Tragedy of Life

The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.

--Adam Gopnik

Mutual

One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.

--Rosalind Coward

More Valuable

If a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are some things more valuable than life.

--Poppy Z. Brite

No Snowflake

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

--Zen proverb

Every Love

Every love relationship is based on unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love.

--Milan Kundera

Both Atheists

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

--Stephen Henry Roberts

Cultured Place

The world is now a cultured place, where the devil has evolved accordingly...he's shed his horns and tail and crooked fingers.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Final

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on January 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

--Molly Ivins (final paragraph of final column, January 12, 2007)

Understood

The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's.

--Molly Ivins

Not a Picture on a Wall

Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television program you can decide you just don't care for. Our entire lives are set into and written by the warp and woof of politics. Political decisions affect your life every day in thousands of way--whether the food you eat is safe, what books your children read in school, how deep you will be buried when you die, if the lady who dyes your hair is competent, how safe your money is in stocks or banks, whether you have a job, whether your kid has to go fight in a war, who is qualified to prescribe your eyeglasses--that's all politics.

--Molly Ivins

Modern States

The belief that modern states can continue indefinitely to act as if they were autonomous units, competing with each other to acquire the power to destroy life on a colossal scale, is not only the most insidious of illusions but an unacknowledged pathology.

--Anne Baring

There Comes A Yes

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future world depends.

--Wallace Stevens