Following are some quotes I've collected. There are multitudes of quotes on the net, but you may have missed these. Use your browser's 'find' feature to look for author or keywords on this page.
I have 2 groups of quotes. Some are quotes that I've posted in my cubicle, and some are more Christian in nature. I hope you find them profitable.
For more quotes and information, see alt.quotations FAQ, The Quotations Page, Dictionary of Quotations, Aphorisms Galore, Education Quotations, more education quotations, Yogi Berra quotes, some quotes on freedom, government, etc., LinkBank: Quotation links, EFF Quotes Collection, BilLee's Fabulous Quotes Pages, Bartlett's Quotations, Scientific Quotes, or use your favorite search engine to find more quotation collections.
When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption.
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Slump? I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hittin'.
This is like deja vu all over again.
If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.
I want to thank all those who made this night necessary.
It ain't over 'till it's over.
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Yogi was playing golf with three friends. They were playing best ball (i.e. after each player drives, they choose the best ball and each player plays from that spot) and after nine holes, they never chose Yogi's as the best ball.
Then one hole, Yogi hit what he thought was the best ball, but instead his friends chose a different one.
He was very upset and said, "If I were playing alone, I would hit mine."
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In an interview back in 1961. Yogi was asked to comment about Mickey Mantle and his switch hitting; "Oh that Mick, he's so Amphibious"!
"Bill Dickey is learning me his experience." - Yogi Berra in his rookie season.
"So I'm ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face."
Reporter: "How did you like school when you were growing up, Yogi?"
Yogi Berra: "Closed."
Ken Boswell: "I'm in a rut. I can't break myself of this habit.
I keep swinging up at the ball."
Yogi Berra: "Well, swing down."
Rube Walker: "Hey, Yogi, what time is it?"
Yogi Berra: "You mean now?"
"I think Little League is wonderful. It keeps the kids out of the house."
"A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore."
"Yeah, what paper you write for, Ernie?" - Yogi Berra after being introduced to Ernest Hemingway.
"If the people don't want to come out to the park, nobody's going to stop 'em."
"Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded."
"I'm a lucky guy, and I'm happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary." - Yogi Berra at a dinner in his honor.
"In baseball, you don't know nothing."
"The game's not over until it's over."
Interviewer: "I understand you had an audience with the Pope."
Yogi Berra: "No, but I saw him."
Interviewer: "Did you get to talk to him?"
Yogi Berra: "I sure did. We had a nice little chat."
Interviewer: "What did he say?"
Yogi Berra: "Ya know, he must read the papers a lot, because he said,
'Hello, Yogi.'"
Interviewer: "And what did you say?"
Yogi Berra: "I said, 'Hello, Pope.'"
Mary Lindsay: "You look nice and cool Yogi."
Yogi Berra: "You don't look so hot yourself."
Reporter: "What would you do if you found a million dollars?"
Yogi Berra: "If the guy was poor, I would give it back."
"Baseball is 90 percent mental; the other half is physical."
"Even the music was nice." - Yogi Berra (speaking of the opera "Tosca").
"It gets late early out there."
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra
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It is truly amazing. The net actually does contain the total collected knowledge of the universe, only not in alphabetical order.
plerman@aol.com
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"ENJOY YOUR MEAL"
New directive from America's microwave manufacturers
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Smith & Wesson: An early point & click interface.
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The Bill of Rights - Void where prohibited by law.
Howard L. Bloom
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The box said 'Requires Windows 95, or better' ... so I bought a Macintosh.
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Computers save time like kudzu prevents soil erosion.
Al Castanoli
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Waterworld (a movie) cost $175 million.
Mars Pathfinder mission budget (real life) was $150 million.
You make the call.
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...never equate ignorance and stupidity without due process.
Stan Kelly-Bootle, UNIX Review, Oct 1997, p.101
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It is impossible to foresee the consequences of being clever.
Christopher Strachey
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Good morning doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive.
first words of HAL 9000, as revised by Arthur C. Clarke
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We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Prof. Robert Silensky, California Univ.
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Strong typing is a good secretarial skill.
Unnamed Collins manager
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The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.
Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live
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The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert Humphrey
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The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: 'If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?'
Nathan Myhrvold (Microsoft Group VP) at ACM97 on planned obsolescence in the computer industry
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We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
Jason Kidd, upon his draft to the Dallas Mavericks
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Proven ability to track down and correct erors.
from a resume
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If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until the looting started.
student age 15
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Democracy is a beautiful thing, except for that part about letting just any old yokel vote.
student age 10
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For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese. Then the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock. That's what happens to cheese when you leave it out.
student age 6
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The only stupid question is the one that is never asked, except maybe "Don't you think it is about time you audited my return?" or "Isn't is morally wrong to give me a warning when, in fact, I was speeding?"
student age 15
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When a government makes it more attractive to ride in the wagon than pull it, those pulling get frustrated and discouraged, while the wagon load gets heavier.
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All TV programs are educational, it's just a matter of what they teach.
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Remember the Donner party. Shortcuts can be costly.
Michael L. Cook
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I'm proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is - I could be just as proud for half the money.
Arthur Godfrey
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I sure don't want to leave the impression that we've got all the answers. We stumble over ourselves all the time. We don't know beans, but we like it this way. Ignorance is bliss and we're on cloud nine.
L. Morgan
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In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
Geoffrey Cotterell
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Remember that believing a thing does not make it true, and denying it does not make it untrue. ... Nor will your believing certain things in any degree affect the facts.
William Fraser McDowell
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I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Donald E. Knuth
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Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; But knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato, c. 400 BC
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Spencer's General Theory of Optimism: "Working at Collins is fun."
Hepworth's First Corollary: "All work at Collins is fun; it's just a matter of Magnitude and Sign."
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It is commonly said that the Internet is unique in its ability to spread bad information to large numbers of people, but this is ridiculous, given that the Internet cannot begin to compete with CNN or the New York Times for this honour.
Phil Agre
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They were doing a full back shot of me in a swimsuit and I thought, Oh my God, I have to be so brave. See, every woman hates herself from behind.
model Cindy Crawford, on courage
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...but if more people confess to home haircutting, some politicians might worry that too many of us are missing out on clean, well-lit barber shops, with opportunities for socialization and the security of governmental regulation. That's our tendency - to complicate things. ...but if we can send a man to the moon, can't we as a society guarantee to every citizen the right to a professional haircut? Or, shouldn't we provide year-round schooling for every child? Shouldn't we program their activities so parents will be able to lead their own lives without concern that the kids will get into trouble when parents are away?
Marvin Olasky
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Some people say there's not enough generosity to take care of all needs; therefore, we need government. That proposition differs little from saying that if people do not give enough voluntarily, then government intimidation, threats, and coercion should be used to take their money. Good people must ask if that proposition should serve as the foundation for a moral society.
syndicated columnist Walter Williams
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Government: An organization that has the privilege of using force on persons who have not harmed anyone.
Richard Maybury, in his "Uncle Eric" series of books on economics and government.
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I've written a commercial for Apple Computer. It goes like this:
'Macintosh - we might not get everything right, but at least we knew
the century was going to end.'
Douglas Adams, on the Y2K problem
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The most benign product you are going to get from the [TV] networks are 22-minute sitcoms or cartoons providing instant solutions for all of life's problems, interlaced with commercials telling you what a slug you are if you don't ingest the right sugary substances and don't wear the right shoes.
David Grossman
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Perjury is not excused by an apology compelled by overwhelming evidence and delivered under pressure.
Rep. Paul McHale (D-Pa)
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As is now painfully evident, the president has an improper relationship with the truth.
The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune
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Repentance is always difficult, and the difficulty grows still greater by delay.
Samuel Johnson
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A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
O'Henry
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Politicians don't hunt elephants, but they will share the elephants you catch with the people who voted for them.
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The facility and excess of lawmaking seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable.
James Madison, Federalist #62
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The purpose of government is "the enforcement of exact justice and equality" before the law, not the "vicious paternalism" that arises when citizens develop "the hope and expectations of direct and especial favors."
Grover Cleveland
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Because they do get good service on the Web every now and then, users behave somewhat like Skinner's rats who would keep pressing a lever in their cage as long as it gave them a food pellet at rare intervals. In fact, the rat would keep going longer if the food pellets came at random intervals: with randomness, there is always the hope that next time will bring the reward - exactly as when you click a link on the Web.
Jakob Nielsen
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We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
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Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
Thomas Jefferson
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Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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America believes in education: The average professor earns more money in a year than the professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Evan Esar
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I complained because I had no PowerMac; then I met a man who used Windows.
Cloyce Sutton
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I thought it was named for that city in Canada.
A student at a 'Cleveland High' school in California, surprised to learn that the school was named for a president.
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The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there's nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
Will Rogers
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Amid all the fuss about the impeachment proceedings, a friend who fled here from a country without democracy raised a truly amazing thought the other day: In the entire year the Monica thing has been going on - or in all the years Ken Starr has been searching for something indictable - not once has it occurred to any of us to look at a Potomac River bridge and wonder if tanks are going to roll across. As my friend said, there are a LOT of places where, with the civilian government this weakened or ridiculed, and the legislature this paralyzed by politics, the army would roll on in and take over. And it never occurs to us to wonder that it doesn't happen. Maybe that says more about America than anything else.
Margaret Ryan
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If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the worlds great literary works in Braille.
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I'm traveling at the speed of life: 60 minutes per hour!
Michael L. Cook, based on phrases from articles by Peter Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke in "Forbes ASAP", November 20, 1998
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A post-intellectual society is one where public relations substitutes for public policy, where one mass-media image can wipe out many careful arguments, where sound moral character means feeling good about yourself, and the increase of freedom means more consumer choices. It is, finally, a society where intellectuals are very comfortably kept thinking about what they are told to think about. I suppose the biggest difference in the past 30 years is that the intellectually gifted now have so many more places to sell out. Freshmen with any smarts at all now arrive at universities eager to become commodities.
Richard Lee, in a Valparaiso University commencement address
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Communist China is technologically underdeveloped because they have no alphabet and therefore cannot use acronyms to communicate ideas at a faster rate.
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Assume: $45 million spent on Starr investigation of Clinton; and $750,000 per cruise missile.
Conclusion: By avoiding Whitewater, Travelgate, Monica, etc., Bill could lob 60 more cruise missles on some hot-headed dictator.
Michael L. Cook as 'savvy political analyst'
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Look outward. You have been rightly taught Socrates' dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would add: The too-examined life is not worth living either. Perhaps previous ages suffered from a lack of self-examination. The Age of Oprah does not.
Charles Krauthammer in Time (June 28, 1993)
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No arbitrary regulation, no act of the legislature, can add anything to the capital of the country; it can only force it into artificial channels.
J. R. Mc Culloch
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It ranges all the way from organized ethnic cleansing to messing up our website.
A senior NATO diplomat, noting that Belgrade's offensive was clearly well organized and prepared, not only with military attacks, but also with 'cyberwar' hacker attacks. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,34508,00.html
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It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million human beings collected together are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
Thomas Jefferson
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If you have a computer and can fog a mirror, you can post anything on the Internet.
Lars Mahinske, Encyclopaedia Britannica researcher, Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1999
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Authority and dictatorship are not the same thing, and all of us need authority; we need the authority of law, . . . the authority of parents, the authority of teachers. And this doesn't mean blind obedience: it means . . . we all need guidance. . . . [W]e are children in the eyes of God. It's very important in organized society that we are adults making free choices, but we should have the humility to recognize that we are in many respects children. . . . [W]e had a great party in the Sixties and thereafter over the destruction of authority, and now we've got the hangover. . . . [I]n the Nineties . . . we know we've got something wrong. We're pessimistic. The Sixties was very silly in many ways, but it was ... optimistic. Now we know that we have overthrown authority and we wish we hadn't, but we don't quite know how to re-establish it.
Charles Moore in Third Way
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It is anticipated that the whole of the populous parts of the United States will, within two or three years, be covered with net-work like a spider's web.
an 1848 writer commenting on the expansion of telegraph lines across the U.S.
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Technology: It isn't just for geeks anymore.
Michael L. Cook
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Smile! - You don't see your own face, but others do!
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Now more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. ... If the next centennial does not find us a great nation ... it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.
President James Garfield, 1877
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Give me control over he who shapes the music of a nation and I care not who makes the laws.
Napoleon
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We live in a country that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco (famous only for having had a teenage lover, Amy Fisher, who shot his wife).
Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 9, 1994)
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The word "amusement" comes from the prefix "a" and the root "muse". "a" means "not" and "muse" means "to ponder". Literally, "amusement" means "not to ponder". There is no evaluation, no critical analysis, no judgment.
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And it should be considered that nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders. For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513), commenting on ERP, SAP, and Lean Electronics.
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On Hollywood: "Imagine a gigantic junior high school run by students consigned never to graduate, a junior high school that has devoured western civilization and controls the popular culture of the ENTIRE WORLD."
Coleman Luck, a writer and executive producer with over twenty years experience in Hollywood
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You are in a maze of twisty little companies, all working against each other.
from a .sig file
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Whoever has a pension assured to him for his old age is more contented and easier to manage than a man who has none.
Otto von Bismarck, 1889, who introduced the world's first state pension for retired persons over age 70. He was also known as 'The Iron Chancellor'.
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Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work.
Robert Orben
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[To] compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
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We got to the Moon on 32K and now I need 64M just to write a memo!
Daniel Dern
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It may be affirmed, on the best grounds, that no small share of the present embarrassments of America is to be charged on the blunders of our governments. ... What indeed are all the repealing, explaining, and amending laws, which fill and disgrace our voluminous codes, but so many monuments of deficient wisdom.
James Madison, Federalist #62
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Due to technical reasons (lightning strike) no lightning charts are available.
European lightning strikes charts page at http://www-imk.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/~gmueller/metbest.html
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We used to broadcast tapes with birds' distress sounds, but we found they don't work very well - and what the birds really hate is Tina Turner.
Ron Johnson, chief fire officer at the airport in Gloucestershire, England, on using the pop singer's tapes to scare birds off the runway
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I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. There teachers must embody the same selfless dedication of the most rabid fundamentalist preacher, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level - preschool, daycare, or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new - the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of 'love thy neighbor' will finally be achieved.
John Dunphy, "A Religion for A New Age", The Humanist magazine, January/February 1983
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Children...are not "owned" by their parents. ... The Christian fundamentalists who want the freedom to indoctrinate their children with religious education do not understand [that] the law that prevents them from legally teaching their kids prevents someone else from abusing theirs.
Kathy Collins, former legal counsel to the Iowa Department of
Education, "Children are not Chattel," Free Inquiry, a publication of
CODESH (Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism), Fall 1987, p.11.
(Ms. Collins needs to re-read the U.S. Constitution.)
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[Our] great object was to get rid of Christianity, and to convert our churches into halls of science. The plan was not to make open attacks on religion...but to establish a system of state - we said national - schools, from which all religion was to be excluded...and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children. For this purpose, a secret society was formed and the whole country was to be organized.
Orestes Brownson, 1803-1876
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What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.
Horace Mann, 1796-1858
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"...the traditional approach in which the tools of learning [reading,
writing, and arithmetic] were first mastered was not appropriate for
the new age of social consciousness."
"...apart from the thought of participation in social life, the school
has no end or aim." "There is no God and there is no soul. Hence,
there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma
and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried.
There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."
John Dewey, 1859-1952, educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools.
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Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
John Dewey
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We do not need any more preaching about right or wrong. The old 'thou shall nots' simply are not relevant. Values clarification is a method for teachers to change the values of children without getting caught.
Dr. Sidney Simon, creator of the "Values Clarification" curriculum, which sold over 400,000 copies
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Parents give up their rights when they drop their kids off at public school.
Federal District Judge Melinda Harmon ruling against parents suing a Texas School district after their son was questioned by a child protection official without their knowledge, and strip searched by a female worker looking for signs of paddling. (Wall St. Journal, 10-8-96)
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Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday School's meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?
Charles F. Potter, Humanism: A New Religion, 1930
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I think that the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition.
Paul Blanshard, "Three Cheers For Our Secular State," The Humanist, March/April 1976
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We must ask how we can kill the [G]od of Christianity. We need only insure that our schools teach only secular knowledge. If we could achieve this, [G]od would indeed be shortly due for a funeral service.
G. Richard Bozarth, "On Keeping God Alive," American Atheist, November 1977
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Today, our state supported 'public' schools are humanistic schools. Actually, they are religious institutions teaching, with public funds, an alien faith. The public schools are an establishment of religion: the religion of humanism. ... No Christian children should be required to attend a public school.
Rousas J. Rushdoony, The World's Second Oldest Religion, 1981
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Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being. ... It's up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.
Chester M. Pierce's keynote address to the Association for Childhood Education International, Denver, 1972
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Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization.
I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. I think that the examples I have given of learning in a computational environment provide a glimpse of a context for learning in which socialization would be based on a potentiation of the individual, an empowering sense of one's own ability to learn anything one wants to know, conditioned by deep understanding of how these abilities are amplified by belonging to cultures and communities.
Seymour Papert, "Tomorrow's classrooms," New Horizons in Educational Computing, from a 1982 interview
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"...the acting dean of the University of Texas ed school: 'You can't *not* use the schools as the agencies of social change. It's too convenient.'"
John Leo, "Don't listen to Miranda", U.S. News & World Report, June 16, 1977, page 19.
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"I am afraid that schools will prove to be wide gates to hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not constantly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt."
Martin Luther, reference unknown
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Every home is a school. What do you teach?
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After reading this sampling of quotes, many people change their question. The real question becomes not, "Why homeschool?", but rather, "Knowing all of this, why would anyone ever send their children to government schools?"
Recommended Resources:
Why So Many Christians Are Going Home To School, Llewellyn B. Davis
Is Public Education Necessary?, Samuel L. Blumenfeld
The Home School Legal Defense Association
Karl M. Bunday's education web site
Some
Home schooling FAQs
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Notice how many people and organizations want childbirth to be safe, legal, and rare?
based on a comment from World Magazine
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A nuclear war could alleviate some of the factors leading to today's ecological disturbances that are due to current high-population concentrations and heavy industrial production.
Official of the U.S. Office of Civil Defense, quoted in The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schnell, 1982
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I'm constantly amazed by the number of people who can't seem to control their own schedules. Over the years, I've had many executives come to me and say with pride: 'Boy, last year I worked so hard that I didn't take any vacation.' It's actually nothing to be proud of. I always feel like responding: 'You dummy. You mean to tell me that you can take responsibility for an $80 million project and you can't plan two weeks out of the year to go off with your family and have some fun?'
Lee Iacocca
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No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary - not the top jobs. Anyway, I wouldn't want to be Prime Minister; you have to give yourself 100 per cent.
Margaret Thatcher, interviewed in the London Sunday Telegraph, October 26, 1969
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Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
Rick Cook, Mission Manager, NASA Mars Pathfinder Project
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If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow, you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody.
Madeleine L'Engle quoted in 'Context' (Jan. 15, 1995)
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I'm opposed to commercial wailing. Ban opera; don't let our children
be exposed to excessive hollering.
Remove the last restrictions to private hunting of prima donna, which
is not an endangered specie!
Michael Cook
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The man who doesn't relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.
philosopher Elbert Hubbard
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I have come to believe that we must take bold and unequivocal action: we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.
Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance (I don't believe that our Founding Fathers would have taken this view.)
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During my 11 years in Congress, I have consistently opposed federal funding of abortions. In my opinion, it is wrong to spend federal funds for what is arguably the taking of a human life. Let me assure you that I share your belief that innocent human life must be protected, and I am committed to furthering this goal.
Al Gore (Senator) May 26, 1987
It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong. I hope that some day we will see a drop in the outrageously large numbers of abortions which currently take place.
Al Gore, July 1987
"I don't believe a woman's freedom to live her own life, in all cases, outweighs the fetus' right to life."
Al Gore, "Nashville Banner", 1976
Al Gore believes that one important way to strengthen families is by protecting a woman's right to choose. Al Gore is strongly pro-choice - and is deeply committed to making abortion safe, legal, and rare.
http://www.AlGore2000.com/issues/families.html
(as of at least October 13, 1999)
I am for a woman's 'right to choose', now and forever.
Al Gore, New Hampshire, February 2000 [mlc paraphrase]
The pro-choice movement, I'm proud to say, has never resorted to violence.
Al Gore, 1997 speech to NARAL
(Does this include the sucking out of babies' brains?
6-8 more inches of baby movement and the "doctors" would be liable for murder.
Am I allowed to say that in public?)
See also National Review's list of Gore's "misstatements".
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"Please, just give whirled peas a chance," said the ex-hippy Mom to her toddler daughter.
Michael Cook
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Pie charts are half-baked. They are visually hard to interpret.
Michael Cook
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Disney is a master of horror & suspense. Just watch his cartoons.
Michael Cook
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The facility and excess of lawmaking seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable.
James Madison, Federalist #62
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Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson
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They say one thing and do another.
Bill Clinton, on Soviet Communist leaders
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Yes, the president should resign. He has lied to the American people, time and time again, and betrayed their trust. He is no longer an effective leader. Since he has admitted guilt, there is no reason to put the American people through an impeachment. He will serve absolutely no purpose in finishing out his term. The only possible solution is for the president to save some dignity and resign.
unsuccessful Congressional candidate Bill Clinton, regarding Nixon, 1974
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There's nothing left to say. There's not any point now in his putting the country through an impeachment since he isn't making any pretense of innocence now.
unsuccessful Congressional candidate Bill Clinton, regarding Nixon, 1974
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The road to tyranny, we must never forget, is the destruction of the truth.
Bill Clinton, 1995
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There's just no such thing as truth when it comes to [Bush]. He just says whatever sounds good and worries about it after the election.
Bill Clinton on George Bush, 1992
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Every time Bush talks about trust, it makes chills run up and down my spine. The very idea that the word 'trust' could come out of Mr. Bush's mouth after what he's done to this country and the way he's trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system.
Bill Clinton on George Bush, 1992
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I think it's plain that the president should resign and spare the country the agony of this impeachment and removal proceeding.
unsuccessful Congressional candidate Bill Clinton, regarding Nixon, 1974
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If you act recklessly, you will pay a heavy price.
U.S. President Bill Clinton, addressing the nation to describe why the United States had ordered an attack on Iraq (during the middle of the debate in the House of Representatives on whether the President should be impeached) [Washington Post 12/17, A33]
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On Personal Responsibility:
Look, I'm the Speaker, so I'll take the responsibility.
Newt Gingrich on the dismal Republican showing in the 1998 elections
I didn't inhale.
Bill Clinton, 1992
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...white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness; single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.
Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton
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When you see all that rhetorical smoke billowing up from the Democrats, well ladies and gentleman, I'd follow the example of their nominee; don't inhale.
Ronald Reagan, Republican National Convention, 1992
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A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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I see a sort of Celtic mist forming around Hillary as a new archetype (somewhere between Eleanor and Evita, transcending both) at a moment when the civilization pivots, at last, decisively - perhaps for the first time since the advent of Christian patriarchy two millenniums ago - toward Woman.
Lance Morrow, Time magazine
(Wow! And New Yorkers just think they'll only be voting for a Senator!)
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I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the first two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley
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For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
Bill Bryson's "Notes from a Big Country", 1999(?)
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"We don't make these investments to get a return," said [Arthur] Andersen spokesman Andrew Giangola. "We make them because we want to be involved in a hot and exciting online business."
from an article on management consulting firms investing in start-up companies, http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1008-200-922493.html?tag=st.cn.1002newsfd as of 11-08-1999
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You don't get to safe systems that have human beings in them by yelling at them or asking them to try harder. You need to engineer the work environment so that normal human limits are respected.
Dr. Donald Berwick, quoted in "Report addresses need to prevent medical mistakes" by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times, published in the San Jose Mercury News on 1/25/2000 at http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/svlife/docs/errors25.htm
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The cost of the Mars Polar Lander was $165 million. In an $8 trillion economy, that is a laughable sum. Waterworld cost more. The new Bellagio hotel in Vegas could buy eight Polar Landers with $80 million left over for a bit of gambling. To put it in terms of competing space outlays, $165 million is less than half the cost of a shuttle launch. For the price of a single shuttle mission (launch, flight time, landing, and overhead) we could have sent two Mars Polar Landers and gotten $70 million back in change.
Charles Krauthammer, On To Mars (in the 1/31/2000 "Weekly Standard")
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The Basis of Common Law (and the rest of our legal and economic systems):
1. "Do all you have agreed to do."
(the basis of contract law)
2. "Do not encroach on other persons or their property."
(the basis of criminal and tort law)
Richard J. Maybury
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Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, the largest organization in the U.S. promoting physician-assisted suicide, says [the] elderly are increasingly recognized as the 'greedy geezers' and are 'putting a strain on the health care system that will only increase and cannot be sustained.' Humphry, in his new book co-authored with attorney Mary Clement, predicts physician-assisted suicide will be accepted as '[a] method of cost-containment.'
Physician-Assisted Suicide as 'Cost-Containment', National Review Online, February 15, 1999 (an upcoming 'benefit' from your company provided health care program?)
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'Tis not the gale, 'tis the set of the sail
Which determines the way you will go.
quote on a college dorm lobby wall
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The care of human life ... is the first and only legitimate object of good government.
Thomas Jefferson
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Where is the security ... for life if the sense of religious obligation desert?
George Washington
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Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence
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Three points of doctrine ... form the foundation of all morality. The first is the existence of a God; the second is the immortality of the human soul; and the third is a future state of rewards and punishments. Suppose it possible for a man to disbelieve [any] of these articles of faith and that man will have no conscience, he will have no other law than that of the tiger or the shark.
John Quincy Adams
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SOCIAL STUDIES
A daily miscellany of information by Michael Kesterton
Cultural differences
The hit U.S. television show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" was invented in Britain for the ITV network, where it was also very popular. The two shows' questions are different:
American version:
"How many full bags of wool are there in Baa Baa Black Sheep?"
"Which condiment is also known as a Latin dance: mustard, mayonnaise, relish or salsa?"
British version:
"What is the title of the third part of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land?"
"What is the SI unit of magnetic flux density?"
[from The "Globe and Mail", Thursday, February 24, 2000]
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In China, we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America, you can criticize the government but not Darwin.
a Chinese paleontologist
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Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.
Scott C. Todd, a letter in 9-30-1999 issue of "Nature"
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Stephen Jay Gould, 1977
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The classically-minded among us may have noted a new TV ad with the theme of the "Confutatis Maledictis" from Mozart's Requiem. "Where do you want to go today?" is the cheery line on the screen, while the chorus sings "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis." This translates to "The damned and accursed are convicted to the flames of hell." Good to know that Microsoft has done its research.
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I used to drive a Heisenberg Uncertainty car, but I could never read the speedometer without getting lost.
Mark Gadzikowski (ricercar@netcom.com)
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The graveyard is full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle
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I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their formas and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war.
Thomas Jefferson, 1823
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... a passionate attachment of one nations for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one of the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads alto to concession to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill-will and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. and it give to ambitious, corrupted or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray, or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity ... Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (conjure you to belive me fellow-citizen) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake.
George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
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The natural rights of the colonists are these; first, a right to life; second to liberty; third to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.
Samuel Adams, 1772
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A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
Thomas Jefferson, 1801
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Not a place on earth might be so happy as America. Her situation if remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.
Thomas Paine, 1776
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The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connections as possible.
George Washington, 1796
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The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
Winston Churchill
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If there is one thing government loves above all else, it is crisis, Crisis provides the opportunity to write laws, create programs, increase taxes, spend money, expand the bureaucracy, impose regulations, extend control - in short, to justify more government.
Jim Lord, Y2K Survival Letter, October 1998
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The United States never really had an Iraq policy. It had an Iran policy. ... Saddam's frontal assault on America's worst enemy [Iran] was like an answer to our prayers. ... Washington had groped its way toward a well-defined policy construct of helping one thuggish regime against another thuggish regime.
Robert D. Kaplan, "The Arabists", 1993
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I have always given as my decided opinion that no nation had a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another.
George Washington, 1796
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Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
P.J. O'Rourke, 1991
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"It's ironic. ... Most companies spend 50% to 70% of their money on people's salaries. And yet they spend less than 1% of their budget to train their people. Most companies, in fact, spend more time and money on maintaining their buildings and equipment than they do on maintaining and developing people."
Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, "The One-Minute Manager"
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"A leading architect once built a cluster of office buildings set in a central green. The landscape crew asked him where he wanted the sidewalks between the buildings. His reply: 'Just plant grass between the buildings.' By late summer the new lawn was laced with pathways of trodden grass. The paths followed the most efficient line between the points of connection, turned in easy curves rather than at right angles and were sized according to traffic flow. In the fall the architect simply paved in the pathways. Not only did the paths have a design beauty, but they responded directly to user needs.
Christopher Williams, "Origins of Form"
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"I can't even see the Empire State Building."
Last communication to the NY control tower from the pilot of the WW II bomber that crashed into the E.S.B. on July 28, 1945.
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"If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen Beetle, he'd be President today."
from an early 1970's "ad" in The Harvard (National?) Lampoon
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"Noise [i.e. clutter and other display debris] is costly, since computer displays are low-resolution devices, working at extremely thin data densities, 1/10 to 1/1000 of a map or book page. This reflects the essential dilemma of a computer display: at every screen are two powerful information-processing capabilities, human and computer. Yet all communication between the two must pass through the low-resolution, narrow-band video display terminal, which chokes off fast, precise, and complex communication."
Edward R. Tufte, "Envisioning Information"
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Never confuse motion with action.
Benjamin Franklin
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I didn't say that I didn't say it.
I said that I didn't say that I said it.
I want to make that very clear.
former Michigan governor George Romney
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"I think I left it in the basement, I'll run upstairs and look."
attributed to M. C. Escher
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There are three kinds of mathematicians in the world, those who can count and those who can't.
Eric Hjelmfelt
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There are two kinds of people in the world, those who think that there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't.
Leslie Shader
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The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that an optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist is afraid he's right.
???
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One of the things I like about this job is that I'm never bothered by life-insurance salesmen.
Red Adair, oil-well fire fighter
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"A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually."
Abba Eban
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Software developers to R&D managers:
"Just give me money until I say 'when'."
Managers to software developers:
"Shut up and ship it."
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"Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance."
Jim Horning
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Congress needs more people who know the difference between a million and a billion.
Gov. John Sununu
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.
Senator Everett Dirkson
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Yeah, that's my erector set.
You wanna make somethin' out of it?
Tom McWilliams
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"I don't want any yes-men around me, I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job."
Samuel Goldwyn
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
Donald Knuth
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"Give me a lever and a fulcrum, and I can move the globe."
Archimedes
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"Give me a place to sit, and I'll watch."
friend of Archimedes
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The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. Therefore, the heads of provinces, official agents, and deputies are ordered to collect all the weapons mentioned above and turn them over to the government.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun, August 29, 1558, Japan.
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Someone, presumably at MIT, coined the expression last year "The Information Supercollider". I liked that immensely, but recently realized that "Information Supersoaker" works just as well. As long as we're mincing words.
Gunther Anderson, gunther@ssi.edc.org
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"In the article "Devote Every Effort to Running Successfully Socialist Research Institutes" (Sci. Sin. Vol XIX, No. 5), "the arch unrepentant capitalist-roader in the Party Teng Hsiao-ping" should read "Teng Hsiao-ping."
1977 Journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
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"Five percent of the people think; 10 percent of the people think they think; and the other 85 percent would rather die than think."
Thomas A. Edison
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"If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life."
Plato
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"Education is not the filling of a bucket but the starting of a fire."
W.B. Yeats
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It's time - past time - to "send education home," in Mr. [Lamar] Alexander's phrase. The schools cannot be fixed in Washington. They are the proper work of states, localities, teachers and parents...
Chester E. Finn, architect of Goals 2000, commenting in The Wall Street Journal, "A Primer for Education Reform," Jan 13, 1995.
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For more than 3500 years, since the Phoenicians utilized the alphabet to expand commerce and trade with their neighbors, learning an alphabetic language has always been accomplished by teaching an individual the sounds of the written symbols we call letters. From the ancient Hebrews to the present, phonics has been taught in order to make the written language more accessible. Phonics was not taught for it own sake, but the for sake of learning to read with accuracy, comprehension, fluency, and enjoyment. That's it. Back then we didn't have lengthy debates about empowerment of teachers, or multicultural differences, or what the economic status of an individual happened to be. Children were taught to read, often before they entered school. Almost everyone who had attended school for any reasonable length of time could read.
Robert W. Sweet commentary, "Who is the Anti-Phonics Movement?", National Right to Read report, Nov/Dec 1994, p 7.
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Nostalgia is "papier-mache history sterilized of all pain".
Archivist Otto Bettman, upon revisiting his hometown of Leipzig, Germany. Bettmann fled Nazi Germany in 1935 after the purge of Jewish state employees. (From "The Washington Post", p. C1, 18 May 1995. He was profiled in an article by Rick Atkinson.)
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I try to follow the advice that a university president once gave a prospective commencement speaker. "Think of yourself as the body at an Irish wake," he said. "They need you in order to have the party, but nobody expects you to say much."
National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, addressing students and faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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"A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."
Milton Friedman
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"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
Albert Einstein
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness ... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it ... And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of the Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
The Declaration of Independence
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"We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America."
Preamble of the United States Constitution
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"It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection, aid, and favors."
George Washington
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"I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth ... that God governs the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"
Benjamin Franklin
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"And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever."
Thomas Jefferson
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"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
John Adams
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"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."
Patrick Henry
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"The laws of nature are the laws of God, whose authority can be superseded by no power on earth." All human laws which contradict His laws, we are bound in conscience to disobey."
George Mason
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"We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God."
James Madison
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"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
John Quincy Adams
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"We will either be governed by God, or ruled by tyrants."
William Penn
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"It is impossible to govern rightly without God and the Bible"
George Washington
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"I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man ... but for this Book we could not know right from wrong."
Abraham Lincoln
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"The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country."
Calvin Coolidge
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"Posterity - you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
John Quincy Adams
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"What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a price upon its goods, and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."
Thomas Paine
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"Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of The Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian ... This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation ... we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth ... These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.
Supreme Court Decision, 1892, Church of the Holy Trinity vs. United States
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"Let the religious element in man's nature be neglected, let him be influenced by no higher motives than low self-interest, and subjected to no stronger restraint than the limits of civil authority, and he becomes the creature of selfish passion or blind fanaticism. On the other hand, the cultivation of the religious sentiment represses licentiousness - inspires respect for law and order, and gives strength to the whole social fabric, at the same time that it conducts the human soul upward to the Author of its being."
Daniel Webster
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"It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord."
Abraham Lincoln
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"The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles ... to this we own our free constitutions of government.
Noah Webster
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"No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency ... We ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of heaven cannot be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which heaven itself has ordained."
George Washington
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"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The mark of a good conspiracy theory is its untestability."
Andrew Spring
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Nobody on his deathbed ever said: "I wish I'd spent more time at the office."
Peter Lynch, former manager of the Magellan Fund, who left his job in 1990 at 46 (the age at which his father died), to devote time to his family and his favorite Boston charities. (quoted in Money 1993)
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"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."
U.S. Senator Pat Moynihan, quoted in Robert Sobel's review of "Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies" edited by Mark C. Carnes.
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"I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's novel, Farewell My Lovely
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Less is more.
Mies Van der Rohe
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"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it's safer to pick on rich women than biker gangs."
Lenny Schafer, ddschafer@netcom.com
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"Who was faster by this new criterion at Seoul in 1988? U.S. runner Joe DeLoach, clocking 19.75 in the 200 metres (9.87 twice), compared with the paltry 9.92 of teammate Carl Lewis in the 100 metres. Strange that no one was waving DeLoach's flag then for fastest man in the world."
Jeremy Gilbert, pointing out the changing standards of U.S. commentators who are now calling U.S. sprinter Michael Johnson the "fastest man in the world" after his 200-metre win in the 1996 Summer Olympics. (Until a non-American, Canada's Donovan Bailey, dared to win the men's 100-metre sprint at the 1996 Olympics, U.S. commentators had referred to the winner of THAT event as the "fastest man in the world".)
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"An army with no war to fight is a constant source of headaches. That is why the founders of the United States originally intended that their country should have no standing army but rely on popular militias. The United States wound up with the worst of both worlds - an expensive standing army and an armed populace who, for want of invaders, shoot each other."
Terence Moore, writing in the "Winnipeg Free Press"
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Standing armies threaten government by the people, not because they consciously seek to pervert liberty, but because they relieve the people themselves of the duty of self defense. A people accustomed to let a special class defend them must sooner or later become unfit for liberty.
John McAuley Palmer
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For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
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"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who *can* be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything." ... "Don't you see that the educated reader *can't* stop reading the highbrow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."
C.S. Lewis, "That Hideous Strength", copyright 1946 (concerning attempts to sway public opinion and who needs to be swayed)
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"Some people feel that life is not challenging enough all by itself, and feel that they should make life more difficult for themselves since they have it so easy. The best way to do this, of course, is to major in physics."
Physics major at Wesleyan University responding to a question posed at the end of her first semester of Quantum Mechanics, "Why would anyone major in physics"?
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"We live in an aggressively stupid celebrity culture. It isn't just dumb. It's aggressively dumb. ... This whole celebrity thing is related to the dumbing down of everything. It's related to shorter attention spans and superficiality and the placing of value on celebrity itself."
Sports broadcaster Bob Costas, in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reflecting on celebrity in the wake of the recent death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
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"It has frequently been said that the Princess Diana phenomenon revealed the existence of a spiritual hunger, in search of an object on which to glut itself, but the bleaker truth may be that what people want is an alternative to the spiritual. After all, when people binge on burgers at McDonald's, we don't say that they are really hungry for bran and fresh fruit."
Richard Jenkyns, in the New York Review of Books (May 28, 1998)
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"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: Those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition."
Indira Ghandi, the late Prime Minister of India
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"[The] equipment...among the most vital to our success in Africa and Europe were the bulldozer, the jeep, the 2 1/2 ton truck, and the C-47 airplane. Curiously enough, none of these is designed for combat."
U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower
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"In short, computer networks, like the printing press 500 years ago, allow ordinary citizens to distribute their views in different ways and to different audiences than were previously possible. This new-found freedom brings with it many unsolved social, political, and moral issues. The solution to these problems is left as an exercise for the reader."
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks" (3rd ed., Prentice Hall PTR), page 7.
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"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of power. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Daniel Webster, quoted in Hearings on the confirmation of Abe Fortas to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, p. 108
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"No ray of sunshine is ever lost, but the green which it awakens into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted for the sower to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith."
Albert Schweitzer
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"Mr. Speaker, students in Alabama are skipping school, protesting the fact that they are not allowed to pray. Think about it. Even though America has guns, rape, drugs, even heroin and murder in our schools, students are not allowed to pray. Unbelievable! A school without prayer is a school without God. And a nation that denies prayer is a nation that denies God. And a nation that denies God is a nation that just may welcome the devil. Members of Congress, the Constitution may separate church and state, but the Founders never intended to separate God and the American people. I yield back any common sense and logic we have left."
Representative James Traficant (Ohio Democrat), from the House floor (1998?)
-------------------------
"Right now, at the end of the second millennium, is the best moment of all time, and right here, in the United States, is the best place to be at that moment. And do I hark to sounds of glee echoing midst purple mountains' majesty and rolling across the fruited plains? No. I hear America whining, crybaby to the world. I behold my country in a fit - beefing, carping, crabbing, bitching, sniveling, mewling, fretting, yawping, bellyaching, and being pickled-pussed. A colussus that stood astride the earth now lies on the floor pounding its fists and kicking its feet, transformed into a fussy-pants and a sputter-budget."
P. J. O'Rourke, from the book "All the Trouble in the World" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994)
-------------------------
This past year a refurbished Star Wars seemed to be everywhere, but I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness; also a sense of moral good and fun. But then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes, I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form, and I guessed that one day they would explode. "I would love you to do something for me," I said. "Anything! Anything!" the boy replied rapturously. "You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do," I said. "Anything, sir, anything!" "Well," I said, "do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?" He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. "What a dreadful thing to say to a child!" she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right, but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.
actor Sir Alec Guinness, from "Trouble with Fame" in the January 17 issue of the London Daily Telegraph, on his role in the movie Star Wars.
-------------------------
The very commonness of the pencil, the characteristic of it that renders it all but invisible and seemingly valueless, is really the first feature of successful engineering. Good engineering blends into the environment, becomes a part of society and culture so naturallly that a special effort is required to notice it. By looking closely at the origins and development of something so ubiquitous as the pencil, we are better able to appreciate the achievement of a great bridge or efficient automobile. And we can do so without having to needing the detailed esoteric knowledge of the structural or automotive engineer. We can know that the bridge or the automobile was conceived first by a human mind and given its first embodiment as a concept in a human mind or in a sketch done by a human hand and not as a bunch of numbers given by equations in a computer. We can know that a natural gas supply system or a can of soda delivers energy or refreshment on demand without exploding in our faces because some engineers worried about how their design might go wrong. But we can also know that these things are not perfect, because no artifact is perfect.
Henry Petroski, "The Pencil", page 334, Knopf 1990
-------------------------
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who's standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.
Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free."
"President Andrew Shepard," The American President.
-------------------------
"My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution."
George A. Miller, The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97. "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information"
-------------------------
"Praise everybody, I say; never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man's face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber."
W. M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair, chapter XIX
-------------------------
"Most documentation starts as hastily scrawled notes from sleep-deprived developers who weren't necessarily hired for their keen communication skills. Those notes are then fleshed out by recently graduated English majors who have spent their last four years immersed in works of fiction. The results are then passed on to the marketing department whose job it is to make sure that no word or phrase will reflect unfavorably on the product ("I don't think that the word 'Basic' properly communicates the exciting nature of the product. Why don't we call it 'Visual Zesty?!'"). It is then beset by lawyers who finish the job by making sure that they haven't explicitly promised that the product will actually do anything. By the time the documentation gets into your hands, it has been so sanitized for your protection and generalized beyond recognition that you usually have to go out and buy a 3rd-party manual (that was, more likely than not, written by the same non-technical technical writer who wrote the original documentation) in a vain attempt to get an unbiased, unexpurgated, and unfiltered view of just how you're really supposed to use the stuff."
Introduction, About The "@ Novell" Series, November 3, 1998, offering the inside scoop on computer documentation.
-------------------------
"The other big problem with history textbooks is that they always started with the Dawn of Civilization and ended around 1948. So we'd spend the first three months of the school year reading about the ancient Sumerians at a nice, leisurely pace. Then the teacher would realize that time was running short, and we'd race through the rest of history, covering WWII in a matter of minutes, and getting to [U.S. President] Harry Truman on the last day. Then the next year, we'd go back to the ancient Sumerians. After a few years of this we began to see history as an endlessly repeating, incredibly dull cycle, starting with the Sumerians and leading inexorably to Harry Truman."
Dave Barry on his 1960s elementary school experience
-------------------------
"Like a show with an opening number you can't get right, the launch is everything. I usually do umpteen versions of the opening number for a show I'm directing. It's so important to set the tone for an evening, to define the rules for which the audience can sense the strange world they're going to inhabit for the next two hours. I say strange world because it truly is if you dissect it. Just consider how the house lights seem to "brown-out" and no one panics; a large velvety curtain mysteriously rises, seemingly of its own accord; a large group of musicians led by a man with a stick strikes up harmonies and rhythms from a vast pit in front of the stage; people in costumes and makeup in impossibly bright lights enter and speak louder than necessary and act like we're not watching them, then when they can't shout anymore at each other, they start singing as if this were a natural thing to do, and then when they can't sing anymore, they start to dance uninhibitedly. The number comes to a halt--we, the audience, clap as the artists stand in tableau, pending; the applause dies, and the troupe continues its story like nothing has happened. Giant painted trees and rocks slide offstage as a golden staircase whirls onstage; a window unit backed by a show-covered vista flies in apparently from heaven, and we sit there accepting this foolishness; and if we're lucky we believe it, and we laugh and cry with the characters and are entertained and enlightened. When it works, time passes in an instant, we're transported, and we leave the proceedings enriched for the rest of our lives. That's musical theater. However, it all begins with the opening number."
Tommy Tune, "Footnotes"
-------------------------
{The United States] Congress wants to require television manufacturers to install a V-Chip which would keep children from viewing violent or explicit programming. The chip would cost about $500 and would replace the current device known as the on-off switch.
comedian Dennis Miller
-------------------------
"There's something deliciously daffy about the thought of the very ledger of Microsoft's jumbo profits being composed on a Mac - and some kind of poetic justice in that fact coming to light thanks to the idiosyncrasies of Microsoft's own software."
Scott Rosenberg, Salon.com, on Microsoft's annual report being made with a Macintosh, and not with a PC using the company's flagship OS Windows.
-------------------------
"Who can object to such monopolies? Who can object to a monopoly when there are several thousands of them? Who can object to a monopoly when every few years the company enjoying the monopoly revises, alters, perhaps even discards its product, in order to supply a superior one to the public? Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if its is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?"
from a speech to the Standard Oil Development Company Forum in New York City on October 5, 1944, by Edwin H. Land, founder of Polaroid, quoted in Victor K. McElheny's "Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land," at p. 155 (1998).
-------------------------
"Time is the only coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
-------------------------
The problem is that most corps think of their website as a marketing endeavor - like a billboard - instead of as a front office to their corporate headquarters. If they thought of their websites as places where they brought their clients, those websites would be much classier and elegant and usable - same as their offices. You don't let your marketing people run your front office; you shouldn't let your marketing people run your website.
Vanessa Layne in a mailing list, 2000-02-14
-------------------------
"Smart people spend time alone. They don't fill their days with appointments from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., as many politicians and executives do. Great science does not emerge from hard logic and grinding hours. It comes from the mysterious resources of the human brain and soul. Inspiration is nurtured by activities like chopping wood and raking leaves, preparing dinner and reading to the kids. These activities soften the rigid pace of the day's pursuits and allow all our God-given intuition to work its unlogical magic. Only then can we reach our fullest potential. Only then can we leap from thinking to understanding."
Philip K. Howard
-------------------------
My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.
-------------------------
If I were judge, I'd fine them a billion dollars just for trying to foist Microsoft Bob on an unsuspecting public. And I'd fine them another billion for that silly "Where Do You Want to Go Today?" marketing tag ...
Peter Lewis, "Would a Breakup of Microsoft Matter?", Circuits, New
York Times, May 3, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/05/circuits/articles/04pete.html
-------------------------
January 20, 1999, Buffalo, NY, Marine Midland Arena
from a speech by Bill Clinton on why excess government money should
not be given back to the American people (a.k.a. taxpayers).
http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/uri-res/I2R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gov.us/1999/1/20/17.text.1
Medicare is subject to the same pressures that Social Security is and it's cost, as more and more people retire, live longer and use more medical care. So the trick is, how do you preserve Social Security, how do you preserve Medicare, how do you give seniors the ability to have other sources of income? And how do you do it in a way that's fair to their kids and their grandkids? And how do we get it done by the time the baby boomers start retiring? That is the issue. So, you see, it's not just a seniors issue; it's an issue for all Americans.
Now, we're going to have a big argument about this. And we should, and I hope it will be a good debate. But I believe, since we have - as the Vice President said - this $70 billion surplus from last year and a bigger one coming this year, since it's projected that over a 25-year period we will average substantial surpluses on an annual basis - now, they'll go up and down with the economy, but the point is we have no permanent deficit anymore, the natural condition is a surplus, okay - so the question is, what do we do with it?
We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right. (Applause.) But I think - here's the problem. If you don't spend it right, here's what's going to happen. In 2013 - that's just 14 years away - taxes people pay on their payroll for Social Security will no longer cover the monthly checks. So we have to get into the Social Security trust fund, the savings account. By 2032, it will be gone. After that, if we haven't done something, we can only pay a little over 70 percent of the benefits. By then, the cost of living will be higher and it will be devastating.
-----
According to a speech the president made in Buffalo in January of 1999, we ordinary American citizens may not spend any money returned to us by the Monster [i.e. Federal Government] "the right way." I'm still trying to figure out if paying for food, clothing and shelter is "the right way" to spend money, but I really don't know. Do you?
SCOTT FORBES: Bloated in the Beltway
Copyright © 2000 Nando Media
Copyright © 2000 Scripps Howard News Service
April 15, 2000
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"Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves and politicians. All three need parental supervision."
Dick Armey
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-------------------------
I don't know anything about why that happened... I'm not an expert on computers.
Al Gore, who once boasted that he created the Internet, on how copies of his outgoing email could have disappeared
-------------------------
Gregoire mercilessly lampooned the technology industry, noting that "It's difficult to conceive of a harder job" than selling software. "Imagine making your living selling broken stuff - routinely promising features that don't exist," he said. "Only a bunch of nincompoops like us would let them get away with it."
Jerry Gregoire, former CIO at Dell Computer Corp. and PepsiCo Inc.
http://computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO46488,00.html?pm
-------------------------
"The past is a foreign country," wrote L.P. Hartley; "they do things differently there."
-------------------------
One obvious enemy of the [political] convention as an art form has been television. In a layman's version of the Heisenberg principle, as soon as politicians understood that they were being observed, they began changing their behavior.
Editors, "Washington Bulletin" section of the National Review Online, July 26, 2000 http://www.nationalreview.com/daily/nr072600.html
-------------------------
The ability to read and write is overvalued: "Literacy doesn't make anyone a better person" - Frank Smith,
quoted in "Invitations: Changing as Teachers and Learners K-12", Regie Routman (1991), (publisher: Heinemann), 758 pp., ISBN 0-435-08836-X
which also contains other bogus teacher instruction.
Extracted from "Who Teaches the Teachers?", Lynne V. Cheney, "The Weekly Standard" magazine, August 9, 1999, Volume 4, Number 44 http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag_4_44_99/cheney_art_44_99.html
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If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.
Norman Augustine, author, business executive
-------------------------
"When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl.'"
Tom Lehrer, '50-'60s satirist and humorist, quoted in the New York Times, Arts and Leisure section (July 16, 2000), 21, 23
-------------------------
"Tonight, there are 44 million Americans who don't have health insurance which means 44 million Americans who can't take their sick baby to a doctor, who don't have anyone to attend to their dying parents, who can't get the medical help they need to stay on the job. ... Yet this chance [of the American ideal] is being denied to millions of working families who are trapped in a prison of poverty. Tonight nearly one-fifth of the children in this country are ill fed, ill housed, and ill educated. ... everyday we ignore 13 million poor children in America."
Bill Bradley, 'supporting' Al Gore and his last 8 years of social reforms, at the Democratic Convention, August 15, 2000
-------------------------
"If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner-city school that was failing ... I might be for vouchers, too."
Al Gore, August 2000
-------------------------
"each human soul is precious. ... What really matters is what he [Al Gore] will do for all our kids. ... I believe in every woman's right to choose and I know my father will always, always defend it."
Karenna Gore Schiff, at the Democratic National Convention, August 16, 2000, on the non-status of unborn children
-------------------------
"... well knowing where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent government established according to God ..."
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, January 14, 1639, called the "first written constitution in the history of nations."
-------------------------
As a candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton blasted Bush administration standards of behavior and pledged to conduct "the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic."
-------------------------
"Everybody knows that I have tougher ethics rules than any other previous President."
Bill Clinton, news conference, March 3, 1993
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"Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other."
Alexis de Tocqueville, in the early 1800's
-------------------------
"the greatest injury of the 'wall' notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. ... The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor base on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."
Justice William Rehnquist, in Wallace v. Jaffree (1984)
-------------------------
"The educational bureaucracy expects the state to accommodate every possible bizarre cultural mutation and lifestyle, but finds prayer at graduation an intolerable and fatal compromise of state neutrality toward religion."
Daniel Lapin (an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi), America's Real War
-------------------------
Culture is "an expression of our embodied humanity."
Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal
-------------------------
The property of the country belongs to the people of the country. Their title is absolute. They do not support any privileged class... they ought not to be burdened with a great array of public employees. They are not required to make any contribution to Government expenditures except that which they voluntarily assess upon themselves through the action of their own representatives. Whenever taxes become burdensome a remedy can be applied by the people; but if they do not act for themselves, no one can be very successful in acting for them.
Calvin Coolidge
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On being overtaxed: "One day in 1968...the state finance director came to my office to tell me...he expected the state to have a budget surplus of more than $100 million the following fiscal year. ... No legislators knew about the projected surplus yet and he asked me if I had any ideas on how I wanted to spend it. ... I think you ought to decide now (he said) before the legislature hears about the money and starts thinking of its own ways of spending it. I already know what we should do with the money, I said. Let's give it back to the people, give them a tax rebate. ... When the legislators heard that, they went wild. But it was too late; the people knew about the surplus. They wanted it back - and they got it back."
Ronald Reagan, "An American Life"
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No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and...their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice. ... These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government."
Thomas Jefferson
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"If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
Anatole France
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"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
Frederic Bastiat
-------------------------
"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?"
Neal Boortz
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"To abort is reasonably seen as simply the self-indulgent second act of an indulgent first act."
William F. Buckley
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Taxes operate upon energy and industry and skill and thrift, like a fine upon those qualities. If I have worked harder and built myself a good house while you have been contented to live in a hovel, the tax gatherer now comes annually to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry by taxing me more than you. If I have saved while you wasted, I am taxed, while you are exempt. If a man builds a ship, we make him pay for his industry as though he has done injury to the state; if a railroad be opened, down comes the tax collector upon it, as though it were a public nuisance if a factory be erected, we levy upon it an annual sum that would go far toward making a handsome profit.
Henry George, economist
-------------------------
Now, I've always suspected that Al Gore might be an alien. After all, Gore says very strange things. He seems very uncomfortable in his body, as if it's some sort of human-suit. He was born nine months after the alleged alien sighting in Roswell, New Mexico. He regularly talks about "the Earth" and "this planet" as if he hasn't always lived here.
Jonah Goldberg, NRO, Oct 12, 2000 http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/nr_comment101200c.shtml
-------------------------
Gore also told Leslie Stahl of "60 Minutes" that he could "hypnotize a chicken" with a stick. When Stahl asked if he could hypnotize other creatures, he said, "No. It doesn't work."
Jonah Goldberg, Oct 13, 2000 http://www.yrock.com/opinions/showopinionsarticle.asp?articleid=576&featureid=36
-------------------------
On business: "You know you're in trouble when your customers have your tech support in their speed dial."
William P.N. Smith, wpns@compusmiths.com
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"The BeOS takes the best features from the major operating systems. It's got the power and flexibility of Unix, the interface and ease of use of the MacOS, and Minesweeper from Windows."
Gregor Rosenauer
-------------------------
"... all the stability of a Microsoft OS, AND the intuitive UI of UNIX."
hoche@water.grok.com, commenting on Cygnus "cygwin" (UNIX utilities on Windows) package.
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"We should begin by holding our elected representatives accountable to the Constitution. After all, they do take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, not party bosses or big money contributors. We should tell the truth about abortion, that it is the killing of an unborn baby and that only depraved people would find it socially acceptable. We should warn our young people about the 'death-style' of homosexuality, which is far more dangerous to their life and liberty than tobacco will ever be. We should stop revising and demonizing our nation's history and let our children experience the pride of being an American once again. We should stop telling minorities that they are incapable of being successful without governmental assistance and help them understand that with God and hard work the possibilities for success in this free land are endless. We should encourage people to petition and glorify God freely and openly because He alone is the Author of our liberty and happiness."
Chuck Baldwin
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"Once power and authority are delegated to a government, it knows how to keep it ... so far from parting with the powers actually delegated to it, government is constantly encroaching on the small pittance of rights reserved by the people, and gradually wresting them out of their hand."
Maryland Journal, 1788
-------------------------
"From the first history of government to the present time, if we begin with Nimrod and trace down the rulers of nations to those who are now invested with supreme power, we shall find few, very few, who have made the beneficent governor of the universe the model of their conduct, while many are they who, on the contrary, have imitated the demons of the darkness."
Maryland Journal, 1788
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I will not be a party to stealing money from one group of citizens to give to another group of citizens. No matter what the need or apparent justification, once the coffers of the federal government are opened to the public, there will be no shutting them again.
Grover Cleveland
-------------------------
We find a classic statement of Constitutional government in the first term [of Grover Cleveland], when Cleveland vetoed a bill for drought relief in Texas in 1887 and enunciated again what James Madison had said in the 1790's, that the federal government was not authorized to spend money merely on "objects of benevolence." Madison could not have said it better. "Paternal care" is now commonly assumed to be the principal duty of the federal government:
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. ... The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood."
Grover Cleveland, from
"The Great Republic: Presidents and States of the United States of
America, and Comments on American History"
http://www.friesian.com/presiden.htm
It should be noted that the "friendliness and charity of our countrymen" raised more money for the aid of Texans than was requested from the government, which was only $10,000.
-------------------------
"Ah, but October is nothing short of grand. Crisp mornings, warm afternoons, cool evenings. What could be more invigorating than the wake-up call of the early morning air in this vintage month? ... It's as if nature, clinging tenaciously to life, determines to go out with a blaze of glory - a splendid doom. October is a metaphor for dying civilization, resplendent in its dotage. America today is October country: brilliant hues, dazzling scenes, frantic activity masking decay, like the bright colors of a life pile mingling with the musty odor of dissolution. At October's close comes Halloween, haunted eve when the world is given over to nightmare creatures. Ghosts, goblins and ghouls caper about, daring us to refuse them a treat. Our own monsters, all too real - sexual savages gnawing at the nation's moral innards, nihilists masquerading as artists, armies of angry mendicants, posturing politicians only too willing to sell us into slavery for a bag full of votes - will dance on the rubble of civilization. Here are demons, intent on soaping society's windows, who won't be appeased by chocolate bars or candy corn. Still, like the seasons, civilizations come and go. The passing of one gives nourishment to the next. After October, the world slides into a wintry grave, to await rebirth in the spring. After this life, life eternal beckons us. October is a wistful time. Soon, the rains will come; the wind will bite; the snow will fly. But that knowledge, far from depressing, only enhances our urgent pleasure in the rich spectacle."
Don Feder, 2000
-------------------------
"Last year, some 54 federal departments and agencies and more than 130,000 federal employees spent over $18.7 billion writing and enforcing federal regulations. During the Clinton/Gore administration, the number of full-time positions in regulatory agencies reached an all-time high. The era of big government is not over. According to renowned economist Thomas Hopkins, federal regulations were estimated to cost the American people $721 billion this year, which is equal to about 40 percent of all federal spending - representing a hidden tax of more than $6,800 per year for each American family. This figure only represents direct compliance costs, not indirect costs such as the cost of lost productivity, the increased cost of goods and services (as we are seeing with gas prices right now), and lower wages. ... In fact, the average number of pages of regulations in the Federal Register is sky-rocketing. Currently, the Clinton-Gore administration is placing an average of 210 pages of regulations per day in the Federal Register. The last time there was such a flood of regulations was at the end of the Carter administration - when the Federal Register had an average of 200 pages of regulations per day. In addition, the Clinton-Gore administration is attempting to bypass the safeguards of the Administrative Procedure Act which require federal agencies to provide opportunities for informed and meaningful public participation as part of the regulatory rulemaking process. It is doing so by making liberal use of interim final rules, guidance documents, and policy statements that do not require public comment and are not subject to review by the courts. ... This is irresponsible and wrong. It is another egregious abuse of power in the long list of abuses that constitute the real legacy of the Clinton-Gore years."
Sen. James M. Inhofe, 2000
-------------------------
I'm so naive about finances. Once when my mother mentioned an amount and I realized I didn't understand, she had to explain: "That's like three Mercedes." Then I understood.
actress Brooke Shields on her grasp of finances
-------------------------
"Pride slays thanksgiving, but an humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves."
Henry Ward Beecher
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"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.... A hyphenated American is not an American at all... Americanism is a matter of the spirit, and of the soul...The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans...each preserving its separate nationality.... The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans.... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American."
Theodore Roosevelt
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"In 1950, the tax burden on the typical American family was about 5 percent of their annual income. Today, the government burden on families is about 40%. Translation: If taxes had stayed at the 1950 level, millions of mothers could return to the full-time care of their homes and children with little or no reduction in family income. And according to a series of recent studies and surveys, that's where most of them have decided they would prefer to be: at home, raising their children. Those institutions - marriage, family, religion, schools - that historically have preserved our social learning curves and served as bulwarks against moral degeneration, are under broad attack, and crumbling. It is not a priority of liberals to stop this assault."
Linda Bowles
-------------------------
"The progressives' campaign against the Scouts is another example of the liberals' extremism. It has been a characteristic of them for several decades. They set out on a good cause - in this case tolerance - and become intolerant themselves. They call for diversity and end up demanding conformity. The Scouts' ban on homosexuality does not harm homosexuals. It causes them no material damage and no embarrassment - unless they are, well, a little too sensitive. They might remember Groucho's old line about not wanting to be a part of any club whose standards were so low as to allow him entry. There is wisdom there."
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
-------------------------
"Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them."
Joseph Sobran
-------------------------
"I think 'Clueless' was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness."
Alicia Silverstone, star of the movie 'Clueless'
-------------------------
"Embedded in the American culture is a deep reverence for innovation and entrepreneurship. Our traditional icons are the Yankee inventor, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, the cowboy, the astronaut, the Arctic explorer. This represents an important advantage. But of late, this current has become muddied. Our new heroes are the sports star, the entertainer, the stock trader, and the pop star - symbols of getting rich quick rather than of creating value. Moreover, we are losing the cohesiveness of our social and civil polity. Always somewhat thin, it is becoming positively frayed. There is less and less of what holds us together, less and less that induces each of us to care about and work for the greater good of the whole. Such a fragmenting environment is not a nourishing one."
Michael Hammer, "Beyond Reengineering"
-------------------------
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
original source unknown
-------------------------
A little philosophy inclines a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy brings men's minds about to religion."
Francis Bacon
-------------------------
What are all histories but God manifesting himself?"
Oliver Cromwell
-------------------------
The proper question to be asked about any creed is not 'Is it pleasant?' but 'Is it true?'"
Dorothy Sayers
-------------------------
More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing nothing, than by believing too much."
P. T. Barnum
-------------------------
"Just because the person who criticizes you is an idiot doesn't make him wrong."
Roger Rosenblatt
-------------------------
"If the Democrats wanted Gore to be president so bad they should have voted for impeachment."
unknown
-------------------------
"Restoring prayer ... will scarcely at this date solve the grievous public school problem. Public schools are expensive and massive centers for cultural and ideological brainwashing, at which they are unfortunately far more effective than in teaching the 3 R's or in keeping simple order within the schools. Any plan to begin dismantling the public school monstrosity is met with effective opposition by the teachers' and educators' unions. Truly radical change is needed to shift education from public to unregulated private schooling, religious and secular, as well as home schooling by parents."
Murray Rothbard
-------------------------
Multiple Sclerosis vs. Microsoft - One is a debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task. The other is a disease.
adapted from Nathaniel Borenstein
-------------------------
"I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position."
Mark Twain
-------------------------
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we have come together in the midst of one of our country's most difficult periods. After two years of turmoil, a president of the United States has resigned his office. His chosen successor, in who Democrats and Republicans alike had at first placed such hope, has granted a "full, free and absolute pardon" to the fallen president in advance of any charges filed against him. The pardon has again opened the wounds of Watergate. It has undermined respect for law and order. It has prejudiced pending trials. It has tormented the families of those already in prison for the administration's political crimes. It is yet another blow to that vast body of law-abiding Americans, whose faith in equal justice under law has been shaken, then repaired, and now shaken again."
Twenty-eight-year-old William Jefferson Clinton, speaking before the Arkansas State Democratic Convention, September 13, 1974
-------------------------
"He told her that she had no right to go against nature. So I have to admit that in a way, I owe my life to that priest."
Pop singer Celine Dion, in the London celebrity magazine "Hello!", explaining that she was the 14th child and her weary mother had considered abortion.
"She was so shattered she went to see the parish
priest to see if she could do something about it," Ms. Dion said.
The priest held the line and persuaded Therese Dion not to abort.
"She loved me as passionately as she'd loved the last little ones,"
Ms. Dion said, adding that her mother named her after a song that was a
hit while she was pregnant.
World magazine, January 27, 2001.
-------------------------
"The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate. It is immutable. And if the moral order does not change, then it imposes on us obligations toward God and man. Duty, then, requires the willingness to accept responsibility and to sacrifice one's desires to a higher law."
Patrick Henry
-------------------------
[G]overnment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald Reagan, Remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business, August 15, 1986
-------------------------
How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
Ronald Reagan, Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987
-------------------------
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment, by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
Louis D. Brandeis
-------------------------
In a nation which spends more than $50,000 per convict annually to provide prisoners cable TV, well-stocked libraries, computer centers, three hot regulars, comfortable sleeping accommodations, plenty of free time, excellent exercise facilities and medical care - all the comforts of home - let's just say that if convicts had to live in the same conditions many military personnel have endured for the last decade, the ACLU would be screaming.
Federalist Digest, 16 February 2001
-------------------------
"We seem to care more for the trivial than the important. People who should mean much to us don't, while people who don't even know we exist have become our idols. We overlook the faults of entertainers and sports celebrities, but won't do the same for our own family members. We might have multiple marriages, but we remain loyal to our favorite team."
Chuck Baldwin
-------------------------
"The fundamental principle is this: No matter how worthwhile an end may be, if there is no constitutional authority to pursue it, then the federal government must step aside and leave the matter to the states or to private parties. The president and Congress can proceed only from constitutional authority, not from good intentions alone. If Congress thinks it necessary to expand its powers, the Framers crafted an amendment process for that purpose. But too often, rather than follow that process, Congress has disregarded the limits set by the Constitution and gutted our frontline defense against overweening federal government."
Robert A. Levy
-------------------------
Statistics are no substitute for judgment.
Henry Clay
-------------------------
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts for support rather than illumination.
Andrew Lang
-------------------------
Colleges and universities "cannot make vicious students virtuous or stupid students wise, but they can endeavor to prove to their students that intellectual power is not hostile to moral worth, and they can aspire to chasten intellectual presumption with humility."
Russell Kirk, Dreams of Avarice
-------------------------
"The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be accessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer."
Noah Webster
-------------------------
"Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming."
Mark Steyn
-------------------------
"No one should have to leave their hometown, their families and their roots to find a good job in America."
Hillary Clinton in remarks on the Senate floor
-------------------------
"It's the summer season coming up, so my patients must have tuneups. But instead of doing liposuction on seven areas, they're doing three or four. These decisions are so painful.
New York plastic surgeon Pamela Lipkin, on the tragic downside of an economic downturn, April 2001
-------------------------
"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry."
Thomas Paine
-------------------------
"The Clintons merrily paraded their greed and corruption past us like a garish Mardi Gras float powered by the drivetrain of Bill Clinton's gargantuan sense of entitlement."
Dennis Miller
-------------------------
"I just wanted to speak to you about something from the Internal Revenue Code. It is the last sentence of section 509A of the code and it reads: 'For purposes of paragraph 3, an organization described in paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501C-4, 5, or 6, which would be described in paragraph 2 if it were an organization described in section 501C-3.' And that's just one sentence out of those fifty-seven feet of books."
Ronald Reagan
-------------------------
"If you can't trust me with a choice,
How can you trust me with a child?" (bumper sticker)
"If you won't let me have an abortion,
I may resort to infanticide." (what it means)
Daniel Kirk
-------------------------
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler a few years back.
John Maynard Keynes (Obviously, this quote also applies to Keynes himself!)
-------------------------
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...."
James Madison
-------------------------
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H.L. Mencken
-------------------------
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
E. W. Dijkstra
-------------------------
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
Winston Churchill
-------------------------
"The function of Socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."
Norman Mailer
-------------------------
Coincidence: "The occurrence of events that happen at the same time by [perceived - mlc] accident but seem to have some connection" (Merriam-Webster)
That is, God's way of remaining anonymous.
-------------------------
"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."
E.M. Forster
-------------------------
"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."
Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate and one of the founders of the ACLU.
-------------------------
It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesnt improve: it more resembles the Communist economy than our own market economy.
Albert Shanker, former head of the American Federation of Teachers
-------------------------
"If PBS doesn't indoctrinate us, who will?"
Fred R. McClurg, regarding the TV series "Evolution" produced by Paul Allen.
-------------------------
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
-------------------------
"We want America to gather complete information and find the real culprits."
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of Afghanistan's Taliban government, on the recent terrorist attacks in the U.S. [This looks like a job for Ambassador O.J. Simpson.]
-------------------------
"From the first history of government to the present time, if we begin with Nimrod and trace down the rulers of nations to those who are now invested with supreme power, we shall find few, very few, who have made the beneficent governor of the universe the model of their conduct, while many are they who, on the contrary, have imitated the demons of the darkness."
Maryland Journal, 1788
-------------------------
tolerate (v.) - to put up with [something bad]
"But [tolerance] isn't putting up with everything bad.
Tolerance is the wisdom to know which bad things to put up with, when, why, and
to what degree - along with the strength of character to act on that wisdom. ... There
are different levels of toleration, with honors at one end and punishment at the other.
You need the wisdom to know not only what to tolerate, but how far to go.
... it's not necessarily intolerant to express strong convictions.
... it's not necessarily intolerant to suggest that an opposing view is false.
... it's not necessarily intolerant to suggest that a particular behavior shouldn't be tolerated.
... It's not necessarily intolerant to express a judgment about right and wrong,
or good and bad."
J. Budziszewski
-------------------------
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
Thomas Jefferson
-------------------------
"What does Esther Dyson actually do, and is she any good at it?
"Like lots of other trumpeters of the New Economy, what Esther Dyson did best during the go-go '90s was make a joyful noise. Technically, she's president and owner of the computer consulting firm EDventure Holdings, but her real position is as the doyenne of the digerati. How one gets to be a doyenne we've never quite figured out, or we'd be one by now. Like celebrities who are famous for being famous, Dyson is important because a lot of people think she's important, and they pay plenty to attend her conferences, where she never fails to make entirely unsurprising pronouncements.
"Daughter of renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, the man who said, "It is better to be wrong than to be vague," Esther has figured out how to do both simultaneously. Dyson knows Russian as well as guru-speak, which must have made it seem like a naturally good idea to invest in computer ventures in Russia. Our advice? Learn Chinese."
Forbes Magazine http://www.forbes.com/asap/2001/0528/024_print.html
-------------------------
"The secret to managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided."
Casey Stengel (1890-1975)
-------------------------
"The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion."
John Lawton, in an address to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists (1995)
-------------------------
Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the "most reliable Windows ever." To me, this is like saying that asparagus is "the most articulate vegetable ever."
Dave Barry [http://www.miami.com/herald/special/features/barry/2002/docs/jan06.htm]
-------------------------
"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness."
Charles Darwin (probaby not trying to be ironic)
-------------------------
The neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
Thomas Szasz
-------------------------
"Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar."
Edward R. Murrow
-------------------------
Ronald Reagan once described the taxpayer as "someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=105001930 (around April 15, 2002)
-------------------------
Ehrlich-think : Recall the famous 1989 explanation of environmental strategy by global-warming crusader Stephen Schneider: to save the world "We need . . . to capture the public's imagination. That of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we have." And "each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
source lost - probably Wall Street Journal's online "OpinionJournal", April 2002
See also:
http://www.sacbee.com/static/archive/news/projects/environment/index02.html
http://www.usconservation.org/html/knudson.html
http://www.aldenchronicles.com/articles_by_diane/diane_042601.html
http://www.crowley-offroad.com/taxpayer_dollars_fund_environmentalist.htm
http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/press/2001/2001_0508environmentalmovement.htm
Bjørn Lomborg, "THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST", Cambridge University Press, September 2001
for environmentalist exposes
-------------------------
"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work."
Carl Sandburg, American poet, in the "New York Times" of 13 February 1959.
-------------------------
"Kids who have yet to master spelling or basic math are in no position to dogmatize about scientific questions like global warming or nuclear power."
Thomas Sowell
-------------------------
"In one century, we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college."
columnist Joseph Sobran
-------------------------
"Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long."
Somerset Maugham
-------------------------
"There's nothing liberal about the Left except on two issues: personal sex activity and personal drug use. On everything else they are totalitarians."
David Horowitz
-------------------------
"You remember those old mom-finger-snaps, bless them, as loud as the bolt of a carbine, and with the same fearsome promise."
Larry Miller, "I'm Losing You in the Canyon", The Weekly Standard, 07/01/2002
-------------------------
"It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players - more if they are moderately restless. It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning."
Bill Bryson, "In a Sunburned Country"
-------------------------
Many have said that the lottery is a 'hidden tax' or 'regressive tax' on the poor who wish for wealth. Quine considered state lotteries as "a public subsidy of intelligence" on the grounds that "it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the beknighted masses of wishful thinkers."
Willard Van Orman Quine - mathematical logic titan, who died at 92 on Christmas Day 2000. (Unfortunately, governments don't reduce other taxes as consequence, they just rake in more money. Just as unfortunately, people keep playing.)
-------------------------
"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Samuel Johnson
-------------------------
"I don't feel like an old man. I feel like a young man who has something seriously wrong with him."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
-------------------------
"If you can't ride two horses at the same time you shouldn't be in the circus."
Dennis Healey
-------------------------
"You've heard it while on hold on the phone, or in an elevator,
or at some store. A kind of Muzak:
'Lite, bouncy, receptionist-driving-home-from-the-health-club-
thinking-about-new-shoes jazz'"
James Lileks
-------------------------
"I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book."
Groucho Marx
-------------------------
"In a small churchyard in Alexandria, Virginia there is a humble monument to an Unknown Soldier of the Revolution. These are the words on his tomb:"
Here lies a soldier of the Revolution whose identity is known but to God.
His was an idealism that recognized a supreme being.
That planted religious liberty on our shores;
That overthrew despotism;
That established a people’s government;
That wrote a Constitution setting metes and bounds of delegated authority;
That fixed a standard of value upon men above gold; and,
Lifted high the torch of civil liberty along the pathway of mankind.
In ourselves his soul exists as part of ours:
His memory’s mansion.
Rich Galen, "Mullings" column for September 11, 2002
-------------------------
-------------------------
"I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own."
Montaigne (a postscript on the enterprise of collecting quotes)
-------------------------
'Nuff said.
Stan Lee
-------------------------
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