Jonathan P. Baird

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Martin Luther King Jr.

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”  Karl Marx

“Dogs are not our whole life but they make our lives whole.” Alex Caras

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.” Milan Kundera

“When fascism came into power, most people were unprepared , both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak or such yearning for submission.”  Erich Fromm

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them”  Edwidge Danticat

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”  Leo Tolstoy

“All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog” Franz Kafka

“Our national forgetting is basically pathological. Our systems – politics, media, culture – are totally out of balance because of our collective refusal to admit the Vietnam War was wrong.”  Tom Hayden

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Ida B. Wells

“If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it’s about time the working class won that war.” Bernie Sanders

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” A.J. Muste

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I’m changing the things I cannot accept.” Angela Davis

“My love life is so bad. I’m taking part in the world celibacy championships. I meet the pope in the semifinals.”  Guy Bellamy

“When I have one foot in the grave, I will tell the whole truth about women. I shall tell it, jump into the coffin, pull the lid over me and say, “Do what you like now”. ”  Leo Tolstoy

“If our civilization is destroyed…it will not be by…barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above.”  Henry Demarest Lloyd

“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  Mary Oliver

“Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.”  Gloria Steinem

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gave it to.” Dorothy Parker

“It happened. I witnessed the most Philly thing ever. A fight broke out DURING a showing of the Mister Rogers movie.”  anonymous tweet

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” Oscar Wilde

“The most formidable weapon against errors of any kind is reason.” Thomas Paine, 1794

“Repetition does not tranform a lie into a truth.”  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”  James Baldwin

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.” Robert Frost

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”   James Baldwin

“In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt…A new fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be born outside our country, and be imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defenses. At that point, wise counsel no longer serves and one must find the strength to resist.” Primo Levi

“I didn’t fall in love. I rose in it.”  Toni Morrison

“There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement, Three people are better than no people.”  Fanny Lou Hamer

“Try to stay away from workplaces where laughter is absent. The degree of freedom where you work is indicated by the presence or absence of laughter.”  Gloria Steinem

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” Oscar Wilde

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain

“The problem, often not discovered until later in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

“We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.” Anton Chekhov

“Love is the motive but justice is the instrument.” Reinhold Niebuhr

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.” John Maynard Keynes

“There is something wrong in this country; the judicial nets are so adjusted as to catch the minnows and let the whales slip through.” Eugene V. Debs

“I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.” Thurgood Marshall

“The Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal will take care of themselves. Look after the courts of the poor, who stand most in need of justice. The security of the republic will be found in the treatment of the poor and the ignorant. In indifference to their misery and helplessness lies disaster.” Charles Evans Hughes

“The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships – suburban hanky-panky – chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.” Edward Abbey

“It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.” Eugene V. Debs

“If you go to the city of Washington, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress and mis-representatives of the masses claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad that I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.” Eugene V. Debs

“We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder – planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?” Edward Abbey

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Mahatma Gandhi

“I am not saying that most conservatives are stupid people but I am saying that most stupid people are conservatives.”  John Stuart Mill

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” H.L. Mencken

“Smuggle out the truth, pass it through all the obstacles that its enemies fabricate; multiply, spread by all means possible her message so that she may triumph; through zeal and civic action counterbalance the influence of money and the machinations lavished on the propagation of deception. That, in my opinion, is the most useful activity and the most sacred duty of pure patriotism.”
Maximilien Robespierre

“If life isn’t a mystery, then what the fuck is it?” Paul Krassner

“No greater tragedy exists in modern civilization than the aged, worn-out worker who after a life of ceaseless effort and useful productivity must look forward for his declining years to a poorhouse. A modern social consciousness demands a more humane and efficient arrangement.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not wanted printed. Everything else is public relations.” George Orwell

“Virtue has never been as respectable as money.” Mark Twain

“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.” Benjamin Franklin

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” James Madison

“No one could have been happier than I have been with the Weekly. To give a little comfort to the oppressed, to write the truth exactly as I saw it, to make no compromise other than those of quality imposed by my own inadequacies, to be free to follow no master other than my own compulsions, to live up to my idealized image of what a true newspaperman should be, and still be able to make a living for my family – what more could a man ask? I.F.Stone

“There are certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all polite men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate..We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express, and another one – the one we use – which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy.” Mark Twain

“There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.” George Orwell

“If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.” Woody Allen

“There are those who struggle for a day and they are good. There are others who struggle for a year and they are better. There are those who struggle many years and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives. These are the indispensable ones.” Bertolt Brecht

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”  Milan Kundera

“Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure;
I’d face it as a wise man should,
And train for ill and not for good.” A.E. Housman

“Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.” H.L. Mencken

“You want to do what you can while you are on this earth. Otherwise, the alternative is to go shopping.” Saul Landau

“Our only hope will lie in the frail web of understanding of one person for the pain of another.” John Dos Passos

“Our apparent error was to be neither devious nor skeptical…Our mistakes were honorable. And even from a point of view less absurdly exalted, we were not so wrong. There is more falsification of ideas now than real confusion, and it is our own discoveries that are falsified. I feel humiliated only for the people who despair because we have been defeated. What is more natural and inevitable than to be beaten, to fail a hundred times, a thousand times, before succeeding. How many times does a child fall before he learns to walk? … The main thing is to have strong nerves, everything depends on that. And lucidity…Human destiny will brighten.”   Victor Serge

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”  H.L. Mencken

“The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.” H.L. Mencken

“It’s just wonderful to be a pariah. I really owe my success to being a pariah. It is so good not to be invited to respectable dinner parties. People used to say to me,  “Izzy, why don’t you go down and see the Secretary of State and put him straight.” Well, you know, you’re not supposed to see the Secretary of State. He won’t pay any attention to you anyway. He’ll hold your hand, he’ll commit you morally for listening. To be a pariah is to be left alone to see things your own way, as truthfully as you can. Not because you’re brighter than anybody else is – or your own truth so valuable. But because, like a painter or a writer or an artist, all you have to contribute is the purification of your own vision, and add that to the sum total of other visions. To be regarded as nonrespectable, to be a pariah, to be an outsider, this is really the way to do it. To sit in your tub and not want anything. As soon as you want something, they’ve got you!”   I. F. Stone

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesa, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you, beyond that next turning of the canyon walls. ” Edward Abbey

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”  Eugene V. Debs

“I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it.”  Eugene V. Debs

“In the love of a man and a woman is the look of God looking.” Kenneth Patchen

“A good writer, like a good lover, must create a pact of trust with the object of his/her seduction that remains qualified, paradoxically, by a good measure of uncertainty, mystery and surprise.”  Francine duPlessix Gray

“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love.”  Rilke

“Men fight and lose the battle and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat and when it comes turns out to be not what they meant.”  William Morris

“If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” Lenny Bruce

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” Maya Angelou

“Resist much, obey little.” Walt Whitman

“A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.” Ernest Hemingway

“I have doubts about today and about ourselves. You would laugh, Dario, if I told you this aloud. You would say, spreading your great shaggy, brotherly strong hands: “Me, I feel able to win all the way. All the way.” This is how we all feel, immortal, right up to the moment when we feel nothing at all anymore. And life goes on after our little drop of water has flowed back into the ocean. In this sense my confidence is one with yours. Tomorrow is great. We will not have prepared this conquest in vain. The city will be won, if not by our hands, at least by hands like ours. only stronger; perhaps stronger by being better toughened through our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men infinitely like us will come down this ramble on an evening like this, in ten years, twenty years, it matters not, planning the same conquest. Perhaps they will be thinking of the blood we shed, more likely not. Even now I think I can see them. I am thinking of their blood which will also flow. But they will win the city.”  Victor Serge

“One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier.” Thomas Jefferson

“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.Those truths are well-established. They are read in every page which records the progression from a less arbitrary to a more arbitrary government to an aristocracy or a monarchy.”  James Madison

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” John Steinbeck

“Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.” Sinclair Lewis

“You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely”.  Ogden Nash

“A life without tragedy would not be worth living.”  Edward Abbey

“We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.”  Edward Abbey

“Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only – no matter how numerous they might be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for those who think differently. Not because of any fanaticism about “justice”, but because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and “freedom” effectively loses all meaning once it becomes a privilege.”  Rosa Luxemburg

‘Unrelenting revolutionary activity coupled with boundless humanity – that alone is the real life-giving force of socialism. A world must be overturned, but every tear that has flowed and might have been wiped away is an indictment; and a man hurrying to perform a great deed who steps on even a worm out of unfeeling carelessness commits a crime.” Rosa Luxemburg

“Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness.”  Will and Ariel Durant

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”  Thomas Jefferson

“Speak now, I said to myself, release your true feelings before it is too late. Be yourself. Take your place in the world. You are not a cosmic orphan. You have no reason to be timid. Respond as you feel. Awkwardly, crudely…but respond. Leave your throat open. You can have anything the world has to offer, but the thing you need most and perhaps want most is to be yourself. Stop being anonymous. The anonymity you believed would protect you from pain and humiliation, shame and rejection doesn’t work. Admit rejection, admit pain, admit frustration, admit pettiness, even that; admit shame, admit outrage, admit anything and everything that happens to you, respond with your true, uncalculated response, your emotions. The best and most human parts of you are those that you have inhibited and hidden from the world.”  Elia Kazan

“It is not the barbarous irrationality of dour political primitives
that is the American danger; it is the respected judgments of
Secretaries of State, the earnest platitudes of Presidents, the
fearful self-righteousness of sincere young American politicians from
sunny California. These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the
dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no
counter-balance of mind prevails against them. Such men as these are
crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a
paranoid reality all their own; in the name of practicality they have
projected a utopian image of capitalism.”   C.Wright Mills

“Tolstoy and self-renunciation
Socrates and the rule of reason
Thoreau and the simplified life
Marx and Engels who were against exploitation
Gandhi and non-violence
Buddha and harmlessness
Victor Hugo and humanitarianism
Jesus and social service
Confucius and the middle way
Richard Bucke and cosmic consciousness
Walt Whitman and the naturists
Edward Bellamy and the utopians
Olive Schreiner and the allegorists”     Scott Nearing

“We have a thousand points of light for the homeless man.
We’ve got a kinder gentler machine gun hand.” Neil Young

“You got to die of something because if you die of nothing,
they won’t pay your insurance.” Dick Gregory

“There is a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit.
Wit has truth in it.” Dorothy Parker

“I love children, especially when they cry,
for then someone takes them away.” Nancy Mitford

“It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of
its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.”  H.G.
Wells

“It starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he arrives
at school. It starts with marks, rewards, “places”, “streams”, stars –
and still in many places, stripes. This horserace mentality, the
victor and loser way of thinking, leads to “Writer X is, is not, a few
paces ahead of writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book
Writer Z has shown himself as better than Writer A.” From the very
beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms
of comparison, of success and of failure. It is a weeding-out system:
the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce
a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my
belief – though this is not the place to develop this – that the
talents every child has, regardless of his official “IQ” could stay
with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these
talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the
success-stakes.”  Doris Lessing

“”Dollars and dimes! Dollars and dimes!
To be without money is the worst of all crimes.
To grab what you want, and keep all you can
Is the first and last and whole duty of man.”    Anonymous

“The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the
simple fact that its means are at the same time its goal: it is the
sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers
the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.
”  Guy Debord

“Old age is not a disease, it’s not a social disaster, it’s a gift of
the Almighty. It is a result of struggle and victory over many
vicissitudes; it could indeed be the flowering of life, a time of
enormous freedom – freedom to transcend our own narrow self-interests
that we had to preserve when we were middle-aged. But old age is
freedom to look beyond our skin and clothes to those who come after
us, and to a new way of life that is truly human and shared. To
achieve this, old age must be lived, poured out for others. And so
lived, it could be one of God’s great surprises – that those nearest
death should be chosen by Her to point to where new life may be
found.”  Maggie Kuhn

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”    Mark Twain

“I asked Mark a while back what life was all about, since I didn’t
have a clue. He said,”Dad, we are here to help each other get through
this thing, whatever it is. Whatever it is. “Whatever it is.” Not bad.
That one could be a keeper.”  Kurt Vonnegut

“In dwelling be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep into the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.”  Tao Te Ching

“Don’t ever buy a pit bull from a one-armed man.”  Anonymous

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own
destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of
innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a
monster.”   James Baldwin

“To be a negro in this country and to be relatively conscious
is to be in a rage almost all the time.” James Baldwin

“To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of
things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence
whatever. It is unreal, incredible and insignificant to him, and for
him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like
making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had. Generally
speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be
written today for the next ten years with sufficient accuracy. Most
revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm
us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up or the genus pine dying
out in the country, and I might attend.”  Henry David Thoreau

“A man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an
optimist after it, he knows too little.”   Mark Twain

“Conscience is the mother in law whose visit never ends.” H.L. Mencken

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of
the oppressed.”  Steve Biko

“The State can’t give you freedom, and the State can’t take it away.
You’re born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is
something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it
away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are
free.”    Utah Phillips

“…when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging
soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her for a long
walk in the quiet country, gathering wildflowers here and there,
resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the vivid
stream and the tranquillity of the mother-nature, and I am sure she
will enjoy this very much, as you surely will be happy for it. But
remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t use all for
yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side and help
the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim;
because they are your friends; they are the comrades that fight and
fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday, for the
conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers. In this
struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”
Nicola Sacco to his son Dante, Aug 18, 1927

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one 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 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

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words
become superfluous.”  Ingrid Bergman

“Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.”  Voltaire

“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a
liar.”  Mark Twain

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and
remove all doubt.”  Mark Twain

“Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.”  Mark Twain

“Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you
out.”   Anton Chekhov

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and
more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”    James
Baldwin

“Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.” H.L. Mencken

“I failed to make the chess team because of my height.”   Woody Allen

“When you see a married couple coming down the street, the one who is
two or three steps ahead is the one that’s mad.”   Helen Rowland

“My mother didn’t breastfeed me. She said she just liked me as a
friend.”   Rodney Dangerfield

“We had gay burglars the other night. They broke in and rearranged the
furniture.”  Robin Williams

“We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate
vacations. We’re doing everything we can to keep our marriage
together.”  Rodney Dangerfield

“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime. But middle class suburbs
are incubators of apathy and delirium.”  Cyril Connolly

“Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art or as religion,
or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy
of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake,
Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus
castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that
salvation is beaten again and is the one surest sign of fatal
misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.”  James Agee

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physick, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”     William Shakespeare

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to
school an intelligence and make it a soul.”  John Keats

“There is hardly anyone whose sexual life if it were broadcast would
not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”  W. Somerset
Maugham

“Exuberance is beauty.”  William Blake

“”Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity.”  William Blake

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”     William Blake

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and
breeds reptiles of the mind.”   William Blake

“I want to get an abortion. But my boyfriend and I are having trouble
conceiving.”  Sarah Silverman

“The American people don’t really care what side of an issue you’re
on. They just don’t want you to act like a pussy.”   Bill Maher

“Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the
most – that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and
menial tasks, have the least.”  Eugene V. Debs

“In such a world, why write? How justify this mad itch for scribbling?
Speaking for myself, I write to entertain my friends and exasperate
our enemies. I write to record the truth of our time, as best as I can
see it. To investigate the comedy and tragedy of human relationships.
To resist and sabotage the contemporary drift toward a technocratic,
militaristic totalitarianism, whatever its ideological coloration. To
oppose injustice, defy the powerful, and speak for the voiceless. I
write to make a difference. “It is a always a writer’s duty to make
the world better” , said Samuel Johnson. Distrusting all answers, to
raise more questions. To give pleasure and promote esthetic bliss. To
honor life and praise the divine beauty of the world. For the joy and
exultation of writing itself. To tell my story.”   Edward Abbey

“Be of good cheer, my fellow scriveners! Ignore the critics. Disregard
those best-selling paperbacks with embossed covers in the supermarkets
and the supermarket bookstores. And waste no time applying for gifts
and grants – when we want money from the rich we’ll take it by force,
the honorable way. Death before dishonor, as it were. Live free or
die. That about sums up (and may well conclude) my literary career.
Which is not and never was a career anyway, but rather a passion. A
passion! Fueled in equal parts by anger and love. How can you feel one
without the other? Each implies the other. A writer without passion is
like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul
without a body.”   Edward Abbey”

“The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and
domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth – with a capital
G. “Progress” in our nation has for too long been confused with
“Growth”; I see the two as difnerent, almost incompatible, since
progress means, or should mean, change for the better -toward social
justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative
action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the
human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote,
the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to
be here as we do.”  Edward Abbey

“A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a
world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and
bison would be – will be – a human zoo. A high-tech slum.”   Edward
Abbey

“I have suffered from my share of personal tragedies: the loss of
love, the death of a wife, the failure to realize in my writing the
high aspiration of my intentions. But those misfortunes can be borne.
There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us
through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has
no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief – but then only a fool and an
idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave. So, I’ve
been lucky, as most people are lucky; the animal in each of us has a
lot more sense than our brains.”  Edward Abbey

“…there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They
are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people
doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an
active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil
(in one way or another) and defending what is good. Heroes do not want
power over others. There are more heroic people in the public school
system than there are in the world of politics, military, big
business, the arts and the sciences combined.”  Edward Abbey

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without
becoming disillusioned.”   Antonio Gramsci

“First the pork chops,
then morality ”                 Bertolt Brecht

“Poetry is a sophisticated scream.”   Thomas McGrath

“One heals suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”  Marcel Proust

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world…but perhaps this
very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided.”
Franz Kafka

“Your heart will give you greater counsel than all the world’s
scholars.”  The Talmud

“Courage is mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”  Mark Twain

“If a way to the better there be,
it lies in taking a full look at the worst.”   Thomas Hardy

“We live to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”  Anais Nin

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us “Universe”, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
his feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical
delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening the circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.”   Albert Einstein

“We are a feelingless people. If we could really feel, the pain would
be so great that we would stop all the suffering at once.”  Julian
Beck

“it is so long since I’ve had sex I’ve forgotten who ties up whom.”
Joan Rivers

“Basically my wife was immature. I’d be at home in my bath and she’d
come in and sink my boats.”   Woody Allen

“I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much
in my private life.”   Tennessee Williams

“The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the
violin.”  Honore de Balzac

“Sex without love is an empty experience but as empty experiences go,
it’s a pretty good empty experience.”   Woody Allen

“Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do
to watch people who can’t do anything.”    Fred Allen

“Television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well
done.”  Ernie Kovacs

“What he lacked in depth as a preacher he made up for in length.”  Mark Twain

” In the first place God made idiots, That was for practice; then he
made school boards.”  Mark Twain

“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the
preservatives I can get.”   George Burns

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or
discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is
to be back in Eden where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.”
Milan Kundera

“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from
outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who
believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

” “The real truth of the matter” is usually a lie all slicked up to do
a spot of their particularly dirty work.”   Kenneth Patchen

” We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against
betrayal.”    Tennessee Williams

“Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups.”
John Kenneth Galbraith

“In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision-maker.”  Woody Allen

“Law and order embrace on hate’s border.”  Kenneth Patchen

“Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.”  Woody Allen

“”Modern scientific accomplishments” – a wealth of methods coupled
with a poverty of intentions which, having nearly exhausted the
hell-potential of the earth, move on now to the first frontier of the
heavens.”  Kenneth Patchen

“I don’t believe in the after life although I am bringing a change of
underwear.”  Woody Allen

“Gentle and giving – the rest is nonsense and treason.”   Kenneth Patchen

Courage is grace under pressure.    Ernest Hemingway

Love sees sharply, hatred sees even more sharp, but jealousy sees the
sharpest, for it is love and hate at the same time.  Arab proverb

There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable,
and praiseworthy.   Ambrose Bierce

History will be kind to me because I intend to write it.  Winston Churchill

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce.  J. Edgar Hoover

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll toward a middle
class lifestyle will never write anything but crap.   Derek Raymond

Do you suppose the human race invented boredom to make the prospect of
death more palatable?  C.D. Payne

Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s
strategy.  Sun Tzu

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start.
Ernest Hemingway

Money is the acid test of character.  George Jackson

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by
making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is
disageeable and therefore not popular.”   C.G. Jung

“The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under the bridge, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.”
Anatole France

“My whole life has been a series of failures, and the history of my
country has been a history of failure. I have had only one victory –
over myself. This one small victory, however, is enough to give me
confidence to go on. Fortunately, the tragedy and defeat I have
experienced have not broken but strengthened me. I have few illusions
left, but I have not lost faith in men and in the ability of men to
create history. Who shall know the will of history? Only the oppressed
who must overthrow force in order to live. Only the undefeated in
defeat who have lost everything to gain a whole new world in the last
battle. ”  Nym Wales and Kim San

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics
to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them.
That is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the
Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an
elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion
provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be
revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on
to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable
presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly
be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such
a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth
every Sunday and instilled into the minds of children at school,
hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of
eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the
psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier
time. ”  Bertrand Russell

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”   A.J. Muste

“Accept loss forever
Be submissive to everything, open, listening
No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience,
Language, and knowledge
Be in love with your life.”      Jack Kerouac

“Reality is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs.”   Lily Tomlin

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a
table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious
attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry
from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices.”
Henry David Thoreau

“My friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my
flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother. I see his nature
groping yonder so like mine. We do not live far apart. Have not the
fates associated us in many ways? Is it of no significance that we
have so long partaken of the same loaf, drank at the same fountain,
breathed the same air, summer and winter, felt the same heat and cold;
that the same fruits have been pleased to refresh us both, and we have
never had a thought of different fibre the one from the other?…
As surely as the sunset in my latest November shall translate me to
the ethereal world, and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth; as
surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear
shall make age to be forgotten, or, in short, the manifold influences
of nature survive during the term of our natural life, so surely my
Friend shall forever be my Friend, and reflect a ray of God to me, and
time shall foster and adore and consecrate our Friendship, no less
than the rules of temples. As I love nature, as I love singing birds,
and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and
summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.”  Henry David Thoreau

“Anybody who says “Don’t write about politics” must be a privileged
person. He’s really saying “Don’t break my balls.”   Dario Fo

“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always
declares that it is his duty.”  George Bernard Shaw

“Many young people of great talent get lost in the mental, political
and moral laziness of wanting to be revolutionaries without living as
revolutionaries, without sacrifice, without paying life for its
experiences, without taking the risk of going in all the way, without
using their heads before getting involved where they don’t belong,
heads that ought to be used for more than making a hat fit on tight or
withstanding the blows of the police. ”  Miguel Marmol

“How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge
links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for
anyone, not even one’s own parents; if it is possible to love a
collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself, by individual
human creatures? Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant,
has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a
revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of mere
mathematical calculation? I’ve thought a lot about all this and it has
come to my mind again these last few days because I was thinking of
you (Julia) and of how you came into my life and gave me love, gave me
what I had always lacked. It was this lack that used to make me
cross-grained and spiteful.” Antonio Gramsci

“The average man does not know what to do with his life yet wants
another one which will last forever.”  Anatole France

“Macho does not prove mucho.”  Zsa Zsa Gabor

“They have Easter egg hunts in Philadelphia and if the kids don’t find
the eggs, they get booed.”  Bob Uecker

“Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.” Christopher Lasch

“Television has raised writing to a new low.”  Sam Goldwyn

“Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”  H.L. Mencken

“People think the blues is sad. They hear people moaning and such.
That’s not the blues. That’s just somebody singing slow…The blues is
about truth-telling.” Alberta Hunter

“Electricity is really just organized lightning.”  George Carlin

“The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production
reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Everything that was directly lived has moved into a representation.”
Guy Debord

“Seeing clearly is not so difficult to achieve and yet it is rather
unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd
intelligence than of good sense, good will, and a certain kind of
courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one’s
environment and the natural inclination to close one’s eyes to facts,
a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the
fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: ‘What
is terrible when you seek the truth is that you find it.’ You find it,
and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal
circle or to accept fashionable cliches.”  Victor Serge

“I am a father. I have a daughter and I love her dearly. I would love
my daughter to obey the commandments of the Torah; I would like her to
revere me as her father. And so I ask myself the question over and
over again: What is there about me that deserves the reverence of my
daughter?
You see, unless I live a life that is worthy of her reverence, I make
it almost impossible for her to live a Jewish life. So many young
people abandon Judaism because the Jewish models that they see in
their parents are not worthy of reverence.
My message to parents is: everyday ask yourselves the question “What
is there about me that deserves the reverence of my child?”    Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel

“I think it is well to resolve in one’s early youth that no good shall
ever be good to oneself which is bought at the smallest price of one’s
intellectual integrity. The men who hold by this can never be entirely
successful in their generation…but one never regrets having stood
alone.”  Olive Schreiner

“It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb
because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”  Mark Twain

“Monsters exist…But they are too few in number to be truly
dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and
to act without asking questions.”  Primo Levi

“A lot of people say “Why did you kill Christ?”. I dunno, it was one
of those parties, got out of hand, you know.”  Lenny Bruce

“I won’t say ours was a tough school but we had our own coroner. We
used to write essays like: What I’m going to be if I grow up.”  Lenny
Bruce

“Gray hair is God’s graffiti.”   Bill Cosby

“A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.”  Schopenhauer

” The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind
us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving
things inside us.”  G. K. Chesterton

“If Jesus was alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection.
I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time.
His ideas are just too liberal.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking
together in the same direction.” Saint-Exupery

“I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park,
there’s nothing else to do.”  Lenny Bruce

“Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever
produced was the Christian businessman.”  H.L. Mencken

“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.” George Carlin

“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can
we expect any ideal conditions on this earth.” George Bernard Shaw

“Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”  George Carlin

“It’s called the American Dream because to believe it, you have to be
ASLEEP.”   George Carlin

“My working definition of an optimist is a person who hasn’t lived
very long.”   Doris Grumbach

“Ideally what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout
his or her school life is something like this:

You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet
evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
We are sorry but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught
here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this
particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how
impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have
been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down
by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you
who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to
leave and find ways of educating your own judgment. Those that stay
must remember always and all the time, that they are being moulded and
patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this
particular society.”   Doris Lessing

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”  Eleanor Roosevelt

“To eat shrimp you’ve got to get your ass wet, as the saying goes. And
that’s the truth, at least for the people since the rich eat shrimp
without going to any trouble and its the others who get wet for them.”
Miguel Marmol

‘Evil inclination is at first as slender as a spider’s thread and then
strong as a rope.”  Talmudic proverb

“What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and
complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism
is often the last thing they will say aloud – a man may overhear.
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for
so long.”  Doris Lessing

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
Samuel Johnson

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that
it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on
equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to
believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in
plain sight.”  Michael Lind

“The world breaks everyone and afterward, some are strong at the
broken places.”  Ernest Hemingway

“There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity
fueled by greed.”   Edward Abbey

“And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated
by the rest of the world? It is African-American jazz and its offshoots.
What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.” Kurt Vonnegut

“History, n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are
brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
Ambrose Bierce

“What do you want to be? the anarchist asked young people in the
middle of their studies. ‘Lawyers, to invoke the law of the rich,
which is unjust by definition? Doctors, to tend the rich, and
prescribe good food, good air, and rest to the consumptives of the
slums? Architects, to house the landlords in comfort? Look around you,
and then examine your conscience. Do you not understand that your duty
is quite different: to ally yourselves with the exploited, and to work
for the destruction of an intolerable system?'”  Victor Serge

“Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or
overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.”   Edward Abbey

“Life is a zoo in a jungle.”  Peter de Vries

‘The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second
half by our children.”  Clarence Darrow

“Lead me not into temptation. I can find the way myself.”  Rita Mae Brown

“Virtue is insufficient temptation.” George Bernard Shaw

“Love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage.”  Ambrose Bierce

“Women should be obscene and not heard.”  Groucho Marx

“The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art and
(2) sedition.”  Edward Abbey

“Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere
of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.”  Nathalie
Sarraute

” Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone
should be. Where’s our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you’ll
find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady’s foot.”  Edward
Abbey

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious.
But the stupid have an answer for every question.”   Edward Abbey

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives
fully is prepared to die at any time.”  Edward Abbey

“If God lived on earth, people would knock out all his windows.”
Yiddish proverb

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to
school an intelligence and make it a soul.”  John Keats

“Freedom is when you are easy in the harness.” Robert Frost

“We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left
marks on us.” Wallace Stegner

“If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some
point we have to recognize that we don’t really stand for them.’  Paul
Wellstone

“Lawyers should be chosen because they can demonstrate a history rich
in human traits, the ability to care, the courage to fight, the will
to win, a concern for the human condition, a passion for justice and
simple uncompromising honesty. These are the traits of the lawyer.”
Gerry Spence

Conscience is the mother-in-law whose visit never ends.” H.L. Mencken

“You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it
out six inches and say you’re making progress.” Malcolm X

“Virtue has never been a s respectable as money.” Mark Twain

“A ship in harbor is safe but that is not what ships are for.” Anonymous

“Walk tall as the trees;live strong as the mountains;be gentle as the
spring winds; keep the warmth of summer in your heart, and the Great
Spirit will always be with you.” Native American chant

You must live as you think or sooner or later you will think as you
live.” Paul Valery

“Democracy: the worship of jackals by jackasses.” H.L. Mencken

“The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.” Karl Kraus

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises
in moral philosophy;that is, the search for a superior moral
justification for selfishness.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Loyalty to a petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human
soul.”   Mark Twain

“Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.” Woody Allen

It is good to be born in a depraved time for compared to others, you
gain a reputation for virtue at a small cost.” Montaigne

“The “Terror” of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The
terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.”
Edward Abbey

‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit
atrocities.”   Voltaire

“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive and the greatest
success is to labor.” Robert Louis Stevenson

“The love of one’s country is a natural thing. But why stop at the
border.”  Walt Whitman

“A decent provision for the poor is the true test of a civilization.”
Samuel Johnson

“God created the world but it is the Devil who keeps it going.” Tristan Bernard

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” H.L. Mencken

“Marriage is a wonderful institution. But who would want to live in an
institution.” H.L. Mencken

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never
voted in an election. One hopes it is the same half.” Gore Vidal

“The organization of American society is an interlocking system of
semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously
unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony.” Paul Goodman

“The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a
market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm
personal gesture by the individual to himself.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Suicide is belated acquiesence in the opinion of one’s wife’s
relatives.” H.L. Mencken

“Most people would die sooner than think;in fact, they do so.”  Bertrand Russell

“You can get all A’s and still flunk life.” Walker Percy

“The real state secret is the misery of everyday life.” Situationist precept

“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to
do what lies clearly at hand.” Carlyle

“I believe that only one person in a thousand knows the trick of
really living in the present. Most of us spend 59 minutes an hour
living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things
badly done (both utterly useless and weakening} or in the future which
we either long for or dread…There is only one minute in which you
are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by
accepting each minute as an unrepeatable minute, which is exactly what
it is – a miracle and unrepeatable.” Storm Johnson

“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is
worth a thousand books.” Edward Abbey

“Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard,
there is nothing you can do about it.” Golda Meir

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering
on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy?
Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as
make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must
have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress
us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like
suicide. A book muat be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen within us.”
Kafka

‘If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.” Kingsley Amis

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when
it happens.”  Woody Allen

“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal
element I am of it and while there is a soul in prison, I am not
free.” Eugene V. Debs

America…just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with
all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody
else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”  Hunter
Thompson

“Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.” Norman Douglas

“The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even
bigger pain the second time around.” Herb Caen

“A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.” Heywood Broun

“Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when
it is wrong.” Voltaire

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Florynce Kennedy

“Doctors are just the same as lawyers;the only difference is that
lawyers merely rob you, whereas, doctors can rob you and kill you
too.”  Anton Chekhov

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President, One hopes it is the same half.” Gore Vidal

“Some of these rich folks seem to think that everything belongs to them and they’ll even get to take it with them when they die. But you know what? You don’t ever see a hearse pulling a U Haul.” Jim Hightower

“It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one
point of your IQ every year.”  Truman Capote

“The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.” Andy Rooney

“Drinking makes such fools of people and people are such fools to
begin with that it’s compounding a felony.”  Robert Benchley

“Fame is a vapor;popularity an accident;the only earthly certainty is
oblivion.”  Mark Twain

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call;no way
out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the
house down with us trapped, locked in it.”  Tennessee Williams

“The world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who
feel.” Horace Walpole

“Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” Mark Twain

“”Classic”. A book which people praise and don’t read.” Mark Twain

“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
Mark Twain

“There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.”  Mark Twain

“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be
believed.”   I.F. Stone

“I am a gentleman. I live by robbing the poor.” George Bernard Shaw

“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”  H.L.
Mencken

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by
those who have not got it.” George Bernard Shaw

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
Friedrich Nietzche

“I respect faith but doubt is what gets you an education.”  Wilson Mizner

“God is love but get it in writing.”  Gypsy Rose Lee

“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive and the greatest
success is to labor.” Robert Louis Stevenson

“If your life doesn’t end in failure, you haven’t reached high enough.
So it was failure I had to achieve.” H.G. Wells

“What is the matter with the poor is poverty;what is the matter with
the rich is uselessness.” George Bernard Shaw

“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man
– living in the sky – who watches everything you do, every minute of
everyday. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he
does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has
a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and
anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke
and scream and cry forever and ever to the end of time…But He loves
you.”  George Carlin