nation in the whole wide world- admired, respected, envied and feared by
one and all. 
"We must remain the mightiest nation," said its leaders, "so that we can insure 
universal peace and make everyone everyone as prosperous and decent and civilized     
as we are."   
At first, the mightiest nation was as good as its word. It constructed highways 
and hygienic facilities all over the world. And for a while, it even kept the peace. 
But being the mightiest nation meant that its leader was the mightiest man in the world. 
And, naturally, he acted like it.    
He surrounded himself with a palace guard of men chosen solely for their personal 
loyalty. He usurped the powers of the Senate, sighing treaties, waging wars and 
spending public funds as he saw fit. 
When little countries far away rebelled, he sent troops without so much as 
a by-your-leave. And the mightiest nation became engaged in a series of long, 
costly, inconclusive campaigns in faraway lands. Many young men refused to fight 
for their country, and in some places, the mightiest nation employed foreign 
mercenaries to do battle for its causes. And because it was the mightiest nation, 
it worshiped wealth and the things wealth bought. But the rich grew richer and the 
poor grew poorer through unfair tax laws. In the capitol, one in five were idle and 
on welfare. When the poor grumbled, they were entertained by highly paid athletes 
and the firing of expensive rockets which often fizzled. Even so, the poor sometimes 
rioted and looted and burned in their frustrated rage. Many citizens lost faith in 
their old religion and turned to Oriental mysticism. And the young, wearing long hair 
and sandals, became Jesus freaks. Bare-breasted dancers, lewd shows and sex orgies 
were increasingly common. And the currency was debased again and again to meet the 
mounting debts.  
Worst of all, the citizens came to learn their leaders were corrupt- that the    
respected palace guard was selling favors to the rich and sending spies among    
the people, creating fear and distrust.       
So it was that the people lost faith. They lost faith in their leaders, their 
currency, their rockets, their postal system, their armies, their religion, 
their country and, eventually, themselves. 
And thus, in 476 A.D., Rome fell to the barbarians, and the Dark Ages settled 
over Western civilization. 
 -The Mightiest Nation, by Art Hoppe, the San Francisco Chronicle, early 1970s

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
 —Mark Twain

Quotation --- yes, but how differently persons quote! I am as much informed of your 
genius by what you select, as by what you originate. I read the quotation with your 
eyes, & find a new & fervent sense... For good quoting, then, there must be originality 
in the quoter --- bent, bias, delight in the truth, & only valuing the author in the 
measure of his agreement with the truth which we see, & which he had the luck to see 
first. And originality, what is that? It is being; being somebody, being yourself, 
& reporting accurately what you see & are. If another's words describe your fact, 
use them as freely as you use the language & the alphabet, whose use does not impair 
your originality. Neither will another's sentiment or distinction impugn your 
sufficiency. Yet in proportion to your reality of life & perception, will be your 
difficulty of finding yourself expressed in others' words or deeds.
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson

We naturalists deem that the honor of invention is of great, even of incomparable, 
preference to the honor of quotation. Like those who steal horses, I paint their manes 
and tails, and sometimes I put out an eye; if their first master used them at an ambling 
pace, I make them trot, and use them as beasts of burden if they had served for riding.
 -Michel de Montaigne

Knowing others is wisdom; 
Knowing the self is enlightenment.                
Mastering others requires force;    
Mastering the self needs strength.
 -Tao Te Ching    

Overcome your uncertainties and free yourself from dwelling on sorrow. 
If you delight in existence, you will become a guide to those who need you, 
revealing the path to many. 
 -Sutta Nipata 

Whoever saves one life will in time save humanity. 
 -the Talmud

It is better to be divided by truth than united with error.
 -2 Corinthians 10:5

Seek peace and pursue it.
 -Psalms 34:45

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more.
 -Isaiah 2:4

Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are 
mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
 -Hebrews 13:3

Do not exploit the foreigners who live in your land. They should be 
treated like everyone else, and you must love them as you love yourself. 
Remember that you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.
 -Leviticus 19:33-34

Never take advantage of poor laborers, whether fellow Israelites or foreigners 
living in your towns.
 -Deuteronomy 24:14, 

True justice must be given to foreigners living among you and to orphans, 
and you must never accept a widow's garment in pledge of her debt.
 -Deuteronomy 24:17

This is what the Lord says: Be fair-minded and just. Do what is right!
Help those who have been robbed; rescue them from their oppressors. 
Quit your evil deeds! Do not mistreat foreigners, orphans, and widows. 
Stop murdering the innocent!
 -Jeremiah 22:3

For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. 
I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home.
 -Matthew 25:35

Be joyful always; pray continually.
 -Thessalonians 16:18

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: "Help your brother, whether he is an 
oppressor or he is oppressed." The people asked: "...It is right to help him if he is 
oppressed, but how should we help him if he is an oppressor?" The Prophet replied: 
"By preventing him from oppressing others."
 -Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 3, Hadith 624

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) told his companions: "I am not afraid that 
you will be poor, but I fear that worldly wealth will be bestowed upon you as it was 
bestowed upon those before you. (Then) you will compete amongst yourselves for it, 
as they competed for it, and it will destroy you as it did them."
 -Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 5, Hadith 351

Oh you who believe, stand up firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even if 
it be against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against 
rich or poor; for God can best protect both. Do not follow any passion, lest you 
not be just. And if you distort or decline to do justice, verily God is 
well-acquainted with all that you do.
 -Quran 4:135

May all rise up,
May all be called,
May no one be left behind the others.
 -Popol Vuh        

Believe nothing even if I have said it unless it agrees with your reason and common sense.
 -the Buddha

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma 
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it 
had an underlying truth.
 -Umberto Eco

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. 
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us. To study histoy means 
submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. 
It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.
 -Herman Hesse

Anything can be said about world history, anything that might occur to the most distraught
imagination. There is only thing that cannot be said about it- that it is sensible. 
Why, the very word will stick in your throat.
 -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought 
about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
 -Ambrose Bierce

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.
 -Mark Twain

				     A history of the world