This page was filled on November 29, 2004
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
"Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." - Arnold H. Glasow
"Nothing lasts forever - not even your troubles." - Arnold H. Glasow
"If I waited to be right before I spoke, I would be sending little cryptic messages on the Ouija board, complaints from the other side." - Audre Lorde
"No urban music lover has ever, to give one example, placed a gun to Robert Bork's head and forced him to buy a rap CD. Nevertheless, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Bork argues that no one should be allowed to buy rap CDs. 'Is censorship really as unthinkable as we all seem to assume?" Bork asks in a chapter titled 'The Case for Censorship.' 'I [suggest] that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer [including] the more degenerate lyrics of rap music.'
Personally, I never wanted to buy a rap CD until I read Bork's book, which is the strange and strangely predictable thing about censorship: It creates a demand for the very things the censors want to stamp out. Even if it were possible to scuttle the First Amendment (so much for original intent!) and ban rap music, the effort would fail. The Soviet Union, a police state with unlimited powers and spies in every workplace and apartment building, attempted to ban rock and roll music. It failed. It's hard to imagine how our government could enforce a ban on rap music in a country whose citizens own almost as many CD burners as they do guns. Not that I would put it past John Ashcroft. Social conservatives will sometimes argue that rap music or violent movies or drugs need to be banned to protect the weak and vulnerable from taking up a life of sinful indulgence. It would be easier to take these arguments more seriously if the same social conservatives weren't opposed to laws that protect the weak and vulnerable from unsafe workplaces, flammable children's pajamas, and arsenic in our drinking water." - Dan Savage, Skipping Towards Gomorrah
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men." - Alice Walker
"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." - Karl Rove (Bush's top advisor)
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." - Sir Winston Churchill
"If you love Jesus, work for justice. Anybody can honk." - bumper sticker
"In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression... I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony." - Elizabeth Wurtzel
"In California, 50 women protested the impending war with Iraq by lying on the ground naked and spelling out the word peace. Right idea, wrong president." - Jay Leno
"In a speech earlier today President Bush said if Iraq gets rid of Saddam Hussein, he will help the Iraqi people with food, medicine, supplies, housing, education ? anything that's needed. Isn't that amazing? He finally comes up with a domestic agenda ? and it's for Iraq. Maybe we could bring that here if it works out." ?Jay Leno
"To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else." - Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
"Don't smoke too much, drink too much, eat too much or work too much. We're all on the road to the grave -- but there's no need to be in the passing lane." - Robert Orben
"On a personal note, I would like to say that to the best of my knowledge spontaneous dancing is not in the top 10 list of great social ills of our time." - Derek Andrews, Sydney Morning Herald
"Make no judgments where you have no compassion." - Anne McCaffrey
"Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function." - John Pfeiffer
"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." - Aldous Huxley
"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind." - Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi
"There's a lot of people in the Middle East who are desirous to get into the Mitchell process. And -- but first things first. The -- these terrorist acts and, you know, the responses have got to end in order for us to get the framework -- the groundwork -- not framework, the groundwork to discuss a framework for peace, to lay the -- all right." - George W. Bush
"Democrats were quick to point out that President Bush's budget creates a 1 trillion dollar deficit. The White House quickly responded with 'Hey, look over there, it's Saddam Hussein.'" ?Craig Kilborn
"President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either." ?David Letterman
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society." - Mark Twain
"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers." - Daniel J. Boorstin
"You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein? Because he hates America, he loves mistresses and wears a beret. He is French, people." - Conan O'Brien
"Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes." - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
"Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use." - Wendell Johnson
"Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny." - Kin Hubbard
"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" - Henry David Thoreau
"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
"Die trying" - bumper sticker
"Children have more need of models than of critics." - Carolyn Coats
"An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's." - Will Rogers
"In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." - Iroquois Confederacy Maxim
"There's a lady who's sure,
All that glitters is gold.
And she's wearing something shiny from Kmart." - Shelby Carmen Rhonda
Mountain (stolen from Ruminations)
"Dance anyway." - Deanna Carter
"The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved." - Victor Hugo
"Education costs money, but then so does ignorance." - Sir Claus Moser
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky
"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it." - Henry David Thoreau
"The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any." - Katherin Whitehorn
"A nation which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything." - Napoleon Bonaparte
"You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first." - Michael D. Perry
"We take greater pains to persuade others that we are happy than in endeavoring to think so ourselves." - Confucius
"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'" - Quentin Crisp
"My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right." - Ashleigh Brilliant
"There's nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child." - Frank A. Clark
"The state of Texas executed its third prison inmate this week. This week, In fact, they don't even have a last meal anymore, now it's a buffet." - Jay Leno
"We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes." - Fred "Mr." Rogers
"I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not! But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am!" - Monty Python
"I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature." - Margaret Mead
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." - Mel Brooks
"Do not choose to be wrong for the sake of being different." - Lord Samuel
"The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this; decide what you want." - Ben Stein
"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's." - William Blake
"Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening." - Dorothy Sarnoff
"I slept like a log last night. I woke up in a fireplace." - Tommy Cooper
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson
"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals." - Immanuel Kant
"If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon." - George Aiken
"I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died." - Richard Diran
"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?" - Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." - W. Edward Deming
"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr
"New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy." - John Steinbeck
"As a sales representative for a Fortune 500 corporation, I take great pride in the satisfaction of my customers. I always go that extra mile to make sure they're happy and feel like they've gotten the best deal. That's why I never neglect to mention their option to Biggie-Size it." - Pam Pickard, Ruminations
"Whoever controls the media -- the images -- controls the culture." - Allen Ginsberg
"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes." - Edgard Varese
"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson
"To me, the real difficulty is that people don't recognize how much of their own need goes into their response to what they see. It's funny when people say things like, 'People can do what they want, I just don't think they should be out in the street looking that weird.' I think, 'Okay, when we ban men with toupees, then we can tell transsexuals to stay home. When we say, "No four-hundred-pound ladies in pleather miniskirts," then we can tell crossdressers to stay home.'" - Amy Bloom, Nerve.com
"I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman." - Arnold Schwarzenegger
"There is no lovelier way to be thankful for your sight than by giving a helping hand to someone in the dark." - Helen Keller
"I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them." - Phyllis Diller
"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined." - Thomas Szasz
"The Problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary. - James Nicoll
"As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints." - Charles Caleb Colton
"A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood." - Chinese Proverb
"If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?" - Douglas Noel Adams
"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books." - Thomas Carlyle
"Important principles may and must be inflexible." - Abraham Lincoln
"There it was, hidden in alphabetical order." - Rita Holt
"Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves." - Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
"If you're naturally kind, you attract a lot of people you don't like." - William Feather
"Never play peekaboo with a child on a long plane trip. There's no end to the game. Finally I grabbed him by the bib and said, 'Look, it's always gonna be me!'" - Rita Rudner
"Of course the US Constitution isn’t perfect; but it’s a lot better than what we have now." - Eric Sheppard
"I want to say it gently, but I want to say it firmly: There is a tendency for the world to say to America, 'The big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out,' and then to worry when America wants to sort them out." - Tony Blair
"True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess." - Louis Nizer
"Freud, living at a time when women were proving their heads were no different from men's, substituted the penis for the head as the organ of male superiority, an organ women could never prove they had." - Una Stannard, Mrs. Man
"You can't be teased effectively by someone who isn't paying attention to who you are." - Rachel Silverman
"I knew I'd been living in Berkeley too long when I saw a sign that said 'Free firewood' and my first thought was 'Who was Firewood and what did he do?'" - John Berger
"Years ago, fairy tales all began with Once upon a time... now we know they all begin with, If I am elected." - Carolyn Warner
"No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded." - Margaret Mead
"A courtyard common to all will be swept by none." - Chinese Proverb
"I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I do strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still going." - Lord Birkett
"I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and think, 'Well, that's not going to happen.'" - Rita Rudner
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"History is a better guide than good intentions." - Jeane Kirkpatrick
"Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks." - Phillips Brooks
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants." - Isaac Newton
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." - Hal Abelson
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