You Did

Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.
--The Bible (Matthew 25:40)

Objects

Objects once prized lose their newness and become disposable. But they have spiritual properties, and to discard them carelessly is to dishonor the past that shaped us.
--David Edelstein

December 1910

On or about December 1910, human character changed.
--Virginia Woolf

Free

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
--Denis Diderot

Powerful

Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life" said: "George, I'm an old man and most people hate me. But I don't like them either so that makes it all even." I think that's probably the default position among the rich and powerful.
--Joe Posnanski

Limited People

Running a country is so difficult, it is generally only rather limited people who feel they are up to the task.
--Alain de Botton

History

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
--Karl Marx

Nonsense

We live in a nation where our responsible leaders are afraid to talk sense to us while the most irresponsible demagogues feel absolute license to talk nonsense to us.
--Mitch Gitman

Inflexible

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.
--Clay Shirky

Unlikely

There is a common compulsion to describe unlikely outcomes as miraculous--if they are happy, of course. If sad, they are simply reported on, or among the believing described as "the will of God." Some disasters are so horrible they don't qualify as the will of God, but as the work of Satan playing for the other team.
--Roger Ebert

Punish

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
--Thomas Paine

The Fire

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.
--Mark Twain

Our Lives

I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces--my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that.
--Elizabeth Edwards

New Forums

Blogs, email, social networks, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas--and created new targets for censorship....Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society, or any other, pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society.
--Hillary Clinton (January 2010)

Pathological

Millionaires and billionaires are going to need a little nudge and some heavy duty therapy in the form of fair taxation to cure them of their pathological hoarding.
--Karen Garcia

Honor

The point isn't to achieve everything, simply to honor what one suspects one is capable of.
--Alain de Botton

Myths

Many people nowadays think only primitive people believe in myths, but myths dominate the thinking of every society, including our own. A myth is a story that makes sense of the world. Most ancient cultures took their myths from religion; most modern societies take theirs from science or political ideology.
--John Michael Greer

Unnatural

How lonely and unnatural man is and how deep and well-concealed are his confusions.
--John Cheever

Coffee

But for me coffee was first and foremost a caffeine delivery system. It was medicine, just as food, stripped of its pretensions, is fuel.
--Frank Bruni

Things

Because things are the way they are, they will not stay the way they are.
--Berthold Brecht

Obvious

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
--George Orwell

Best Friend

When you go to war over religion, you're basically killing each other to see who has the best imaginary friend.
--Richard Jeni

Romance

God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyll and Hyde of sacred romance.

--Mark Twain

How Are You?

It's normally agreed that the question "How are you?" doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.
--Christopher Hitchens

Did Not Create

And I remind you that those tax cuts have been in effect for a very long time--they did not create jobs.
--Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Always Wins

When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes "uncivil" to call out liars, lying becomes free.
--Rick Perlstein

Stand for Something

Call it polarization, call it conviction, call it whatever you like: These are not wishy-washy times. If you don't stand for something, you get run over.
--Eugene Robinson

Every Door

Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
--Emily Dickinson

Herds

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.
--Charles Mackay

Secret Source

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
--Mark Twain

Virtual

All relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.
--Roger Ebert

Information

Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality.
--Jaron Lanier

Software

Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.
--Zadie Smith

Like Fear

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
--C. S. Lewis

Democratic Revolution

People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don't vote.... If the poor in the United States turned out and voted for people who represented their interests, it would be a democratic revolution. So they don't want it to happen. Keeping people hopeless and pessimistic are two ways in which people are controlled.
--Tony Benn (former British Labour MP)

No Conditions

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
--Hannah Arendt

Thin Thread

The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.
--Carl G. Jung

Real Differences

Discussion of religion often glosses over the very real differences between systems of belief and the consequences of specific doctrines.
--Sam Harris

Wrong

Everyone wants to think they're smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors. They're wrong. And we can prove it.
--Carmen M. Reinhart (economist at the University of Maryland)

Laziness

What gets called "laziness" is usually a pull towards another conflicting kind of work rather than a desire to do nothing.
--Alain de Botton

Beauty

By beauty, I mean that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.
--Edmund Burke

Values We Revere

Shelter aside, good architecture is about embedding values we revere into matter--so we can be reminded of what counts.
--Alain de Botton

Not Real

Money is not real. Yet somehow we've decided it's a great idea to stop feeding real food to real people and cease educating real children in order to demonstrate fealty to an abstract concept.
--Jonathan Schwarz

Your Journey

You chose your journey long before you came upon this highway.
--Leonard Cohen

The Odds

The odds against any of us being here at this moment are staggering.
--Roger Ebert

Silver, Gold

Race horses teach us things about ourselves that maybe at times we are too afraid to uncover. They show us that occasionally we miss the silver lining because we are too busy looking for gold.
--Claudette Canada

Too Expensive

It's just too expensive to save ourselves. It's not cost-effective.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Rising Age

You can measure out your years by observing the rising age of the oldest person you could conceive of sleeping with.
--Alain de Botton

Born For

We are all born for love; it is the principle of existence and its only end.
--Benjamin Disraeli

Embarassed

I'm embarassed to be human.
I'm embarassed that I want what I despise.
--Patty Larkin

Simplicity

Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
--Rashi

Inflict Harm

History, science, psychiatry have shown us: those who intentionally inflict harm on the animal kingdom are just as likely to commit harm on the human side of species.
--Judge Frank LaBuda

Book of Job

I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes out well in it.
--Virginia Woolf

Good Movies

Good movies are a civilizing force. They allow us to empathize with those whose lives are different than our own. I like to say they open windows in our box of space and time.
--Roger Ebert

Socializing

Internet socializing is to socializing as reality television is to reality.
--Aaron Sorkin

Work Less Hard

We'd probably work a lot less hard if we could be sure of being liked without any worldly achievements to our names.
--Alain de Botton

Lack of Time

The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.
--Paulo Coelho

One Person

Still, it's nice to have one person who knows all your secrets.
--Chuck Palahniuk

Terrible Risk

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
--Carolyn Heilbrun

Fading Out

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
--George Orwell

Slowly

Hasten slowly.
--Zen expression

Continual

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
--James Madison

Governed

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
--G. K. Chesterton

Some Victory

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
--Horace Mann

Dependent

The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.
--Theodore Roosevelt

Barely Register

The rest of the periodic table, Elements 3 through 118, lithium through ununoctium, barely register on a cosmic scale. The rest of the universe, you and I included, is a rounding error.
--Sam Kean

Crucial

It is crucial in any loving relationship that the partners know when to leave each other alone without having to fill out a privacy application. Don't ask, don't tell. Just go in the room and close the door. So long, see you later.
--Garrison Keillor

Insincerity

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
--George Orwell

Excess

Moderation is a fatal thing: nothing succeeds like excess.
--Oscar Wilde

Friendships

Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic.
--Todd May

A Field

Outside ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field....I'll meet you there.
--Rumi

A Wake

I like to think that most people who got caught up in that bellicose hysteria experienced the attacks as a spectatorial event, as unreal, and so their reaction was also unreal--like the "payback-time" montage in an action film or the impotent revenge scenarios we play out in our heads. It wasn't until I actually went to New York City a week after the attacks that I understood how empty and inappropriate an emotion anger was to bring to the circumstances; it was like picking fights at a wake.
--Tim Kreider

No God

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.
--Thomas Jefferson

Worship Something

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping we are becoming.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Opposite Direction

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost.
--Franz Kafka

For Others

One of the deepest secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
--Lewis Carroll

The Process

Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Empathy

As we grow up we are supposed to learn something the right derides called "empathy." Empathy is basically an expanded sense of self. It recognizes that because what happens to you affects me and mine, that you and your interests are my concern. If you fail, in the long run, I fail. If I help you succeed, in the long run I will benefit by it.
--J.N. Dillard

The Mosque

Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn't bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I've heard or read.
--Michael Kinsley

A Clash

We must understand that what the terrorists seek is a clash of civilizations. We must do everything possible to avoid giving them propaganda victories in their attempt to create a cosmic war between Judeo-Christian civilization and Muslim civilization. The fight is not between the West and Islam.
--Jeffrey Goldberg

Complexity

It seems to me that we have allowed our political culture and media to drift into a kind of senility. It is almost impossible to believe we are capable as a nation of having a national argument that has any level of complexity at all. Discussions of Keynesian policy, climate change and energy policy, even the life and death decisions of how and when we use military power--seem abandoned if the argument cannot be made in 30 seconds or less.
--Darrix Philadelphia

Pretend

You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty.
--Gemli Boston

Simple

The psychology is incredibly simple: When the government gives me something, it is an expression of communal decency. When it gives you something, it is capitulation to a bloodsucking parasite.
--Dick Dworkin

A Vacation

Let's give God a vacation.
He must be tired of it all.
Rigging the game, taking the blame,
Twenty four hours a day on call.
He gave us the power to reason.
He put the spark in the clay.
So let's let him go for a season
and start making sense today.
--Mose Allison

How Delicate We Are

It's amazing to me how delicate we are and how strong we are. What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die--that's that.
--Laura Linney

Hate

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
--Hermann Hesse

Monsters and Miracles

We are a boatful of monsters and miracles, hoping that, somehow, we can survive a world in which all hands are against us. A world which, by all evidence, will end extremely soon. Yet, I posit we are in a universe which favors stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can be only continuances. If we are in such a universe, as I hope, then we may have a chance.
--Reed Richards

So NYC

Kagan is so Manhattan, Scalia is so Queens, Ginsburg is so Brooklyn and Sotomayor is so Bronx. They adopted in their identities the whole New York sensibility.
--Joan Biskupic

Destiny

The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.
--Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin

Long For

If you want to build a ship, don't herd 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

Interconnected

We are a nation of people interconnected in every day life. If the gulf between the haves and have-nots continue to widen, it means the social fabric that gives us resilience and strength will falter. The pain that most of us feel will eventually be shared by all.
--Spence Malvern

Belong To...

So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me--each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other.
--Buckminster Fuller

Nowhere To Go

Being a Mets fan, I find that it has its advantage. No anticipation, no disappointment. I pity the Yankee fan--there's nowhere to go but down.
--M. Levine

Truth and Dare

I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.
--Michel de Montaigne

Individuals

"Think globally, act locally" has a corollary: plan in terms of classes, but act in terms of individuals.
--Bejay Willamsburg

Needs Our Love

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Self-Medication

I think that what a lot of artists do are acts of self-medication. In the chaos, disorder, and anguish of the world, the moment you have some control, that you can make something beautiful, for a moment: You're free.
--Vikram Jayanti

Elsewhere

Existence is elsewhere.
--André Breton (The Surrealist Manifesto)

Common

It is a very common phenomenon to feel the greatest despair just as a long-desired goal approaches.
--Graham Firchlis

Naturally

Am I the only Luddite who thinks that technology--overwhelming created by neuro-atypical males--naturally diminishes the social and empathic aspects of life?
--Frequent Flyer

Morality

The most important human endeavor is striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depends on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives.
--Albert Einstein

We Are Friends

The non-economic character of friendship does not lie in its altruism, but in its lack of accounting. We are friends not solely because you amuse me or assist me, but more deeply because we have rooted ourselves together in a soil we have both agreed to cultivate.
--Todd May

Learn To Dance

Anxious and arrogant, we seek to control what we do not understand. In a world of contingencies and complexities, better we should learn to dance.
--Guy Wilcox

What Exactly

We need a slow communication movement along the lines of the Italian slow food movement. Caring about something takes time. And what exactly is the Internet's speed and diversity preparing us for?
--Scott Chicago

To Do

To be is to do.
--Immanuel Kant

Not Insentient

Our house was not insentient matter--it had a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us and we were in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved.
--Mark Twain

No Purpose

Conservative ideology rests on the fiction that social organization serves no purpose.
--Dos Syracuse

Not Real

Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring abstract value. Unhealthy societies often become mesmerized by money and treat it as if it were something concrete. The effect is to destroy the currency's practical value.
--John Ralston Saul

Sentiment

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
--Abraham Lincoln

The Economy

Somebody must take a loss on the economy's bad loans--and bankers want the economy to take the loss, to "save the financial system." From the financial sector's vantage point, the economy is to be managed to preserve bank liquidity, rather than the financial system run to serve the economy.
--Michael Hudson

A Place

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
--Joan Didion

Facebook

Facebook...a way of being social without having to actually socialize. Socializing apparently, in this brave new world, takes too much time and energy. I find that concept abhorrent. I don't need fake friends or phony social "activities." But then, I am weird.
--Slavic Diva

Promise

I don't promise answers, but I do promise responses.
--Spaulding Gray

We Dwell

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.
--Voltaire

Not

Of course, as anyone with any exposure to statistics knows, correlation is not causation.
--Clive Thompson

Problem

Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" now seems a self-fulfilling problem--only it's not for too much governance, now it is for completely abdicating its responsibility to the commonweal.
--Vincent Amato

Positive Interactions

Researchers found that couples in lasting marriages have at least five small positive interactions (touching, smiling, paying a compliment) for every negative one (sneering, eye rolling, withdrawal). When the ratio drops, the risk of divorce increases.
--Margaret Eby

I Believe

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
--Roger Ebert

Moments

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
--George Carlin

Necessary

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
--Carl G. Jung

Love, Fear

When you function in love, your inside creates your outside. When you function in fear, your outside creates your inside.
--Drunvalo Melchizedek

Temporarily

We are all temporarily able-bodied.
--Head of Disabled Student Services at UC Berkeley

Weren't New Yorkers

The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding.
--Jonathan Lethem

Sneaking Around

Astrology is a science for poets: metaphor sneaking around with mathematics.
--Spiritual Mysteries.com

Margin

Once we know that accidents can be catastrophic and irreversible, it becomes clear that there is no margin of error. We're operating a brittle system, unable to contain failure and unable to recover from it.
--David Roberts

Keeps Moving

I don't know nothing except change will come.
Year after year what we do is undone.
Time keeps moving from a crawl to a run.
I wonder if we're gonna ever get home.
--Patty Griffin

Surface

You can't be deep without a surface.
--Jonathan Lethem

Alone

We're all in this alone.

--Lily Tomlin

Interconnected

Simply put, contagion is a fact of life in our interconnected global economy and financial markets.
—Gretchen Morgenson

More Damaging

Having consumed most of the world's readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways.
--Elizabeth Kolbert

Our Wealth

Immigrants are not our burden, they are our wealth.
--Jane Adams

Extend Ourselves

Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, we have used technology to extend ourselves.
--Ray Kurzweil

Not Bad

I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.
--Jessica Rabbbit

New Grammar

We often say, rightly, that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can't write, you can't think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar.
--Clive Thompson

Comes Into

Joy comes into our lives when we have something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.
--Viktor E. Frankl

Bliss

If only I didn't know that ignorance is bliss, then, maybe, I could be happy.
--Shannon Wheeler

No Age

Youth has no age.
--Pablo Picasso

Isn't Being

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
--Peter Drucker

The Road

The road is our major architectural form.
--Marshall McLuhan

Our Way Of Life

Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life.
--Jack Gerard (president, American Petroleum Institute)

On Water

Walking on water wasn't built in a day.
--Jack Kerouac

All That Yearning

All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been times in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.
--David Nicholls

End Point

Hoarding can be a way of denying that there's an end point to your timeline or boundaries around your opportunities.
--Heather Havrilesky

Converse With Everything

Aborigines openly and unaffectedly converse with everything in their surroundings--trees, tools, animals, rocks--as if all things have an intelligence deserving of respect.
--Robert Lawlor

Epistemic Closure

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.
--Julian Sanchez (research fellow, Cato Institute)

Backward

History, like nature, knows no jumps, except the jump backward, maybe.
--Robert Penn Warren

In A Nutshell

It is the strange thing about this church. It is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say that we, with our permissive society and our rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it. It's fun, it's jolly; because it's a primal urge it can be dark and dangerous and difficult---it's a bit like food, in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that, in erotic terms, is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.
--Stephen Fry

Dream Letter

A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.
--The Talmud

Monkees Fan Club

Considering that it's an artificial movement generated around a cheap media persona, declaring yourself a supporter of the Tea Party is a bit like being a proud member of a Monkees Fan Club.
--Devilstower

Acceptance

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
--George Orwell

The Whole

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.
--Jiddu Krishnamurti

Fixes Itself

The real slogan should be "Save the humans," because it's our own extinction that is the real threat, not damage to the planet, which fixes itself.
--DoubleHelix

One Shred

I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth--one shred of evidence.
--Paul Volcker

One Of The Worst

I felt sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though their cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.
--Ulysses S. Grant

Minority or Majority

It comes down to this in the end--the minority of the living, a mere 6.7 billion people on a fragile planet, and the majority of the dead, numberless and stretching back over an expanse vaster than the iciest steppe. Do you choose the minority or the majority? For whose account do you labor?
--Roger Cohen

Changed My Mind

That's a conundrum, isn't it? I don't know what to say. Maybe I don't want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security. I didn't look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I've changed my mind.
--Jodine White (Tea Party supporter; New York Times, April 15, 2010)

Twitter

Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry.
--George Packer

Place At The Table

What gives a church in which celibacy is equated with holiness, in which males have almost all the power, the right to a place at the table where laws are made about women's bodies?
--Katha Pollitt

Evolve a System

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
--George Orwell

Community

The reason most people do theater is because of the community. It is an art form where together you create something so much greater as an artist than you could do by yourself.
--Derek Cook

Patriotism

A modest proposal: no one displaying the Confederate flag gets to lecture any American about patriotism--ever.
--John Perr

It Happens

Progress is not an illusion. It happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
--George Orwell

Miracles

All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in?
--John Updike

Ordinary Human

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
--George Orwell

Go Broke

Many low-income debtors must save for months before they can afford to go broke.
--John Collins Rudolf

Senses

The goal is not to bring your adversaries to their knees but to their senses.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Western Time

Mid-century modernism helped confirm and create a new way of thinking about time. It is characteristic of First World, industrial cultures to think of time as something open-ended. This marks them as very different from traditional, face-to-face societies, who are inclined to think of time as something repetitive, redundant, in a word, circular. Western time is a bullet train. It hurtles away from the present, taking us with it as it goes.
--Grant McCracken

Forever

Forever is composed of nows.
--Emily Dickinson

His Own Words

My bet would be that if you tried to pin him down on this he'd tell you that he didn't say what he said. If he's like most people, he wouldn't recognize his own words as his own words even if you showed him a video of him saying those very words. That's because for most people words don't matter as conveyors of meaning. Words are merely sounds that express feeling.
--Lance Mannion

Small Talk

Lots of what passes for small talk is actually quite revealing, and to a sensitive listener can quickly lead to deeper communication.
--Siri Gottlieb

Right, Wrong

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
--G.K. Chesterton

One Who Smiles

Washington Establishmentarians in the National Press Corps define a moderate Democrat as one who is willing to work with Republicans to kill Democratic initiatives. A moderate Republican is one who smiles when he calls Democrats cowards, traitors, and socialists.
--Lance Mannion

It's Not Like

Stop the whining about "abuse of power." They passed a bill you don't like, for crying out loud, it's not like they seized office with a partisan decision by the Supreme Court and then invaded a country that hadn't attacked us or anything.
--Digby

Pillars

This bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.
--Rep. James W. Wadsworth (R-NY; on Social Security, 1935)

Not More Special

And fuck all the "it's a republic not a democracy" or "the founders wanted two senators per state" crap. It's all stupid rationalizations for an unjustifiable system. People in Wyoming are not more special in people in California and should not have more say over the way the country is governed.
--Scientician

Years of Experience

Increasing health-care coverage is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the number of abortions--a fact proved by years of experience in other industrialized nations.
--T.R. Reid

God Bless

Bipartisanship gave us the Patriot Act and FISA and illegal wiretaps and two wars and "free speech zones" and "no fly" lists. God bless bipartisan America.
--John Cory

Growth

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
--Edward Abbey

Like the Weather

Statistics aren't evil. They're just a bit like the weather--hard to really predict.
--Mark Suster

Clever Devil

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
--C. S. Lewis

Shareholder Value

American business is about maximizing shareholder value. You basically don't want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.
--Allen Sinai (chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics)

The Mind

It's not the job of the mind to tell us who we are.
--A.H. Almaas

Dream In The Body

Sickness is a dream in the body, and symptoms are possessed of what the physicist David Bohm calls "soma-significance." They mean something. They have wisdom, metaphoric power, method in their madness. They are one of the languages the soul uses to get across to us something about itself.
--Gregg Levoy

Age Is Opportunity

For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Plan

Everyone has a plan until they've been hit.
--Joe Louis

Time Affluent

There's often a rush to trade time for money, even though a variety of studies have found people who are "time affluent" are happier than those who are materially affluent.
--Laura Rowley

You Sigh

Most movies are simpleminded and pretend it is earth-shakingly important whether this boy and this girl mate forever, when a lot of young romance is just window-shopping and role-playing, and everyone knows it. You break up, you sigh, you move on. The process is so universal that with some people, you sigh as you meet them, in anticipation.
--Roger Ebert

True Spirit

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
--Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Just Are

I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.
--Chuck Palahniuk

Heartbeats

I heard on the radio that we creatures have about a billion and a half heartbeats to use. Voles and birds use theirs fast as do meth heads and stockbrokers, while whales and elephants are slower. This morning I'm thinking of recounting mine to see exactly where I am.
--Jim Harrison

Most Singular Difference

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
--J. D. Salinger

Vanity

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.
--Henrich Heine

Elitist

Your life may depend on an arrogant elitist who happens to know what he's doing.
--Garrison Keillor

Loss of Time

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they're being honest--including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books.
--George Packer

The Truth

When there is no authority to the truth, prejudices thrive.
--David Aaronovitch

Dither

People I hardly know still keep asking me to be their Facebook friend. What do I do? It's a bit impolite to ignore their request, which I often do by default. It's rude to say No. And it's a bit false to say Yes. So I dither.
--Dharmaruci

Calamity

It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.
--Frank Kermode

Cultivate

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould and tilled with manure.
--Charlotte Brontë

Indispensable

The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.
--Charles de Gaulle

Just a Dream

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see,
Are the dreams all made solid,
Are the dreams all made real.,
All of the buildings, all of those cars,
Were once just a dream
In somebody's head.
--Peter Gabriel (Mercy Street)

Catcher In The Rye

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
--J. D. Salinger

Savage

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
--Bertrand Russell

Wellness

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
--Abraham Maslow

A Dearth

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
--John Paul Stevens

On and On

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
--Chuck Palahniuk

Blur Line

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
--Arnold Toynbee

Quite Insane

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
--Nikola Tesla

Too Much

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
--William Wordsworth

Quest

He says the primal quest
ain't nothin' but a second guess.
Sometimes you just do your best
to compromise.
--Dave Carter

Releases It

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our Neighbor

Our neighbor is anyone who needs assistance, whether friend or stranger. We cannot expect to correct all the ills of the world but we can help the people with whom we come in contact. This is our spiritual service.
--Elizabeth Sand Turner

The Blues

White folks don't understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.
--August Wilson (title character, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom)

The Art...

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.
--Marcus Aurelius

Anything Else

The sad fact of contemporary American economic culture is atomistic individualism. Anything else is decried as communism.
--Dave Hanson

More Rational

My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by. I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.
--Stewart Brand

Acceptable

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.
--Jaron Lanier

Too Vast

The mind considering itself--I shudder; it is too vast, a space without dimension, filled with cosmic events that are silent and immaterial.
--E. L. Doctorow

What You Can

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
--Theodore Roosevelt

Affection

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
--C. S. Lewis

Grace

Gracefulness is an idea belonging to posture and motion. In both these, to be graceful, it is requisite that there be no appearance of difficulty; there is required a small inflexion of the body.
--Edmund Burke