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