What Interests You

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

--Katharine Hepburn

Peace Comes First

It's Madison Avenue's task to make you think you can spend your way into someone's heart at Christmas. That's fine, but it's not true. No one who can be bought is worth buying. That's especially true where romantic love is concerned. Besides, this is the season of peace. For any real friend or lover or relative, your peace of mind comes first.

--Ben Stein

You Must

When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message: "You must change your life."

--Ursula K. LeGuin

Temporary Interruption

Even a temporary interruption of a longstanding habit can inspire growth, even transformation.

--Brian Donohue

Women & Men

A woman who can't forgive should never have more than a nodding acquaintance with a man.

--Edgar Watson Howe

Answers Inside

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

--Marshall McLuhan

Risking Our Persons

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

--William James

Ass Smell

If a lot of dogs are on the beach, the first thing they do is smell each other's ass. The information that's gotten somehow makes pacifists out of all of them. I've thought, "If only we smelled each other's asses, there wouldn't be any war."

--Dustin Hoffman

Drunk God

Don't you know there ain't no devil.
There's just God when he's drunk.

--Tom Waits

Row Row Row

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

--Hunter S. Thompson

Devil's Boredom

It is wonderful how much good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.

--Helen Keller

That Takes Religion

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

--Steven Weinberg

Murder

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

--Napoleon Bonaparte

Short of Experts

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.

--Mark Twain

Sweet and Fitting

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. *

--Wilfred Owen

* It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

Paradox Time

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

--Bertrand Russell

Get It Right

You don't have to get it right the first time.

--Barbara Sher

Can't Laugh

Listen, if you can't laugh at death, you really have no right to be here.

--Robert Altman

A Little Hunger

If you want your children to have a peaceful life, let them suffer a little hunger and a little coldness.

--Chinese proverb

The Present

Do not live in the past, do not live in the future; concentrate the mind on the present moment.

--Buddha

Time Changes

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

--Andy Warhol

Pause in the Action

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

--Guillaume Apollinaire

Trust, Too

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust too.

--John Masefield

Half Awake

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

--William James

Cure the Soul (Anniversary Quote)

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

--Oscar Wilde

In Short

The soul is not a physical entity, but instead refers to everything about us that is not physical--our values, memories, identity, sense of humor. Since the soul represents the parts of the human being that are not physical, it cannot get sick, it cannot die, it cannot disappear. In short, the soul is immortal.

--Harold Kushner

Slightly Faster

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

--Kim Stanley Robinson

The Pass-Word

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy.

--Walt Whitman

So Little

It takes so little to make people happy. Just a touch, if we know how to give it, just a word fitly spoken, a slight readjustment of some bolt or pin or bearing in the delicate machinery of a soul.

--Frank Crane

Let America

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

--Langston Hughes

Do Continuously

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

--Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Rain Is Grace

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

--John Updike

What You Shall Do

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...

--Walt Whitman (preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass)

Celebration of All

Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists.

--Sogyal Rinpoche

Help Forget

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget.

--Ernest Becker

The Unexpected

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

--Mark Twain

Only One

There are 32 ways to write a story, but only one plot: Things are not as they seem.

--Jim Thompson

Looks Into You

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Central Acts

A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.

--Edward Mendelson

Two or Three

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

--Willa Cather

What Matters

Concepts do matter. The right thought arises from a true sensing within the heart of consciousness.

--Brian Donohue

Yawn Across The Country

The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It's otherworldly....People clearly don't realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country.

--Jonathan Turley (George Washington University professor and constitutional expert)

Tools Of Conquest

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own--for the children, and the children yet unborn.

--Rod Serling

Anything But

How can anybody look at the figure of Christ on the cross and think that's anything but a condemnation of torture? For the thinking person, it clearly is. But for the fundamentalist, that image creates anxiety about death and makes them cling to their hierarchical values even more.

--Amanda Marcotte

Who Knows God's Word?

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

--Thomas Paine

Lack

It is not the lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Our Understanding

It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality.

--George Soros

A Triumph

All the analysis in the world doesn't allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.

--Ernest Becker

Working Class Hero

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV.
And you think you're so clever and classless and free.
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

--John Lennon

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.

--H. L. Mencken

Good Night, America

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

--Steve Goodman

No Vice, No Virtue

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

--Barry Goldwater

Take That

And there you have it: from "compassionate conservative" to the abolition of common law, and all in a mere six years. Take that, Mao.

--Ellis Weiner

Fair Game

When a society throws away 900 years of common law, there's no telling what might happen. It's like using a tactical nuke. Suddenly, things that we, and our parents, and our grandparents were raised to consider too deviant to mention are now fair game.

--Lindsay Beyerstein

That Jewel

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings--give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else!...Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.

--Patrick Henry

Oppressive and Lawless

Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.

--Justice Robert H. Jackson (Brown v. Allen, 1953)

Terrorism Is...

Terrorism is 10% bang and 90% an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and kneejerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated as collectively responsible.

--Simon Jenkins

It's Like Your Dog

We are constantly trying to work out our relation to the other. It's like your dog meeting somebody else's dog. There is a growl, a sniff, a step forward, a potential rejection, or maybe an acceptance. That kind of thing is constantly taking place. Dogs do it very generously. As far as we human beings are concerned, obviously we are more subtle, but we are less generous because we have more "me." But still this process goes on constantly--we do that when we confront our world.

--Chogyam Trungpa

Kant Do

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

--Robert Louis Stevenson

Like Anyone

I never like anyone till I've seen him at his worst.

--Ethel M. Dell

Something Which Consumes

We can only hope we will be able to cope with today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces.

--Gunter Grass

Void For Vagueness

The word spiritual is a space-holder for a variety of other concepts, which it intentionally hides. Like the words love and monogamy, it is void for vagueness, and is a loose thread leading to a cover-up.

--Eric Francis

Reality

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

--Henri Louis Bergson

That's All

To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an "ism." It is independence of mind--that's all.

--Martin Amis

Make Gentle

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

--Robert F. Kennedy

A Matter of Love

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

--Vladimir Nabokov

Let Us...

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

--Charles Dickens

The Lived Truth

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know...that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

--Ernest Becker

Who Knows

Who knows but the world may end tonight?

--Robert Browning

Creation Better...

Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.

--Vida D. Scudder

Beatitudes

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes.

--Kurt Vonnegut

Where? Who?

Where does a cloud come from? Where does it go?
Where was it before it appeared?
Where do people go when they die?
Where do they come from when they're born?
Who are you?

--Zen koan

Comes to America

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

--Sinclair Lewis

War Situation

Despite the best that has been done by everyone...the war situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage.

--Emperor Hirohito (radio broadcast announcing Japan's surrender, August 15, 1945)

Denial

In pretending Pluto is not a planet, we have yet another an example of a big denial trip associated with the darkness of the world. We are saying that the bottom line of reality (whatever is represented by the official planet most distant) is not Pluto: all matters of survival, life and death; sex; shared resources; and social and personal transformation; but rather, that it is Neptune: whatever you want it to be. It is about what you believe. This is a great, humorous metaphor for an era in history when the truth is whatever you want it to be.

--Eric Francis

Fetish

This is not the time to be weak and pacifist. But a gun or a bomb is always a fetish, a substitute for spiritual force, a sign of our weakness. This is the time to be strong in spirit and refuse to be enticed into literal battles in which the loser wins and the winner loses.

--Thomas Moore

Does Not Fit

The large corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit.

--Charles Lindblom

Letting Go

I think most of the spiritual life is really a matter of relaxing--letting go, ceasing to cling, ceasing to insist on our own way, ceasing to tense ourselves up for this or against that.

--Beatrice Bruteau

Derives From...

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all "inherent powers" must derive from that Constitution.

--U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor (August 17, 2006)

Error...Not

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

--William James

Best Argument

I always thought the best argument against the death penalty is God's casting out of Cain, rather than putting him to death.

--Sarah Steiner

Decay

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language...one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

--George Orwell

Need It

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

--Joan Didion

Rule It

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.

--H.L. Mencken

Flying Blues

For thousands of years human beings dreamed of flying, but it took us less than a century to get sick of it.

--Walter Kirn

Ripe Fruit

Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.

--Henry David Thoreau

How Did They...?

But how did such people attain power in the first place? Maybe it's the result of our infantilized media culture, in which politicians, like celebrities, are judged by the way they look, not the reality of their achievements.

--Paul Krugman

In Wait

Even in the most civilized societies the demagogues are always in wait, ready and testing. They are indefatigable and we will never entirely prevail over them. And that is okay. But if we stop resisting them, they will prevail over us. And that is not okay.

---Milos Forman

Ultimate Test

The ultimate test of a man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.

--Senator Gaylord Nelson

I Accept

Is "I accept responsibility" the new "Your call is very important to us"? Probably.

--Seth Godin

Cosmic Joke

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

--Martha Gellhorn

Cannot Sleep Forever

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

--Thomas Jefferson

Choose Your Blastocyst

Can't we just use gay blastocysts? Or terrorist blastocysts? Or liberal blastocysts? I mean, we have DNA testing for that these days.

--Hoosier X

Better Solutions ???

Are there better solutions than violence? Of course there are. But they are all vastly more complicated, and furthermore they take time, hard thinking, and patience.

--Steve Dayton

Accountable

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

--John Stuart Mill

Belief Divides

We have seen that ceremonies are not religion, that going to a temple is not religion, and that belief is not religion. Belief divides people.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti

Patience

Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.

--Ambrose Bierce

Related To All Things

You may call this thought by whatever fancy words you wish--psychology, theology, sociology, or philosophy--but you must think of Mother Earth as a living being. Think of your fellow men and women as holy people who were put here by the Great Spirit. Think of being related to all things.

--Ed McGaa

Wicked

Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed. Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united--and they can only be united against other people.

--Leo Strauss

All Men

It is not too early, it is never too early, for the nation steadfastly to follow its great constitutional traditions, none older or more universally protective against unbridled power than due process of law in the trial and punishment of men, that is, of all men, whether citizens, aliens, alien enemies or enemy belligerents.

--Supreme Court Justice Wiley B. Rutledge (1947)

How Will I Be...?

We often wonder: "How will I be when I die?" The answer to that is that whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now: that's what we will be like at the moment of death, if we do not change....You can see the demigod realm being acted out every day perhaps in the intrigue and rivalry of Wall Street, or in the seething corridors of Washington and Whitehall. And the hungry ghost realms? They exist wherever people, though immensely rich, are never satisfied, craving to take over this company or that one, or endlessly playing out their greed in court cases. Switch on any television channel and you have entered immediately the world of demigods and hungry ghosts.

--Sogyal Rinpoche

Gentle People

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

--Garrison Keillor

Called To Account

A person will be called to account on Judgment Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not.

--The Talmud

Make Yourself

You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.

--Anne-Wilson Schaef

The Master

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

--Martin Heidegger

Reality

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

--Philip K. Dick

Separation = Not Safe

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

--Edmund Burke

Kooks

But really, the idea that worrying about the effect of carbon-dioxide emissions on the world's climate makes you some kind of liberal kook is as tired as the image of Mr. Gore as a stiff, humorless speaker, someone to make fun of rather than take seriously.

--A.O. Scott

Everything Secret

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

--Lord Acton

Pissed

It is better to be pissed off than pissed on.

--Stephen Joyce

Globalization

If you don't feel conflicted about the effects of globalization, if you don't worry about the many losers from the process, you aren't paying attention.

--Paul Krugman

Bearable Only...

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

--Carl Sagan

Money Can't Buy

You aren't wealthy until you have something money can't buy.

--Garth Brooks

The Ape

I'd rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel.

--Terry Pratchett

Con Game

To picture God in terms of power is also one of the great bait and switch gimmicks of all time. People within the power hierarchy proclaim that God is the ultimate authority, and then appoint themselves as God's interpreters and enforcers. They are God's humble bullies. It has been one of the most successful con games of all time.

--Rev. Jim Rigby (pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas)

True and False

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

--Harold Pinter

Life Delights

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

--William Blake

Little...More

My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.

--Charles Lamb

Imagine If...

Imagine if someone in your office, sitting at a desk across from you, were suddenly blown to bits, splattering you with his or her blood. You wouldn't get over it for the rest of your life. This is what happens daily in Iraq.

--Bob Herbert

I Don't Think

I don't think I was clinically an alcoholic. I've had friends who were, you know, very addicted...and they required hitting bottom and going to AA. I don't think that was my case.

--George W. Bush

Not Alone

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

--Pearl S. Buck

Hope

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

--Walter Benjamin

Pleasant Surprise

Serendipity: The pleasant surprise of happening upon a fortunate discovery when you weren't in search of it.

--Henry Walpole (author of The Princess of Serendip)

Essential Virtues

In fact, the mass migration to computers and the Internet in some ways serves as a foil for print, dispensing with its more circumstantial uses and highlighting its most essential virtues.

--Ben Vershbow

Safe But Crowded

The beaten path is the safest, but the traffic's terrible.

--Jeff Taylor

The Light Gets In

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

--Leonard Cohen

Away for Days

Take the day off, dear reader, and ignore the world and let the president play his fiddle. Find the one who means the most to you and make yourselves happy. If that be ignorance, make the most of it.

--Garrison Keillor

Confession

I confess, I do not believe in time.

--Vladimir Nabokov

Time Runs Out

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

Closed Doors

Democracies die behind closed doors.

--Damon J. Keith (Judge for the Sixth Circuit, United States Court of Appeals)

Kick Ass

Every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell's ass.

--Barry Goldwater (1981)

No Skill

If we are to be routinely misled by the government, could they at least do it with a modicum of skill?

--Marina Hyde

Violating All

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

--John Adams

Echo (Echo)

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

--Henri Louis Bergson

Sloppy Ways

I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith--it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

--Robert A. Heinlein

If All Else...

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

--John Kenneth Galbraith

Open the Door

Too often the opportunity knocks, but by the time you push back the chain, push back the bolt, unhook the locks and shut off the burglar alarm, it's too late.

--Rita Coolidge

Mexico Is Theirs

The country is theirs. Their liberty, if they can get it, is theirs, and so far as my influence goes while I am president, nobody shall interfere with them.

--Woodrow Wilson

Hiding Ourselves

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

--Henry Ward Beecher

China Will Astonish

China is a sleeping giant. Let her lie and sleep, for when she awakens she will astonish the world.

--Napoleon Bonaparte

Not All Bits

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

--Carl Sagan

Life Is Full

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering--and it's all over much too soon.

--Woody Allen

Twilight

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness.

--Justice William O. Douglas

Sweet Jam

There was sweet jam
on the handle of the door,
but I doused the anger
that was rising in me
because I thought of the day
when the handles would be clean
and the small hand
absent.

--Seamus O'Neill

Refuse to be Mismanaged

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be

Be curious, not judgmental.

--Walt Whitman

Ethics and Reverence

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

--Albert Schweitzer

Define War

One problem of legal logic is to "define war." We have not been attacked by another nation--in fact, we were clearly the aggressors against Iraq. We were attacked by a private group of ideological zealots led by a Saudi millionaire.

--Molly Ivins

Prediction

I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that.

--Donald Rumsfeld (November 14, 2002)

A Coward's Escape

War is a coward's escape from the problems of peace.

--William Sloane Coffin

The Dead

The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

--Lois McMaster Bujold

Not Limitless

We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

--Paul Bowles

Pharoah Won't Let Us Go

Progressive movements for social change are founded on the widespread realization by a lot of nameless and ordinary people that the established order is unjust, and on their determination that it will be changed in their lifetimes. Pharoah won't let us go until well after enough of us let him go.

--Bruce Dixon

Free of the Anxiety

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

--Ernest Becker

Make Haste

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

--Henri Frédéric Amiel

Overlook

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.

--William James

Touch Another

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

--Frederick Buechner

The Human Response

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

--F. Forrester Church

Brainwashed

I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

--Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

Fruitful Errors

Give me a fruitful error anytime, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.

--Vilfredo Pareto

Spending Oneself

Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

--Sarah Bernhardt

Scar Tissue

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

--Wallace Stegner

What Life Is

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

--Jack Lemmon

Waving Back

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around--and why his parents will always wave back.

--William D. Tammeus

Three Little Words

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

--Robert Frost

Even Witty

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

--Harold Pinter

So Startling

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

--Emily Dickinson

Your Friends

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

--Richard Bach

Taxing

Ask people if they want to be taxed, and they will always say no. Ask them if they are willing to be taxed in order to have roads, courts, health care, guaranteed education for their children through college, and a safe retirement, and the answer is different.

--Abigail Manheim

Nearest Perfection

The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Wise Despot

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

--Frank Herbert

This Is Nice

We should be kind to each other. Be civil. And appreciate the good moments by saying "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is!"

--Kurt Vonnegut

The Hoax

Americans today are great consumers of the hoax of a risk-free life.

--Philip Alcabes

Endlessly

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

--Henri Louis Bergson

Code Word

Anytime you see that "of faith" suffix as in "people of faith," it's a code word for "sex is dirty" or "women are dirty" or simply, "we can't control ourselves so you must not be able to either."

--BlondeSense Liz

Increase Turnout

If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.

--Coretta Scott King

What Citizens Do

Shopping is what consumers do. Talking to each other is what families should do, and talking about building a movement that improves life for all our families is what citizens must do.

--Bruce Dixon

Hard To Find

It is not skepticism about the very idea of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find.

--Kwame Anthony Appiah

Nothing Left To Chance

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

--Stephen King

Shall Make No Law

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

--Amendment I, the U.S. Constitution

Graver Issues

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.

--Janos Arany (poet, 1817-1882)

Ingratitude

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

--Rabindranath Tagore

The Exact Opposite

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.

--Bertrand Russell

Spandex Guy

What Bode Miller is to Olympic triumph, George Bush is to Presidential history, flopping off the slick course of national politics like James Buchanan in Team USA spandex.

--Tom Watson

Ready To Learn

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

--Winston Churchill

The Object Is The Object

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

--George Orwell

It Crumbles

If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America--even those designated as "unlawful enemy combatants." If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles.

--Alberto J. Mora (former general counsel, United States Navy)

Complete and Total

My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

--Barbara Jordan (D, TX; 1972 - 1978)

Nor Cruel...

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

--Amendment VIII, the U.S. Constitution

One Never Regrets...

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

--Oscar Wilde

Mystery At The Heart

Most people still treat matters of money, capital, finance, the stock market, and even simple banking matters as if they were essential mystical or at least magical. The math makes it scary. What remains of the hauteur of the capital markets makes it intimidating. But there is a mystery at the very heart of money.

--Grant McCracken

The World Tends...

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

--Lars von Trier

Really Is...

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

--Groucho Marx

Things Unreasonable

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

--Henri Louis Bergson

Allow No Man

I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

--Booker T. Washington

The Enemy

The enemy of creativity is fear. The enemy of fear, in the short run anyway, is not creativity. It's the fetal position. The fetal position doesn't work. It feels like it ought to, but it just gives you more room for your fear. In the long run, the enemy of fear is creativity. I'm sure of it.

--Seth Godin

Not How It Works

I can't call a newspaper and tell them what to put in it. That's not how our society works.

--Anders Fogh Rasmussen (prime minister of Denmark)

No vs. Yes

A "no" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

--Mahatma Gandhi

Enjoy the Right

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

--Amendment VI, the U.S. Constitution

Enthusiasm

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

--Charles Kingsley

Excellence...

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

--Aristotle

Bounded in a Nutshell

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

--William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

Don't Interfere

Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.

--Abraham Lincoln

The Right of the People

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

--Amendment IV, the U.S. Constitution

Loyalty

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

--Woody Allen

Foreclosed

If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.

--Morris Berman (professor of sociology at Catholic University)

Take Control

Can we take control over our own lives and stop evoking the sky-God whenever we refuse to understand or act for ourselves?

--Jaye Ramsey Sutter

Inventions

All religions of a spiritual nature are inventions of man. He has created an entire system of gods with nothing more than his carnal brain. Just because he has an ego and cannot accept it, he has had to externalize it into some great spiritual device which he calls "God."

--Anton Szandor LaVey

Every Single...

Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him.

--Philip Pullman

This Offer Is Limited...

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

--Steve Jobs

What Is Right?

The desire to be right and the desire to have been right are two desires, and the sooner we separate them the better off we are. The desire to be right is the thirst for truth. On all accounts, both practical and theoretical, there is nothing but good to be said for it. The desire to have been right, on the other hand, is the pride that goeth before a fall. It stands in the way of our seeing we were wrong, and thus blocks the progress of our knowledge.

--W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian

A River...

Awakening is not a single event in time; it is a river endlessly flowing in this moment now.

--Arjuna Ardagh

First Steps

Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Too

This too, this too.

--Buddhist mantra

Somebody Helped

No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you.

--Althea Gibson

Surprise!

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

--Vladimir Nabokov

Unconditional

I have never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love. You can find it in a simple act of kindness toward someone who needs help. There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heats our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.

--Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Memory

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

--Jane Austen

If Death...

If death is the end of everything, then living is everything.

--Robert D. Richardson

Brief Crack of Light

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

--Vladimir Nabokov

As If

We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win.

--Philip Pullman

Only Once

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

--Friedrich Nietzsche