This page was filled on April 22, 2000

"Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world." - Thomas Carlyle

"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

"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." - Wilson Mizner

"The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour." - Japanese Proverb

"I believe that none of us ever fails at anything. Every time we create something we are successful at creation. However, we do make some poor choices about what we create." - Anonymous

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates." - Thomas Szasz

"Our attitude is the crayons that color our world." - Allen Klein

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you." - Joseph Joubert

"It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music." - Ursula K. Le Guin

"There are so many good reasons to not eat meat, it seems a shame that they're mostly subverted by crusaders such as Chrissie Hynde and Morrissey, whose biggest threat to carnivores is annoying us to death. That all the vegan blowhards have kept a pretty low profile since the latest E. Coli fiasco suggests nothing more than an inability to put one and one together publicly and jot the results down in a press release. This despite so many hot-button angles to be pushed: If AIDS is proof that God disapproves of homosexuality, where's Jerry Falwell when the bar-b-que goes bad? Indeed, between E. Coli, mad-cow syndrome, and the RBGH flap, you might get the idea that God moves not so much in mysterious ways as in bacterial ones." - E. L. Skinner, suck.com

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

"I've learned that the greater a person's sense of guilt, the greater his need to cast blame on others." - 46-year-old

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." - Sally Kempton

"It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit." - Noel Coward

"There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort and one of them says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know, and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly." - Annie Hall

"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it." - Joseph Joubert

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." -Voltaire

"It often takes a thousand words soft spoken every day, to bury just the three or four that we didn't mean to say." - Jana Poston

"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

"What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?" - George Carlin

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

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have." - Emile Chartier

"You might as well laugh at yourself once in a while - everyone else does." - Anonymous

"The heart of the fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart." - Benjamin Franklin

"To see what is right and not to do it is cowardice." - Confucius

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another." - Frank Zappa

"Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil." - Thomas Carlyle

"Like most intellectuals, he is immensely stupid." - Marquise de Merteuil

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome." - Isaac Asimov

"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I lost two weeks." - Joe E. Lewis

"Life's too short for chess." - Henry James Byron

"Because a fellow has failed once or twice, or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage - and that's the same thing." - George Lorimer

"At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone." - La Bruyere

"You will soon learn that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on your point of view." - Star Wars

"The path may not be left for an instant. If it could be left, it would not be the path." - Confucius

"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people wouldn't even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it." - Thomas Carlyle

"We've got to pause and ask ourselves : How much clean air do we need?" - Lee Iacocca

"Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else." - George Bernard Shaw

"If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes, are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair. Despair is for those who expect to live forever. I no longer do." - Erica Jong

"To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure. But risk must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, and is nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, live, or love. Chained by his addictions, he's a slave. He has forfeited his greatest trait, an that is his individual freedom. Only the person who risks is free." - Leo Buscaglia

"When anger rises, think of the consequences." - Confucius

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

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." - Marcus Aurelius

"Homer: And what does my little girl want?
Lisa: An absence of mood swings and some stability in my life.
Homer: Uh... How about a pony?
Lisa: Okay!" - The Simpsons

"I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen so often to me after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that I get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be." - Douglas Coupland, Life After God

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." - Aldous Huxley

"One is responsible for one's own life. Passivity provides no protection." - Madeleine Kunin

"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason." - Oscar Wilde

"Over the years, many executives have said to me with pride: 'Boy, I worked so hard last year that I didn't take any vacation.' I always feel like responding, "You dummy. You mean to tell me you can take responsibility for an eighty-million-dollar project and you can't plan two weeks out of the year to have some fun?" - Lee Iacocca

"There is a big difference between thinking: I'm in a relationship and something's wrong. Therefore something must be wrong with the relationship, and thinking: I'm in a relationship and we've got problems. This is evidence that you are different than me." - Wayne Dyer

"Man is free, but not if he does not believe it." - Giacamo Girlamo Cassanova de Seingalt

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

"Real communication happens when people feel safe." - Ken Blanchard

"Vanity made the revolution; liberty was only a pretext." - Napoleon

"She say she feels lost, sort of like the way she felt when she was younger.
I told her that everybody feels lost when they're young.
But she say there's a difference. She tells me that at least when she was young she felt lost in her own special way. Now she just feels lost like everyone else." - Douglas Coupland, Life After God

"TO THOSE WITHOUT PITY:

Cruel of heart, lay down my song,
Your reading eyes have done me wrong,
Not for you was the pen bitten,
And the mind wrung, and the song written." - Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with the wind." - Hamilton Wright Mable

"People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute." - Rebecca West

"You will not be discouraged if the world does not rush to you, demanding what you have...Neither will you quietly sit down to let the world wonder and then seek you; but you will be aggressive, you will carry your truths to people and cause them to see them so clearly that they must accept them." - Edith Kincaid Butler

"The tragedy in life does not lie in not reaching your goals, the tragedy lies in not having any goals to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to be unable to capture your ideals, but it is a disaster to have no ideals to capture." - Benjamin Mays

"People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent." - Bob Dylan

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks." - Anonymous

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." - Edward Abbey

"Randall: Look, do you want to be leader of this gang?
Strutter: No we agreed, no leader!
Randall: Right. So shut up and do as I say." - Time Bandits

"The radio stations all seemed to be talking about Jesus nonstop, and it seemed to be this crazy orgy of protection, with everyone projecting onto Jesus the antidotes to the things that had gone wrong in their lives. He is Love. He is Forgiveness. He is Compassion. He is a Wise Career Decision. He is a Child Who Loves Me.
I was feeling a sense of loss as I heard these people. I felt like Jesus was sex - or rather, I felt like I was from another world where sex did not exist and I arrived on Earth and everyone talked about how good sex felt, and showed me their pornography and built their lives around sex, and yet I was forever cut off from the true sexual experience. I did not deny that the existence of Jesus was real to these people - it was merely that I was cut off from their experience in a way that was never comfortable." - Douglas Coupland, Life After God

"If homosexuality is a disease, let's all call in queer to work. 'Hello, can't work today. Still queer.'" - Robin Taylor

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings." - C. Archie Danielson

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended." - Frederic Bastiat

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." - Ayn Rand

"I have never been contained except I made the prison." - Mary Evans

"The taxpayer -- that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination." - Ronald Reagan

"If you don't invest very much, then defeat doesn't hurt very much and winning is not very exciting." - Dick Vermeil

"We apologize for the error in last week's paper in which we stated that Mr. Arnold Dogbody was a defective in the police force. We meant, of course, that Mr. Dogbody is a detective in the police farce." - Correction Notice in the Ely Standard

"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion." - L. Ron Hubbard in 1949 (who founded the Church of Scientology in 1953)

"The truth is out there? Does anyone know the URL?" - Anonymous

"The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best." - Henry Van Dyke

"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering." - Buckminster Fuller

"God made man, and then he said 'I can do better than that' and made women." - Adela Roger St. John

"Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in a way that they have been told to." - Alan Keightley

"You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend." - Rich Jeni (on religious wars)

"You can always tell when someone's lying to you, because they're male..." - Caroline Rhea

"We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there." - Dana Gould

"I was walking down the street when this man hammering on his roof called me a paranoid little freak... In morse code." - Emo Phillips

"For refund, insert baby here." - Graffiti on condom machine

"I married beneath me. All women do." - Nancy Astor

"I think the reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself." - Rita Mae Brown

"We hate each other because we fear each other and we fear each other because we don't know each other" - Martin Luther King

"Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you to miserable in comfort." - Helen Gurley Brown

"Life is not holding a good hand; Life is playing a poor hand well." - Danish Proverb

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next." - Gilda Radner

"I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves." - Emo Philips

"You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much." - Tove Jansson

"We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same." - Carlos Castaneda

"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness." - James Thurber

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it... always." - Mahatma Gandhi

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." - Bertrand Russell

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." - William James

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays." - Oscar Wilde

"I don't hate people... I just feel better when they're not around." - Charles Bukowski

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares." - Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

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