Quotes Du Jour

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:10:31 PST

“I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.”
- Max Lerner (1902-1992) American political columnist, educator: Entry in "Who's Who in America," 1992.

“Standing at his appointed place, at the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.”
- Paul Klee (1879-1940), Swiss painter: "On Modern Art," 1924.

“The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.”
- Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) English chemist.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:47:14 PST

“The City is of Night; perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning’s fragrant breath
After dewy dawning’s cold grey air…

The City is of Night; but not of Sleep;
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
A night seems termless hell.”
- James Thomson (1834 – 1882), Scottish poet and dramatist: “The City of Dreadful Night”, 1874.

“When civilization falls in its grave, and technology throws on the dirt, you realized the finest things in life are the ones that can never be hurt.”

- Bob Mould (b. 1960), American musician, songwriter and singer: ‘Crystal’ (song) on the album “Candy Apple Grey” recorded by Hüsker Dü, 1986.

“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 – 1935), American judge and jurist: attributed.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:32:56 PST

“It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays a heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.”

- Muriel Spark (1918 - 2006), Scottish writer: “Territorial Rights”, 1979.

“Capitalism, it is said, is a system wherein man exploits man. And communism – is vice versa.”

- Daniel Bell (b. 1919), American sociologist: “The End of Ideology”, 1960.

“A dream too tired to come true, left a rebel without a clue, won’t you tell me what I should do?”

- Paul Westerberg (b. 1960), American singer-songwriter: ‘I’ll Be You’ (song) on the album “Don’t Tell A Soul”, recorded by The Replacements, 1989.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:22:14 PST

“Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.”
- James Madison (1751 – 1836), 4th American President. “The Federalist”, No. 10, 1787.

"Privacy is one of those things, like water and air (and electricity in California), that you don't think about too much until it's gone. But once you lose it or it's in short supply, you realize just how important it is."
- Carlton Vogt (b. 19xx): IT columnist and ethicist: Ethics Matters, March 28, 2001

“God changes not what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves.”
- The Koran, 13:11.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:57:46 PST

“When you meet African Americans, don’t laugh nervously at everything they say. Believe it or not, all black people are not Richard Pryor. Some of them have horrible senses of humor and are just making normal conversation with you.”
- Dennis Miller (b. 1953), American standup comedian, actor and talk show host: ‘White People’ from "Ranting Again", 1998.

“We find it hard to believe that other people' s thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.”
- James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936), American historian: In "Quotations to Cheer You Up When the World is Getting You Down," by Allen Klein, 1991.

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people… and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”
- John Adams (1735 – 1826), 2nd American President and Federalist statesman: “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law”, 1765.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:41:56 PST

“Conquer thyself, till thou has done this, thou art but a slave; for it is almost as well to be subjected to another's appetite as to thine own.”
- Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 1890), British consul, explorer, translator, writer, poet, Orientalist and swordsman.

“The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 – 1935), American judge and jurist: Court opinion Schenk v. United States, March 13, 1919.

“The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.”
- Don DeLillo (b. 1926), American author: Frank Vásquez in “Libra”, 1988.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:45:19 PST

“A virus is only doing its job.”
- David Cronenberg (b. 1943), Canadian film director: “Sunday Telegraph”, 1992.

“Whoever does not love wine, women and song, remains a fool his whole life long.”
- Martin Luther (1483 – 1546), German clergyman and scholar: attributed.

"Mainstream culture eats its young to gain its strength, like a cannibal warrior, and the intent of the fringe becomes the tool of the mainstream."
- Warren Ellis (b. 1968), British author: in an E-mail. (Bad Signal)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 19:43:37 PST

“Why is there invariably something comic about intellectuals when they meet together in crowds.”
- Max Frisch (1911 –1991), Swiss novelist and playwright: “Diary”, 1948.

“The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s own clean linen in public.”
- Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900), Irish playwright, poet and wit: “The Importance of Being Earnest”, 1895.

“One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.”
- Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922), French writer and critic: “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs”, 1918.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:39:40 PST

“Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.”
- Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), English novelist, painter and musician: ‘Thought and Word’ in “Samuel Butler’s Notebooks”, 1951.

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… you may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.”
- Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931), Syrian mystical writer, poet and artist: ‘Of Children’ in “The Prophet”, 1920.

“The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.”
- Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 AD), Roman Emperor and philosopher: “Meditations”

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:12:01 PST

“Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be reborn.”
- Aneurin Bevan (1867 - 1960), British Labor politician: quoted in Michael Foot, “A B”, Vol. 1,

“I have often thought about death, and I find it the least of all evils.”
- Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626), English philosopher, lawyer, essayist and statesman: “An Essay On Death”,

“It’s easy to be brilliant if you are not bothered about being right.”
- Denis Healy (b. 1917), British Labor politician: “The Time of My Life”,

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:47:59 PST

“He could not die when the trees were green,
For he loved the time too well.”
- John Clare (1793 – 1864), English poet: “The Dying Child.”, 1865.

“And closing the door with the delicate caution of one brushing flies off a sleeping Venus, he passed out of my life.”
- P. G. Wodehouse (1881 – 1975), English comic novelist: ‘Jeeves and the Old School Chum’, from “Very Good, Jeeves!”, 1930.

“For one night or the other night,
Will come the Gardener in white,
And gathered flowers are dead.”
- James Elroy Flecker (1884 – 1915), English poet: “Hassan”, 1922.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 19:10:59 PST

“Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.”
- Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731), English novelist and journalist: “The True-Born Englishman”, 1701.

“Universal suffrage almost inevitably leads to government by mass bribery, an auction of the worldly goods of the unrepresented minority.”
- W. R. Inge (1860 - 1954), English writer, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London: “The End of an Age”, 1949.

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940), American novelist: “Notebooks”

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 20:54:03 PST

“Play hard, respect the game and have fun.”
- Kirby Puckett (1960 – 2006), American baseball player: his keys to his success in playing baseball, often referred to as “The Gospel According to Puckett.”

“Strive not my soul, for an immortal life, but make the most of what is possible.”
- Pindar (518 – 438 BC), Greek lyric poet: “Pythian Odes”

“Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is.”
- Will Rogers (1879 – 1935), American humorist, actor, rancher, writer and wit: in Grove, “The Will Rogers Book”, 1961.

“Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through.”
- Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944), American writer and poet: “Sudden Death”, 1983.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 11:51:59 PDT

“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
- Georges Bernanos (1888 – 1948), French novelist, political writer: M. Olivier, in “The Diary of a Country Priest”, 1936.

“To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945) German clergyman and theologian: “Ethics as Formation”, 1955.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 14:05:53 PDT

“Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?”
- Mikhail Bulgakov, (1891 – 1940), Soviet novelist and playwright: “The White Guard”, 1973.

“Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.”
- Martin Luther (1483 - 1546), German priest and scholar.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:47:10 PDT

“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908), American economist: ‘The United States’, published in “New York”, November 15, 1971, reprinted in “A View from the Stands”, 1986.

“Men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into ‘the masses’. And where is David who can slay this giant?”
- Lillian Smith (1897 – 1966), American author: prologue to “The Journey”, 1954.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 18:44:50 PDT

“Great men of action… never mind on occasion being ridiculous; in a sense it is part of their job, and at time they all are. A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk.”
- Oswald Mosley (1896 – 1980), British fascist leader: “My Life”, 1968.

“The face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need.”
- William Burroughs (1917 – 1997), American author: ‘Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness’, published in “The Evergreen Review” (New York), Jan/Feb 1960, reprinted as introduction to “The Naked Lunch”, 1962.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 18:30:22 PDT

“The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.”
- Aharon Appelfeld (b. 1932), Israeli novelist: in the “International Herald Tribune” (Paris), August 19, 1989.

“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.”
- Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 – 1961), Swedish statesman and secretary-general of U.N.: note written 1950, published in “Markings”, 1963.

“To dies is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”
- Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980), American psychologist: “Man for Himself”, 1947.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 19:56:54 PDT

“The (post) structuralist temper requires too great a depersonalization of the writing/speaking subject. Writing becomes plagiarism; speaking becomes quoting. Meanwhile, we do write, we do speak.”
- Ihab Hassan (b. 1925), American critic: “The Re-Vision of Literature’, published in “New Literary History”, autumn 1976, reprinted in “The Right Promethean Fire”, 1980.

“The question now is: Can we understand our stupidity? This is a test of intellect, not of character.”
- John King Fairbank (1907 – 1991), American historian and educator: quoted in “The Observer” (London), May 4, 1975.

“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second guessing in the “New York Review of Books.”
- John Updike (b. 1932), American author and critic: “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, 1989.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 19:37:33 PDT

“Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.”
- Albert Camus (1913 – 1960), French-Algerian philosopher and author: “The Rebel”, 1950, translated 1953.

“Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.”
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), German philosopher, critic and poet: “The Gay Science”, 1887.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 20:23:38 PDT

“Outside the streets on fire in a real death waltz,
between flesh and what’s fantasy and the poets down here
don’t writer nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but wind up wounded, not even dead.
Tonight in Jungleland.”
- Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949), American songwriter and musician: ‘Jungleland’ (song), from the album “Born to Run”, 1975.

”No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.”
- Greil Marcus (b. 1945), American rock journalist: ‘Robert Johnson’ in “Mystery Train”, 1976.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:19:02 PDT

“There is master-morality and slave-morality.”
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), German philosopher, critic and poet: “Beyond Good and Evil”, 1886.

“There’re two people in the world who are not likeable: a master and a slave.”
- Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943), American poet: in conversation with James Baldwin, London, November 4, 1971, published in “A Dialogue”, 1973.

“At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.”
- James Baldwin (1924 – 1987), American author: ‘Color’, first published in “Esquire” (New York), December 1962, reprinted in “The Price of the Ticket”, 1985.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:01:27 PDT

“There is nothing that a man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.”
- Elias Canetti (1905 – 1994), Austrian novelist and philosopher: opening lines of “Crowds and Power”, 1960, translated 1962.

“If morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894), Scottish writer, poet and essayist: “Across the Plains”, 1892.

“Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with the Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.”
- Robert Bly (b. 1926), American poet and author: “Iron John”, 1990.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 06:54:06 PDT

“Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.”
- D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930), English writer, poet and critic: “Fantasia of the Unconscious”, 1922.

“They wouldn’t be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn’t be heroes if they weren’t miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.”
- Lester Bangs (1948 – 1982), American rock journalist: in “Creem” (London), March 1975, reprinted in “Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung”, 1987.

“The enemy of idealism is zealotry.”
- Neil Kinnock (b. 1942), British Labour politician: quoted in “The Observer” (London), December 27, 1987.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 20:23:58 PDT

“No morality can be founded in authority, even if the authority were divine.”
- A. J. Ayer (1910 – 1989), English philosopher: “Essay on Humanism”

“Noble values, in the end, are always overcome; history tells the story of their defeat over and over again.”
- Henry de Montherlant (1896 – 1972), novelist and essayist: “Le Maître de Santiago”, 1947.