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Quotes of the day: Fred Allen
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Published Friday, May 31, 2013 @ 7:17 AM EDT
May 31 2013

Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan (May 31, 1894 - March 17, 1956) was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show (1932–1949) made him one of the most popular and forward- looking humorists in the Golden Age of American radio. (Click for full Wikipedia article).

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A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.

A lot of people spend six days sowing wild oats, then go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 pm to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.

Advertising is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

An actor's popularity is fleeting. His success has the life expectancy of a small boy who is about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

California is a fine place to live- if you happen to be an orange.

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.

I'd rather have two girls at 17 than one at 34.

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you'll end up in the police station.

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and c omedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

You only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.


Categories: Fred Allen, Quotes of the day


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Or maybe platypi?
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Published Thursday, May 30, 2013 @ 10:22 AM EDT
May 30 2013

Platipi.


Categories: Animals, Photo of the day, WTF?


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Rollover
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Published Thursday, May 30, 2013 @ 7:18 AM EDT
May 30 2013

The KGB Quotations Database has passed 18,000 entries, for those who keep track of such things.

You're welcome.


Categories: KGB Blog News, KGB Quotations Database


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Quotes of the day: Voltaire
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Published Thursday, May 30, 2013 @ 12:45 AM EDT
May 30 2013

François-Marie Arouet (November 21, 1694 - May 30, 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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A long dispute means that both parties are wrong.

A witty saying proves nothing.

Animals have these advantages over man: They have no theologians to instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Common sense is not so common.

Divorce is probably of nearly the same age as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead.

History supplies little more than a list of people who have helped themselves with the property of others.

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.

If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature cries aloud that He does exist; that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence upon it.

If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part, the rest are lost in the multitude.

Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house but are sure that they have one.

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

One always speaks badly when we have nothing to say.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

Paradise on earth is where I am.

Physicians pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into humans of which they know nothing.

Prejudice is the reason of fools.

Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.

The English people are like the English beer. Froth on top, dregs at the bottom, the middle excellent.

The great consolation in life is to say precisely what one thinks.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.

There has never been a perfect government, because men have passions; and if they did not have passions, there would be no need for government.

Those who can make you believe in absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

Virtue debases in justifying itself.

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

When it is a question of money all men are of the same religion.

Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.


Categories: Quotes of the day, Voltaire


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Sorry.
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Published Thursday, May 30, 2013 @ 12:44 AM EDT
May 30 2013

Sorry.


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Quotes of the day: JFK
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Published Wednesday, May 29, 2013 @ 4:49 AM EDT
May 29 2013

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his death in 1963. Click for full Wikipedia article.

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.

Domestic policy can only lose elections. Foreign policy can kill us.

Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it.

For those to whom much is given, much is required.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of The New York Times.

If a nation cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

If we are strong, our character will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help.

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

In politics you have no friends, only allies.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be President but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.

My brother Bob doesn't want to be in government- he promised Dad he'd go straight.

My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now.

The basis of effective government is public confidence and that confidence is endangered when ethical standards falter, or appear to falter.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie- deliberate, contrived and dishonest- but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

The mere absence of war is not peace.

The state is the servant of the citizen, and not his master.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Unless liberty flourishes in all lands, it cannot flourish in one.

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

Washington is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

We celebrate the past to awaken the future.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

It's also the birthday of G.K. Chesterton.


Categories: John F. Kennedy, Quotes of the day


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Uneasy lies the head...
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Published Wednesday, May 29, 2013 @ 4:44 AM EDT
May 29 2013

Wow.

I just had the most bizarre, vivid dream of my life. Seriously.

Sufficiently vivid to send me catapulting out of bed to the keyboard- wide awake, 100% alert, and without an intervening stop at the bathroom and coffeemaker- and sufficiently bizarre that I really can't write about it in detail.

It involves a trip to a Los Angeles barber shop, a dead celebrity, hospital waiting rooms, appearing on a television show, cab rides, botched airline reservations- a sequence of events as lucid as any I've experienced in real life, but that are, upon reflection, a spectacular collection of somnambular non-sequiturs.

I usually don't have dreams of such preternatural quality. I also don't subscribe to the belief that dreams have any deep meaning. Still, when you're wide awake at four a.m., asking yourself "Where the hell did that come from?", you find yourself replaying the previous day's events in your memory, looking for potential triggers.

Right before going to bed, we watched the last episode of the second season of The West Wing, in which a major character dies. Although the dream wasn't about that character or actor, it did involve a deceased performer I greatly admired. Los Angeles? That's where the series was filmed and the celebrity lived. Barber shop? I need a haircut and have been trying to work out the logistics of getting to the barber within the next week. Hospital waiting rooms- clearing out some old files yesterday, I encountered the discharge instructions from my inpatient treatment for pneumonia last year. Appearing on television and cab rides- the last time I was in New York, I stopped by ABC World News Now in the middle of the night, and when leaving the city to go to my next stop, a business trip to Germany, my cabbie nearly got into a fistfight with a driver who cut him off. During that trip to Germany, Jimmy Doohan- the actor who played Scotty on Star Trek- passed away. Not the celebrity in my dream, but another dead performer. Botched airline reservations- checked the balance information on an airline-branded credit card account yesterday.

I guess there is a loose thread connecting the events in my dream; the weirdness comes from my subconscious mind shoehorning them into a narrative that makes about as much sense as the script to Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Oh well. It's 5 am and I'm up. I'll get a head start on the day.

Maybe I can squeeze in that haircut.


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On wealth...
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Published Tuesday, May 28, 2013 @ 7:34 AM EDT
May 28 2013

A commune is where people join together to share their lack of wealth.
-Richard Stallman

A man is wealthy in proportion to the things he can do without.
-Epicurus

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, and Jill a wealthy widow.
-Evan Esar

And above all, above all, honest work must be rewarded by a fair and just tax system. The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny.
-George McGovern

As wealth is power, so all power must infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other.
-Edmund Burke

Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.
-Huey P. Long

Don't judge a man's wealth- or his piety- by his appearance on Sunday.
-Benjamin Franklin

Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I've grown older I've become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can't see- the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.
-Jimmy Carter

Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.
-James Thurber

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
-Ernest Hemingway

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause
-Albert Einstein

I believe that anyone can be successful in life, regardless of natural talent or the environment within which we live. This is not based on measuring success by human competitiveness for wealth, possessions, influence, and fame, but adhering to God's standards of truth, justice, humility, service, compassion, forgiveness, and love.
-Jimmy Carter

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
-Confucius

In every well governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
-Anatole France

It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.
-Arthur Vandenberg

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.
-Charles Caleb Colton

It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always unhappy.
-John D. Rockefeller

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

Man must have no idol and the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry.
-Andrew Carnegie

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

Money is only unused power. The real purpose of wealth, after food, clothing and shelter, is philanthropy.
-Leon Levy

No man is wholly free. He is a slave to wealth, or to fortune, or the laws, or the people [who] restrain him from acting according to his will alone.
-Euripides

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
-Rex Stout

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

Nothing more clearly show how little God esteems his gift to men of wealth, money, position and other worldly goods, than the way he distributes these, and the sort of men who are most amply provided with them.
-Jean de la Bruyere

Once wealth and beauty are gone, there is always rural life.
-Mason Cooley

Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values.
-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen

People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.
-Will Rogers

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.
-Russell Green

The company of just and righteous men is better than wealth and a rich estate.
-Euripides

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

The first wealth is health.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

The notion of economic equality is based on an ancient and ugly falsehood central to bad economic thinking: There's a fixed amount of wealth. Wealth is zero-sum.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The only thing wealth does for some people is to make them worry about losing it.
-Antoine de Rivarol

The press is owned by wealthy men who only want certain things to reach the public.
-Noam Chomsky

There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.
-Anthony Trollope

There is untold wealth in America, especially at tax time. (Cartoon caption in The Wall Street Journal)
-Unattributed

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
-Douglas MacArthur

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. (in 1939)
-Louis Brandeis

We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
-Eric Hoffer

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
-George Bernard Shaw

We have, however, a clear mandate from the people, that Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

We spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.
-Douglas Coupland

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.
-Jean Cocteau

Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
-Paul Krugman

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
-Henry George

What information consumes is rather obvious- it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
-Herbert Simon

When wealth is centralized the people are dispersed. When wealth is distributed the people are brought together.
-Confucius

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

You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent.
-W. Somerset Maugham


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Photo of the day
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Published Tuesday, May 28, 2013 @ 7:31 AM EDT
May 28 2013

Yes, there is.

"There's something behind me, isn't there?"


Categories: Animals, Photo of the day


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Memorial Day
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Published Monday, May 27, 2013 @ 1:05 AM EDT
May 27 2013

(Published May 30, 2007 Chicago Tribune)

Garrison Keillor

Memorial Day is a lovely day in America, a day of reunion in small towns, where people drive up to the cemetery on Monday morning and file in, old-timers carrying lawn chairs, and even if you've missed a few years, people will come over and shake your hand and thank you for coming. You don't have to dress up or support the war in Iraq. You just come, and afterward there are hot dogs and potato salad at the Legion Club.

It's the last patriotic holiday that still means something, and it persists year after year despite the wooden rituals and leaden speeches. In Central Park on Monday, an admiral with a chestful of ribbons gripped the lectern and read his lines, and the line of his that got quoted was, "Their sacrifice has enabled us to enjoy the things that we, I think in many cases, take for granted," which does not ring, does it? No.

"Their sacrifice has enabled us to enjoy the things that many of us take for granted" would have been better, but still it's nothing people will take home with them and ponder. How about, "Their noble sacrifice has enabled us to see the ignobility of the leadership that sent them to their deaths"? How about, "We have sacrificed enough of our young men and women and it is time to bring them home to enjoy the things that the rest of us take for granted"?

The Current Occupant drove over the bridge to Arlington and spoke at the Tomb of the Unknowns, a site of powerful reverence, and his speechwriter, in a hurry to finish and enjoy his weekend, gave him, "From their deaths must come a world where the cruel dreams of tyrants and terrorists are frustrated and foiled -- where our nation is more secure from attack, and where the gift of liberty is secured for millions who have never known it," a line cobbled together from scrap lumber. Shades of "the last full measure of devotion" and "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain" but made from different cloth. The reputation of the Gettysburg Address remains secure.

Dishonesty makes for poor rhetoric and that's what has gutted this beautiful holiday. The ideas it celebrates- that our young men and women did their duty and died in defense of their country- are simply not true. Vietnam was lost and it didn't matter to the security of the United States. Saigon fell and life in the States went on without a blink. And since the end of selective service, these honored dead are somebody else's sons and daughters, not ours- one good reason why there is so little protest of this war: If the Army were conscripting our children to go to Baghdad, the Occupant's approval rating would be in the low teens.

Memorial Day survives on the faint memories of World War II, the Good War. Those old Legion and VFW guys are the ones who keep it going. Some come in fatigues, some ride in golf carts past the rows of tombstones and the urns with fresh gardenias planted in them, and the Boy Scouts line up, and the auxiliary ladies in blue hand out little American flags. There is a distant HEE-YUP and the crowd shushes and the honor guard marches in, left, right, left, right, left, right, and Old Glory is raised on the flagpole, and we all recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The names of the dead are read and wreaths of poppies are placed and maybe somebody recites "In Flanders Fields":

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Everyone is a little stiff and self-consciously reverent. And then comes the speech. That's the problem. It is time for the truth to be told and we cannot bring ourselves to tell it. Good men and women were sacrificed to the vanity of politicians and generals. It is a miserable business to tell lies over the graves of good soldiers, but we do, and then we all sing "America the Beautiful," including the verse about heroes proved in liberating strife, and the honor guard fires its rifle salute and somebody presses Play on a boombox and we hear taps and the guard turns about-face and marches off and we walk away, thoughtfully, and there is much to think about.

(Garrison Keillor is an author and host of "A Prairie Home Companion.")


Categories: Garrison Keillor, Holidays


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Quotes of the day: Henry Kissinger
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Published Monday, May 27, 2013 @ 1:04 AM EDT
May 27 2013

Henry Alfred Kissinger (born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, May 27, 1923) is a German-born American writer, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (Click for full Wikipedia article.

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A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.

All truly great achievements in history resulted from the actualization of principles, not from the clever evaluation of political conditions.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

I don't read books, I write them.

I've always acted alone. Americans like that immensely.

If you believe that their real intention is to kill you, it isn't unreasonable to believe that they would lie to you.

Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Those who learn from history are condemned to watch others repeat it.

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

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Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
-Tom Lehrer


Categories: Henry Kissinger, Quotes of the day, Tom Lehrer


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On memory...
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Published Sunday, May 26, 2013 @ 7:57 AM EDT
May 26 2013

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half-remembered glory.
-John Steinbeck

A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.
-Donna Roberts

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
-Clifton Fadiman

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
-Doug Larson

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness. But after that he begins to bunch them.
-H.L. Mencken

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
-Alexander Smith

A people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay

By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.
-George Burns

Can anyone remember when times were not hard, and money not scarce?
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Death is that state in which one exists only in the memory of others. Which is why it is not an end. (from "Skin of Evil," Star Trek: The Next Generation)
-Hannah Louise Shearer

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
-Saul Bellow

Everyone complains of his memory, but nobody of his judgment.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.
-James M. Barrie

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
-Gore Vidal

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
-Oscar Levant

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells "Can't you remember anything I told you?" and lets fly with a club.
-Unattributed

I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.
-Dorothy Parker

I never throw anything away, which is irrelevant because I can never remember where I put anything.
-Kevin G. Barkes

I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away.
-Oscar Levant

I've had so many wives, I can't remember all their names. To keep it simple, I just called them all "Plaintiff."
-Lewis Grizzard

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
-Oscar Wilde

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.
-Joseph Brodsky

If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't really there.
-Paul Kantner

In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy.
-Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

In memory everything seems to happen to music.
-Tennessee Williams

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.
-Joseph Conrad

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.
-Eugene McCarthy

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

It's not that men can keep secrets. They just don't remember they know any.
-Leo Gallagher

Liars ought to have good memories.
-Algernon Sidney

Life is not what one has lived, but what one remembers and how one chooses to tell it.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Like all great travellers I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
-Alphonse de Lamartine

Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.
-Erma Bombeck

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never know what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.
-Pierce Harris

Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food.
-Austin O'Malley

Memory is a great betrayer.
-Anais Nin

Memory is better than a video because it's free and it doesn't work very well.
-David Owen

Memory is the editor of one's sense of life.
-Elizabeth Bowen

My memory of you is better than you.
-Chuck Lorre

No amount of time can erase the memory of a good cat, and no amount of masking tape can ever totally remove his fur from your couch.
-Leo Dworken

Nobody is forgotten, when it is convenient to remember him.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
-Robert Benchley

One day you'll find that these high school years will be a tiny, distant memory. The scars, of course, are yours to keep forever.
-Tom Batiuk

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
-Phyllis Rose

Only the vanquished remember history.
-Marshall McLuhan

The advantage of a bad memory is that, several times over, one enjoys the same good things for the first time.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The great majority of people are only remembered when something for which they are responsible goes wrong.
-Lord Slim

The inability to forget is infinitely more devastating than the inability to remember,
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
-Harold Pinter

The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.
-Charles Kuralt

The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.
-Eric Hoffer

The true art of memory is the art of attention.
-Samuel Johnson

There are only three things worth remembering: you social security number, the formula for your hair dye and how many hours you were in labor with your children.
-Erma Bombeck

There has never been a statue erected to the memory of someone who let well enough alone.
-Jules Ellinger

There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.
-Stephen Colbert

There's something profoundly sad about being able to remember the exact moment you were last happy.
-Olivia Ramsey

There's two types of old people. There's the old people that remember what sex was like, and then there's the old people that pretend that it didn't exist.
-Jay Black

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana

Those who cannot remember the past are invited to come over to my place.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
-William Gibson

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
-Florence King

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
-Eric Hoffer

We do not remember days, we remember moments.
-Cesare Pavese

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
-W. Somerset Maugham

What sinners remember best is that they were happy while sinning.
-C.S. Lewis

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.
-Winston Churchill

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

When our memories outweigh our dreams, we have grown old.
-Bill Clinton

When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
-Alan Moore

Why should we have enough memory to retain even the smallest details of what happened to us, while we do not have enough to remember how many times we have told them to the same person?
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
-William S. Burroughs

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
-Stanislaw J. Lec

Your word can never be as good as your bond because your memory can never be as trustworthy as your honor.
-George Bernard Shaw


Categories: Quotes on a topic


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No comment
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Published Saturday, May 25, 2013 @ 10:59 AM EDT
May 25 2013

Not all of her genes come from me.

Grandchildren sometimes do things that defy explanation.


Categories: KGB Family, Photo of the day


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Happy birthday, Hal
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Published Saturday, May 25, 2013 @ 12:01 AM EDT
May 25 2013

Harold Lane "Hal" David (May 25, 1921 – September 1, 2012) was, simply, one of the greatest lyricists of all time.

See our tribute here.


Categories: Passages


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Sermon of the day
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Published Friday, May 24, 2013 @ 6:00 AM EDT
May 24 2013

(91 years later, and this sermon is probably even more valid today.)

Harry Emerson Fosdick (May 24, 1878 - October 5, 1969) was an American pastor. Fosdick became a central figure in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy within American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s and was one of the most prominent liberal ministers of the early 20th Century. Although a Baptist, he was guest preacher in New York City at First Presbyterian Church on West Twelfth Street and then at the historic, interdenominational Riverside Church. (Click for full Wikipedia article).

"Shall the Fundamentalists Win?": Defending Liberal Protestantism in the 1920s

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Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. "Liberal" Protestants sought to reconcile faith and science and to slow what they saw as the reactionary tendencies of fundamentalism. Harry Emerson Fosdick's influential 1922 sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?," called for an open-minded, intellectual, and tolerant "Christian fellowship." Though the sermon cost him his post at New York's First Presbyterian Church, his views represented those of an influential Protestant minority, and Fosdick enjoyed a long career at Riverside Church, built for him by John D. Rockefeller. Following the Scopes trial and a well-publicized scandal involving well-known pastor Aimee Semple McPherson and a mysterious lover, fundamentalists began to lose the prominence they enjoyed in the 1920s. But religious fundamentalism would remain a vital political force in American life.

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This morning we are to think of the fundamentalist controversy which threatens to divide the American churches as though already they were not sufficiently split and riven. A scene, suggestive for our thought, is depicted in the fifth chapter of the Book of the Acts, where the Jewish leaders hale before them Peter and other of the apostles because they had been preaching Jesus as the Messiah. Moreover, the Jewish leaders propose to slay them, when in opposition Gamaliel speaks "Refrain from these men, and let them alone; for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be overthrown; but if it is of God ye will not be able to overthrow them; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God."...

Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the Fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. I speak of them the more freely because there are no two denominations more affected by them than the Baptist and the Presbyterian. We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.

The Fundamentalists see, and they see truly, that in this last generation there have been strange new movements in Christian thought. A great mass of new knowledge has come into man's possession— new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which the ancient peoples used to think in matters of religion and the methods by which they phrased and explained their spiritual experiences; and new knowledge, also, about other religions and the strangely similar ways in which men's faiths and religious practices have developed everywhere...

Now, there are multitudes of reverent Christians who have been unable to keep this new knowledge in one compartment of their minds and the Christian faith in another. They have been sure that all truth comes from the one God and is His revelation. Not, therefore, from irreverence or caprice or destructive zeal but for the sake of intellectual and spiritual integrity, that they might really love the Lord their God, not only with all their heart and soul and strength but with all their mind, they have been trying to see this new knowledge in terms of the Christian faith and to see the Christian faith in terms of this new knowledge.

Doubtless they have made many mistakes. Doubtless there have been among them reckless radicals gifted with intellectual ingenuity but lacking spiritual depth. Yet the enterprise itself seems to them indispensable to the Christian Church. The new knowledge and the old faith cannot be left antagonistic or even disparate, as though a man on Saturday could use one set of regulative ideas for his life and on Sunday could change gear to another altogether. We must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms.

There is nothing new about the situation. It has happened again and again in history, as, for example, when the stationary earth suddenly began to move and the universe that had been centered in this planet was centered in the sun around which the planets whirled. Whenever such a situation has arisen, there has been only one way out— the new knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination. Now, the people in this generation who are trying to do this are the liberals, and the Fundamentalists are out on a campaign to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship. Shall they be allowed to succeed?

It is interesting to note where the Fundamentalists are driving in their stakes to mark out the deadline of doctrine around the church, across which no one is to pass except on terms of agreement. They insist that we must all believe in the historicity of certain special miracles, preeminently the virgin birth of our Lord; that we must believe in a special theory of inspiration—that the original documents of the Scripture, which of course we no longer possess, were inerrantly dictated to men a good deal as a man might dictate to a stenographer; that we must believe in a special theory of the Atonement— that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner; and that we must believe in the second coming of our Lord upon the clouds of heaven to set up a millennium here, as the only way in which God can bring history to a worthy denouement. Such are some of the stakes which are being driven to mark a deadline of doctrine around the church.

If a man is a genuine liberal, his primary protest is not against holding these opinions, although he may well protest against their being considered the fundamentals of Christianity. This is a free country and anybody has a right to hold these opinions or any others if he is sincerely convinced of them. The question is— Has anybody a right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him on such points and to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship? The Fundamentalists say that this must be done. In this country and on the foreign field they are trying to do it. They have actually endeavored to put on the statute books of a whole state binding laws against teaching modern biology. If they had their way, within the church, they would set up in Protestantism a doctrinal tribunal more rigid than the pope's.

In such an hour, delicate and dangerous, when feelings are bound to run high, I plead this morning the cause of magnanimity and liberality and tolerance of spirit. I would, if I could reach their ears, say to the Fundamentalists about the liberals what Gamaliel said to the Jews, "Refrain from these men and let them alone; for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be everthrown; but if it is of God ye will not be able to overthrow them; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God."

That we may be entirely candid and concrete and may not lose ourselves in any fog of generalities, let us this morning take two or three of these Fundamentalist items and see with reference to them what the situation is in the Christian churches. Too often we preachers have failed to talk frankly enough about the differences of opinion which exist among evangelical Christians, although everybody knows that they are there. Let us face this morning some of the differences of opinion with which somehow we must deal.

We may well begin with the vexed and mooted question of the virgin birth of our Lord. I know people in the Christian churches, ministers, missionaries, laymen, devoted lovers of the Lord and servants of the Gospel, who, alike as they are in their personal devotion to the Master, hold quite different points of view about a matter like the virgin birth. Here, for example, is one point of view that the virgin birth is to be accepted as historical fact; it actually happened; there was no other way for a personality like the Master to come into this world except by a special biological miracle. That is one point of view, and many are the gracious and beautiful souls who hold it. But side by side with them in the evangelical churches is a group of equally loyal and reverent people who would say that the virgin birth is not to be accepted as an historic fact... So far from thinking that they have given up anything vital in the New Testament's attitude toward Jesus, these Christians remember that the two men who contributed most to the Church's thought of the divine meaning of the Christ were Paul and John, who never even distantly allude to the virgin birth.

Here in the Christian churches are these two groups of people and the question which the Fundamentalists raise is this— Shall one of them throw the other out? Has intolerance any contribution to make to this situation? Will it persuade anybody of anything? Is not the Christian Church large enough to hold within her hospitable fellowship people who differ on points like this and agree to differ until the fuller truth be manifested? The Fundamentalists say not. They say the liberals must go. Well, if the Fundamentalists should succeed, then out of the Christian Church would go some of the best Christian life and consecration of this generation—multitudes of men and women, devout and reverent Christians, who need the church and whom the church needs.

Consider another matter on which there is a sincere difference of opinion between evangelical Christians: the inspiration of the Bible. One point of view is that the original documents of the Scripture were inerrantly dictated by God to men. Whether we deal with the story of creation or the list of the dukes of Edom or the narratives of Solomon's reign or the Sermon on the Mount or the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, they all came in the same way, and they all came as no other book ever came. They were inerrantly dictated; everything there— scientific opinions, medical theories, historical judgments, as well as spiritual insight— is infallible. That is one idea of the Bible's inspiration. But side by side with those who hold it, lovers of the Book as much as they, are multitudes of people who never think about the Bible so. Indeed, that static and mechanical theory of inspiration seems to them a positive peril to the spiritual life...

Here in the Christian Church today are these two groups, and the question which the Fundamentalists have raised is this— Shall one of them drive the other out? Do we think the cause of Jesus Christ will be furthered by that? If He should walk through the ranks of his congregation this morning, can we imagine Him claiming as His own those who hold one idea of inspiration and sending from Him into outer darkness those who hold another? You cannot fit the Lord Christ into that Fundamentalist mold. The church would better judge His judgment. For in the Middle West the Fundamentalists have had their way in some communities and a Christian minister tells us the consequences. He says that the educated people are looking for their religion outside the churches.

Consider another matter upon which there is a serious and sincere difference of opinion between evangelical Christians: the second coming of our Lord. The second coming was the early Christian phrasing of hope. No one in the ancient world had ever thought, as we do, of development, progress, gradual change as God's way of working out His will in human life and institutions. They thought of human history as a series of ages succeeding one another with abrupt suddenness. The Graeco-Roman world gave the names of metals to the ages— gold, silver, bronze, iron. The Hebrews had their ages, too— the original Paradise in which man began, the cursed world in which man now lives, the blessed Messianic kingdom someday suddenly to appear on the clouds of heaven. It was the Hebrew way of expressing hope for the victory of God and righteousness. When the Christians came they took over that phrasing of expectancy and the New Testament is aglow with it. The preaching of the apostles thrills with the glad announcement, "Christ is coming!"

In the evangelical churches today there are differing views of this matter. One view is that Christ is literally coming, externally, on the clouds of heaven, to set up His kingdom here. I never heard that teaching in my youth at all. It has always had a new resurrection when desperate circumstances came and man's only hope seemed to lie in divine intervention. It is not strange, then, that during these chaotic, catastrophic years there has been a fresh rebirth of this old phrasing of expectancy. "Christ is coming!" seems to many Christians the central message of the Gospel. In the strength of it some of them are doing great service for the world. But, unhappily, many so overemphasize it that they outdo anything the ancient Hebrews or the ancient Christians ever did. They sit still and do nothing and expect the world to grow worse and worse until He comes.

Side by side with these to whom the second coming is a literal expectation, another group exists in the evangelical churches. They, too, say, "Christ is coming!" They say it with all their hearts; but they are not thinking of an external arrival on the clouds. They have assimilated as part of the divine revelation the exhilarating insight which these recent generations have given to us, that development is God's way of working out His will...

And these Christians, when they say that Christ is coming, mean that, slowly it may be, but surely, His will and principles will be worked out by God's grace in human life and institutions, until "He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied."

These two groups exist in the Christian churches and the question raised by the Fundamentalists is— Shall one of them drive the other out? Will that get us anywhere? Multitudes of young men and women at this season of the year are graduating from our schools of learning, thousands of them Christians who may make us older ones ashamed by the sincerity of their devotion to God's will on earth. They are not thinking in ancient terms that leave ideas of progress out. They cannot think in those terms. There could be no greater tragedy than that the Fundamentalists should shut the door of the Christian fellowship against such.

I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to succeed. Nobody's intolerance can contribute anything to the solution of the situation which we have described. If, then, the Fundamentalists have no solution of the problem, where may we expect to find it? In two concluding comments let us consider our reply to that inquiry.

The first element that is necessary is a spirit of tolerance and Christian liberty. When will the world learn that intolerance solves no problems? This is not a lesson which the Fundamentalists alone need to learn; the liberals also need to learn it. Speaking, as I do, from the viewpoint of liberal opinions, let me say that if some young, fresh mind here this morning is holding new ideas, has fought his way through, it may be by intellectual and spiritual struggle, to novel positions, and is tempted to be intolerant about old opinions, offensively to condescend to those who hold them and to be harsh in judgment on them, he may well remember that people who held those old opinions have given the world some of the noblest character and the most rememberable service that it ever has been blessed with, and that we of the younger generation will prove our case best, not by controversial intolerance, but by producing, with our new opinions, something of the depth and strength, nobility and beauty of character that in other times were associated with other thoughts. It was a wise liberal, the most adventurous man of his day— Paul the Apostle— who said, "Knowledge puffeth up, but love buildeth up."

Nevertheless, it is true that just now the Fundamentalists are giving us one of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance that the churches of this country have ever seen. As one watches them and listens to them he remembers the remark of General Armstrong of Hampton Institute, "Cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy." There are many opinions in the field of modern controversy concerning which I am not sure whether they are right or wrong, but there is one thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.

As I plead thus for an intellectually hospitable, tolerant, liberty-loving church, I am, of course, thinking primarily about this new generation. We have boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools, and because we love them we may well wonder about the church which will be waiting to receive them. Now, the worst kind of church that can possibly be offered to the allegiance of the new generation is an intolerant church. Ministers often bewail the fact that young people turn from religion to science for the regulative ideas of their lives. But this is easily explicable.

Science treats a young man's mind as though it were really important. A scientist says to a young man, "Here is the universe challenging our investigation. Here are the truths which we have seen, so far. Come, study with us! See what we already have seen and then look further to see more, for science is an intellectual adventure for the truth." Can you imagine any man who is worthwhile turning from that call to the church if the church seems to him to say, "Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results."

My friends, nothing in all the world is so much worth thinking of as God, Christ, the Bible, sin and salvation, the divine purposes for humankind, life everlasting. But you cannot challenge the dedicated thinking of this generation to these sublime themes upon any such terms as are laid down by an intolerant church.

The second element which is needed if we are to reach a happy solution of this problem is a clear insight into the main issues of modern Christianity and a sense of penitent shame that the Christian Church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great needs. If, during the war, when the nations were wrestling upon the very brink of hell and at times all seemed lost, you chanced to hear two men in an altercation about some minor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could you restrain your indignation? You said, "What can you do with folks like this who, in the face of colossal issues, play with the tiddledywinks and peccadillos of religion?" So, now, when from the terrific questions of this generation one is called away by the noise of this Fundamentalist controversy, he thinks it almost unforgivable that men should tithe mint and anise and cummin, and quarrel over them, when the world is perishing for the lack of the weightier matters of the law, justice, and mercy, and faith...

The present world situation smells to heaven! And now, in the presence of colossal problems, which must be solved in Christ's name and for Christ's sake, the Fundamentalists propose to drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly!

Well, they are not going to do it; certainly not in this vicinity. I do not even know in this congregation whether anybody has been tempted to be a Fundamentalist. Never in this church have I caught one accent of intolerance. God keep us always so and ever increasing areas of the Christian fellowship; intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant, not with the tolerance of indifference, as though we did not care about the faith, but because always our major emphasis is upon the weightier matters of the law.

Source: Harry Emerson Fosdick, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" Christian Work 102 (June 10, 1922): 716–722.

(From History Matters)


Categories: Harry Emerson Fosdick, Religion


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Quotes of the day: Henrik Ibsen
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Published Thursday, May 23, 2013 @ 6:08 AM EDT
May 23 2013

Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 - May 23, 1906) was a major Norwegian playwright, theater director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney.

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.

Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of iron or of gold.

Castles in the air- they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too.

Do you know what we are... those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

Don't use that foreign word "ideals." We have that excellent native word "lies."

I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

It is no use lying to one's self.

It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never right until it does right.

Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

Many a man can save himself if he admits he's done wrong and takes his punishment.

One's life is a heavy price to pay for being born.

People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it.

Really to sin you have to be serious about it.

The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.

The majority is always wrong. The minority is rarely right.

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom- these are the pillars of society.

The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

To live is to war with trolls.

What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

When you've sold yourself once for the sake of others, you don't do it second time.

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.


Categories: Henrik Ibsen, Quotes of the day


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Hello, Noonan.
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Published Thursday, May 23, 2013 @ 6:00 AM EDT
May 23 2013

(The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: "Nooney Tunes")

If you've been irritated for years by Peggy Noonan's self-serving, pompous blatherings, boy, do I have something for you.


Categories: Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Peggy Noonan


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Tweaks
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Published Wednesday, May 22, 2013 @ 8:59 AM EDT
May 22 2013

I've been tweaking the blog to reduce the page load and link generation times. The biggest change is that the categories and archives links no longer appear on every page. They've been relocated to the "about" page.

Fixing one thing generally breaks a half-dozen others, so please let me know if you come across something that doesn't work.


Categories: KGB Blog News


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On technology
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Published Wednesday, May 22, 2013 @ 6:10 AM EDT
May 22 2013

A linear projection into the future of any science or technology is like a form of propaganda- often persuasive, almost always wrong.
-Pamela McCorduck

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
-Bill Gray

A successful technology creates problems that only it can solve.
-Alan Kay

All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.
-Neil Gaiman

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
-David Ross Brower

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-James Klass

Cheese in an aerosol can is the greatest advance in technology since fire.
-James Angove

Each fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, football fans cheer for their favorite irrational number: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine!"
-Bruce Watson

Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth. (From Engineers Explained)
-Unattributed

Even though today's technology provides us with mountains of data, it is useless without judgment.
-Felix G. Rohatyn

Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
-Carl Sagan

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
-Clive James

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
-Alice Kahn

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard P. Feynman

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
-Buckminster Fuller

I may be just an empty flesh terminal relying on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that, everything that makes me a unique human being, is still out there, somewhere, safe in the theoretical storage space owned by giant multi-national corporations.
-Stephen Colbert

If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't be able to stop things now. (re: regulation of information technology.)
-Carlo de Benedetti

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
-Freeman Dyson

If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.
-Ed Turner

In the long run, everything is a toaster. (on innovative technologies)
-Bruce Greenwald

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
-Douglas Adams

[Information Technology] people are so hypnotized by the technology they don't look for real results.
-Peter Drucker

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
-Bruce Sterling

Let's be frank, the Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven.
-Bill Bryson

Levitt's First Law of Information Technology: If it's free, adopt it.
-Unattributed

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.
-A.C. Grayling

[N]either technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.
-James Gleick

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-Stewart Brand

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
-Albert Einstein

Some technologies do their job perfectly and tend to stick around. The spoon is one example, the lawn-roller another. Paper may well be a third. (From The Economist)
-Unattributed

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
-Aldous Huxley

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.
-Max Frisch

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
-Alan Kay

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
-Unattributed

Technology is really civilization, let's face it.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.
-John Tudor

Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive.
-Laurie Anderson

The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-Roger Levian

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself-either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.
-Max Born

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
-E.O. Wilson

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology- the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
-Robert Pirsig

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
-Neil Postman

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
-Douglas Adams

We have lots of information technology. We just don't have any information. (New Yorker cartoon caption)
-Sydney J. Harris

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
-Carl Sagan

While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
-Lee Gomes

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law, newspapers, periodicals, radio, television, all electronic media, and technologies yet to be developed. (Cartoon caption in The New Yorker)
-Unattributed


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Quotes of the day: Alexander Pope
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Published Tuesday, May 21, 2013 @ 7:55 AM EDT
May 21 2013

Alexander Pope (May 21, 1688 - May 30, 1744) was an English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. (Click here for full Wikipedia article.)

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A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.

Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear.

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie; for an excuse is a lie guarded.

At every word a reputation dies.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

Coffee, which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

Genuine religion is not so much a matter of feeling as a matter of principle.

Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.

For, as blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

He who tells a lie, is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.

Here am I, dying of a hundred good symptoms. (Response to his physician's statement that he was better. He died later that day.)

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
(from "Eloisa to Abelard")

I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring out.

Order is heaven's first law.

Our passions are like convulsion-fits, which, though they make us stronger for the time, leave us the weaker ever after.

Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few.

Some old men, by continually praising the time of their youth, would almost persuade us that there were no fools in those days; but unluckily they are left themselves for examples.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool.

The Scripture in time of disputes is like an open town in time of war, which serves indifferently the occasions of both parties.

There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.

Therefore they who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients, may as well say our faces are not our own, because they are like our Fathers: And indeed it is very unreasonable, that people should expect us to be Scholars, and yet be angry to find us so.

To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.

Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown;
O grant an honest fame, or grant me none!

Virtues and vices are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.

Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time,
And make two lovers happy.


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Quotes of the day: Honoré de Balzac
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Published Monday, May 20, 2013 @ 7:11 AM EDT
May 20 2013

Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. (Click for full Wikipedia article).

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A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman.

A mother, who is really a mother, is never free.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea.

A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without love, without virtue, without sex.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Discretion is the best form of calculation.

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Glory is the sun of the dead.

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Manners are the hypocrisy of nations.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Our most cruel enemies are our nearest in blood!... Kings have neither brothers, nor sons, nor mothers.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within.

Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self- denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

The fact is that love is of two kinds- one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.

True love is eternal, infinite, always like unto itself; it is equable, pure, without violent demonstration; white hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.

Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings.

What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.


Categories: Honoré de Balzac, Quotes of the day


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Star Trek: Into Insipidity
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Published Sunday, May 19, 2013 @ 12:14 PM EDT
May 19 2013

(A curmudgeon's review of "Star Trek: Into Darkness")

Star Trek: Into Darkness is aggressively, egregiously, purposefully, intentionally, maliciously stupid.

A certain suspension of disbelief is necessary in order to watch science fiction of any kind, and Star Trek is no exception. But Star Trek generally limited itself to extrapolations of existing technology and scientific theory, and the techno-babble whatsits still had to function within a known universe with well-defined laws of physics.

(Warning: there are spoilers ahead.)

One wonders if those responsible for this abomination took a copy of the script from Star Trek II, a script rejected from Lost in Space, shuffled them together, and filmed the result.

J.J. Abrams' original 2009 reboot also contained major errors, but that film was entertaining enough that the gaffes didn't come to mind until you were in your car, on your way home from the theater.

The plot holes is this stinker dragged me out of the movie in the very opening scene, and from that point on, things just got worse.

The movie starts on the planet Nibiru, which is also the name of the fictional planet that was supposed to kill us all during the Mayan Apocalypse.

"Hi, I'm J.J. Abrams, and we're starting off by naming this planet 'Nibiru' just to let you know we're deliberately thumbing our nose at science in general and Star Trek in particular, which we never liked. The whole movie is like this. This is one colossal in-joke. Don't forget to visit the concession stand."

They have to lower a guy on a rope into a volcano because some kind of magnetic interference from the volcano messes with the transporter. The rope breaks, and the guy and the doohickey that's going to turn off the volcano fall into the crater. The guy and the doohickey survive. Why not just drop the doohickey into the volcano in the first place and be done with it?

In the 23rd century, humans apparently have developed the ability to jump and/or fall 50-100 foot distances without sustaining injuries. They are also all long-distance runners.

The Enterprise is a space ship. Roddenberry's explicit design requirements were "no fins or rockets."

This Enterprise has more flaming ports than a busload of tourists eating at a Taco Bell.

It's probably safe to assume Roddenberry didn't envision starships and shuttlecraft would be interchangeable with submarines, either.

In the future, military experts charged with the safety of the planet will meet, unarmed, in buildings with no security, in rooms with large picture windows.

The bad guy may be superhuman and have lots of guns, but he can't hit the side of a Nibiruian barn. Too bad he didn't have another one of those magic fizzy explosive class rings.

Despite other advances in technology, firefighting still relies on hoses, strategically placed so they can be hurled into the turbine intakes of 23rd century shuttles.

Question: if you can use a super-duper transwarp transporter to beam yourself from earth to a planet light years away, isn't it kind of dumb to waste all that money building a star fleet? And lucky for him there were no magnetic volcanoes in the way?

We need to wake up this guy who's been in suspended animation for 300 years so he can design advanced weapons for us. Just imagine if we could somehow bring Thomas Newcomen from 1712 to the present. He could show us how to build a steam engine!

I swear that was a red-skinned Admiral Ackbar sitting at the station in the brig. Another Abrams joke? ("It's a trap. Also, wait until you see what I do to Star Wars.")

I'm a doctor and a scientist, which is why I injected blood from a 300 year old mutated human into a dead tribble for absolutely no reason, a species from a totally different planet with totally dissimilar biology and by the way, did I mention it was already dead? And why did we bring the movie to a freaking stop to point this out to you? It's a little thing we learned in writing school called "foreshadowing." Aren't we clever?

When Scotty disabled the weapon systems on the bad guy's ship he could have also disabled their shields, so Kirk and whatshisname could have just beamed on over instead of doing that dangerous space-suited jump between the vessels. Well yeah, but then we couldn't put in our homage to the asteroid scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And also, Mr. Smart Guy, the bad starship was powered by a cold fusion magnetic volcano that would have blocked the transporter anyway. Pbpbpbpbt.

"To really piss off the science nerds, we're going to make a reference about being 238,000 kilometers from earth and then place the ships next to the moon, which is 238,000 *miles* from earth. Later we'll make some clever joke about even NASA getting the two confused. Oh, and screw you, science fans."

Those 72 super-duper torpedoes which blew up simultaneously inside the bad starship were neither super nor duper, because not only did they not destroy the bad guys, they allowed the ship to make it through earth's atmosphere without burning up, take out Alcatraz, and mess up all those nice Bay-view apartment buildings. Yeah, the same folks in charge of Starfleet security also run Earth's planetary defense system.

Even assuming the ships were caught by Earth's gravity, one expects it would take slightly more than ten minutes for them to cover the distance between the moon and the earth. That would make their velocity 1.5 million miles per hour or over 400 miles per second. Objects entering the atmosphere at that speed explode and/or incinerate.

This Enterprise is designed like an 80s Hyatt hotel, with a big atrium and, one presumes, a food court that didn't appear because Orange Julius wouldn't sign the contract.

23rd century starships have engineering sections which apparently also have the ability to brew large quantities of beer in massive tanks.

Speaking of tanks, when the guys are hanging from one of the ubiquitous engineering catwalks and a big one goes whizzing past, my wife noted they had not only lost warp drive, but also had no hot water.

In the first movie, they were able to beam two people falling at escape velocity from the surface of a planet being imploded by the massive, constantly-changing gravitational field of a red-matter generated black hole. This time around, they couldn't differentiate between Dr. McCoy and a torpedo (both are blunt and explosive?) or pull Spock and the bad guy from a flying vehicle. Wait- is there a magnetic volcano near here?

23rd century matter/anti-matter warp drive engine design is a lot like that of 70s Volkswagen Beetle engines, in that you can get both to function optimally by repeatedly kicking them.

Hey, remember that we discovered there was something in this guy's blood that can cure incurable illnesses and bring people back from the dead? Shouldn't we be working on this? Or do magnetic volcano-resistant transporters get higher priority?

Note I haven't said anything about the lifted dialogue or the stolen and abused plot lines from previous movies.

One can only hope that some persons who see this film will decide to take a look at Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and realize Star Trek was intended to be entertainment for thinking grown-ups, not the burlesque Abrams perpetrated in what is hopefully his last dubious contribution to a once dignified franchise.


Categories: Movies, Star Trek


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It's madness...
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Published Sunday, May 19, 2013 @ 6:09 AM EDT
May 19 2013

A long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.
-Charles Manson

All things considered, insanity is the only alternative.
-Unattributed

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
-H.P. Lovecraft

America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.
-Charles Pierce

Being crazy isn't enough.
-Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

Don't call me irrational. It makes me crazy when you do that.
-Unattributed (From the TV series Frasier)

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
-William Dement

Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
-Steve Landesberg

I am not insane, you just have no context.
-Velut Luna

I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
-Unattributed

I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
-S.J. Perelman

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
-Hunter S. Thompson

I plead contemporary insanity. (T-shirt)
-Unattributed

I sent my desk calendar to a psychiatrist. The schedule was insane.
-Carol Simpson

I'll take crazy over stupid any day.
-Joss Whedon

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an "information highway," but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.
-Mike Royko

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
-John Steinbeck

If you spend all of your time arguing with people who are nuts, you'll be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.
-Scott Adam

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers, but creative artists very seldom.
-G.K. Chesterton

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
-J.G. Ballard

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
-Oscar Wilde

In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.
-Johnny Carson

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
-Nora Ephron

Insanity in the individual is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Insanity is contagious.
-Joseph Heller

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
-Rita Mae Brown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a raise.
-Robert Brault

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over-taxed.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
-Ray Bradbury

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
-Philip K. Dick

Madness may be a sane response to an insane world, and insanity breeds special perceptions.
-R.D. Laing

Madness takes it toll. Please have exact change.
-Unattributed

Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food.
-Austin O'Malley

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
-Susan Sontag

Mothers are all slightly insane.
-J.D. Salinger

My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.
-Spike Milligan

My grandmother was insane. She had pierced hearing aids.
-Steven Wright

Never tell a crazy person he's crazy.
-Tina Fey

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions.
-Henry Ward Beecher

No sane man will dance.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
-G.K. Chesterton

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
-Robert Anton Wilson

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.
-Heinrich Heine

Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane.
-Scott Adams

Sanity is a cozy lie.
-Susan Sontag

Sanity is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency.
-N.F. Simpson

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected.
-Robert Pirsig

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-Carl Jung

Some are born mad. Some remain so.
-Samuel Beckett

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.
-William Saroyan

The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.
-Unattributed

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes- the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals; and, the Don Quixotes, with a sense for ideals, but mad.
-George Santayana

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to be insane in such a useful way that they can't commit you.
-Mark Edwards

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
-Rita Mae Brown

There are worse things than being mad.
-Jack Kerouac

There is a pleasure sure,
In being mad, which none
but madmen know!
-John Dryden

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
-Oscar Levant

This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
-P.J. O'Rourke

This is a mournful discovery.
1) Those who agree with you are insane
2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.
-Philip K. Dick

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who did not hear the music.
-Angela Monet

To be crazy is not necessarily to writhe in snake pits or converse with imaginary gods. It can sometimes be not knowing what to do in the morning.
-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
-Henrik Tikkanen

Warning: the Internet may contain traces of nuts.
-Unattributed

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
-John Updike

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
-Hermann Hesse

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
-Dave Barry

When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
-Alan Moore

Would it not be more economical for the governments to build asylums for the sane instead of the demented?
-Kahlil Gibran

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the United States of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war.
-Unattributed

You're only given a little spark of madness; you mustn't lose it.
-Robin Williams


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Quotes of the day: Tina Fey
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Published Saturday, May 18, 2013 @ 6:33 AM EDT
May 18 2013

Elizabeth Stamatina "Tina" Fey (born May 18, 1970) is an American actress, comedienne, writer and producer, known for her work on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, the critically acclaimed NBC comedy series 30 Rock, and such films as Mean Girls, Baby Mama, Date Night, and Admission. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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Confidence is ten percent hard work and 90 percent delusion.

Gay people don't actually try to convert people. That's Jehovah's Witnesses you're thinking of.

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society... unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

I learned quickly that trying to force Country Folk to love the Big City is like telling your gay cousin, "You just haven't met the right girl yet."

I prefer the retro chic of spending Christmas just like Joseph and Mary did- Traveling arduously back to the place of your birth to be counted, with no guarantee of a bed when you get there.

I think God designed our mouths to die first to help us slowly transition to the grave.

If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?

If you're ever feeling really good about yourself, there's this thing called the Internet.

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don't like something, it is empirically not good. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles trying to prove it doesn't exist.

It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.

Never tell a crazy person he's crazy.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff?

Seriously, I've just realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it.

Sometimes if you have a difficult decision to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.

The eyes are the window to where the soul is supposed to be.

The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30.

When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable.

When people say, "You really, really must" do something, it means you don't really have to... When it's true, it doesn't need to be said.

You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.

You can't be that kid standing at the top of the water slide, over- thinking it. You have to go down the chute.


Categories: Quotes of the day, Tina Fey


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Quotes of the day: Alan Kay
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Published Friday, May 17, 2013 @ 8:49 AM EDT
May 17 2013

Alan Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist whose Dynabook, proposed in 1972, served as the conceptual prototype for the design and development of laptop and slate computers. He was the original architect of the overlapping-window user interface, and coined the phrase "object-oriented programming." (Click for Wikipedia article).

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

A successful technology creates problems that only it can solve.

Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults.

I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire.

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in- the one that we think is reality

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal- a sort of voting situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws.

The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.


Categories: Alan Kay, Quotes of the day


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Future tense (or tense future)
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Published Thursday, May 16, 2013 @ 7:42 AM EDT
May 16 2013

As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.
-William Gibson

Forget the past- the future will give you plenty to worry about.
-George Allen

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
-Isaac Asimov

I am an optimist; anyone interested in the future has to be, otherwise he would simply shoot himself.
-Arthur C. Clarke

I believe the children are like our future: nasty, brutish and short. (From The Onion)
-Unattributed

I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
-Arthur Wing Pinero

I have seen the future. It needs work.
-Robert Littell

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
-Albert Einstein

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
-E.B. White

I'm a peripheral visionary. I can see into the future, but only off to the side.
-Steven Wright

I'm optimistic about the future, but not about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one.
-James Baldwin

Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars... Could anything- anything- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous that the world we are living in.
-Sam Harris

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
-Eric Hoffer

In the future, more people will work for themselves, creating a huge market for bizarre products.
-Scott Adams

In the future, most democratic countries will be led by tall people with good hair.
-Scott Adams

In the future, the most important job skill will be a lack of ethics.
-Scott Adams

It's not the future that scares me... it's what will happen tomorrow.
-Frank Romano

My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer... and there are flying cars.
-Joss Whedon

Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.
-Ashleigh Brilliant

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
-Dean Acheson

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-Alan Kay

The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed.
-Scott Adams

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
-Frank Herbert

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
-Erich Fromm

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
-Winston Churchill

The enemies of the Future are always the very nicest people.
-Christopher Morley

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
-Warren Bennis

The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.
-Alvin Toffler

The future depends on assumptions and assumptions are just stuff you make up. No sense in knocking yourself out.
-Scott Adams

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
-George F. Will

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.
-James Cameron

The future is the past returning through another gate.
-Arnold H. Glasow

The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror.
-Bruce Sterling

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.
-George F. Will

The future will be better tomorrow.
-Dan Quayle

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
-John Sladek

The past can only be known, not changed. The future can only be changed, not known.
-Steward Brand

The past is gone; the present is confusing; and the future scares the hell out of me.
-David L. Stein

The trouble with our times is the future is not what it used to be.
-Paul Valery

The written word will soon disappear and we'll no longer be able to read good prose like we used to could. This prospect does not gentle my thoughts or tranquil me toward the future.
-James Thurber

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
-Eugene O'Neill

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
-Arthur C. Clarke

When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.
-John M. Richardson, Jr.

When you think all is lost, the future remains.
-Robert Goddard

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


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Way too much happiness
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Published Wednesday, May 15, 2013 @ 4:05 AM EDT
May 15 2013

A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.
-Honore de Balzac

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.
-Bette Davis

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
-Benjamin Disraeli

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
-Bertrand Russell

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself.
-Don Marquis

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
-George Bernard Shaw

God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he'll be there.
-Rev. Billy Graham

Grief and sadness knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger than common joys.
-Alphonse de Lamartine

Grief is the obverse of happiness. They are two sides of a single coin, and only the vulnerable know either.
-Irving Townsend

Happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.
-Tom Magliozzi

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-Ernest Hemingway

Happiness is a belt-fed weapon.
-(Bumper Sticker) Unattributed

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
-William S. Burroughs

Happiness is a form of courage.
-Holbrook Jackson

Happiness is a good feeling I get when things go a particular way; joy is an attitude I adopt in spite of how things go.
-Fil Anderson

Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
-Hermann Hesse

Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.
-Channing Pollock

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
-Robertson Davies

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
-Marcel Proust

Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.
-Isaac Asimov

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
-Ingrid Bergman

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family- in another city.
-George Burns

Happiness is that ridiculous life goal of illiterates.
-Elias Cannetti

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
-Don Marquis

Happiness isn't good enough for me. I demand euphoria!
-(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) Bill Watterson

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
-Oscar Levant

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.
-George Sand

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
-Robert Frost

Happiness, it is said, is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves.
-F. Emerson Andrews

He that is happy, by whatever means, desires nothing but the continuance of happiness.
-Samuel Johnson

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.
-Paul Sweeney

I believe that a man's pursuit of happiness should not be impeded by his employer's lack of imagination.
-Rob Neyer

I believe that inherent within the God-given right to the pursuit of happiness, is the equally God-given right to the pursuit of unhappiness. That is why I support gay marriage.
-Chuck Lorre

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
-Aldous Huxley

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
-John Stuart Mill

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices do.
-C.S. Lewis

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.
-Bertrand Russell

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.
-C.S. Lewis

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
-Thomas Paine

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.
-Thomas Paine

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
-Agnes Repplier

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
-W. Somerset Maugham

It is poor government that does not realize that the prolonged life, health and happiness of its people are its greatest asset.
-William James Mayo

It's all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness.
-P.J. O'Rourke

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.
-Mark CHernoff

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
-Helen Keller

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
-George Orwell

Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house but are sure that they have one.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Men's hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

Money can't buy you happiness, but it helps you look for it in a lot more places.
-Milton Berle

Money doesn't buy happiness, but with it at least you can be miserable in comfort.
-Unattributed

My recipe for marital happiness is whenever you can, read at meals.
-Cyril Connolly

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.
-Samuel Adams

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
-Mary Wollstonecraft

No one has a right to happiness.
-Eric Hoffer

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
-Virginia Woolf

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

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
-William Feather

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
-Rita Mae Brown

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
-Terry Pratchett

People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older.
-Sydney J. Harris

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
-Oscar Wilde

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
-Hosea Ballou

Reason, Observation and Experience- the Holy Trinity of Science- have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Remember: Anyone who says money can't buy happiness simply hasn't learned where to shop.
-Warren Buffett

Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us either peace or happiness.
-Gustave Le Bon

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
-Oscar Wilde

Sometimes it's hard to avoid the happiness of others.
-David Assael

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

That action is best which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
-Francis Hutcheson

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-Henry Ward Beecher

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
-Joseph Addison

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
-H.L. Mencken

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.
-Martha Washington

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
-Jeremy Bentham

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
-Ernest Dimnet

The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.
-Bertrand Russell

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. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist.
-Thomas Paine

The one thing your friends will never forgive you is your happiness.
-Albert Camus

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
-William Cowper

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
-Aldous Huxley

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
-Eric Hoffer

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do.
-James M. Barrie

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
-F.H. Bradley

The secret of happiness... is to be happy already.
-Julian Barnes

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible...
-Bertrand Russell

The secret to true happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity.
-Olivia Goldsmith

The trouble is not that we are never happy- it is that happiness is so episodical.
-Ruth Benedict

There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.
-Helen Keller

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
-Unattributed

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.
-Dante Alighieri

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
-Anthony Trollope

There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy.
-Unattributed

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have a clear conscience, or none at all.
-Ogden Nash

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
-Buddha

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
-Gustave Flaubert

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
-Bertrand Russell

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
-Erich Fromm

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
-George Bernard Shaw

We hold these truths to be self-evident- that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-Thomas Jefferson

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
-Jane Austen

You can't postpone sorrow, so why would you postpone happiness?
-Robert Brault


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Quotes of the day: Francis Albert Sinatra
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Published Tuesday, May 14, 2013 @ 4:58 AM EDT
May 14 2013

Baritone Frank Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was indisputably the 20th century's greatest singer of popular song. Though influenced by Bing Crosby's crooning, and by learning from trombonist Tommy Dorsey's breath control and blues singer Billie Holiday's rhythmic swing, Frank Sinatra mainstreamed the concept of singing colloquially, treating lyrics as personal statements and handling melodies with the ease of a jazz improviser. His best work is standards- Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and the Gershwins- but Sinatra, despite his 1957 denunciation of rock & roll as degenerate, recorded songs by the likes of Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Jimmy Webb, and Billy Joel. Not only did his freely interpretive approach pave the way for the idiosyncrasies of rock singing, but with his character- a mix of tough-guy cool and romantic vulnerability- he became the first true pop idol, a superstar who through his music established a persona audiences found compelling and true. (Click for full article.)

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Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.

Being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.

Cock your hat- angles are attitudes.

Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world- to an individual or to a nation.

For years I've nursed a secret desire to spend the Fourth of July in a double hammock with a swingin' redheaded broad... but I could never find me a double hammock.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

How can a free people make decisions without facts? If the press reports world news as they report about me, we're in trouble.

Hunger is inexcusable in a world where grain rots in silos and butter turns rancid while being held for favorable commodity indices.

I believe that God knows what each of us wants and needs. It's not necessary for us to make it to church on Sunday to reach Him. You can find Him anyplace. And if that sounds heretical, my source is pretty good: Matthew, Five to Seven, The Sermon on the Mount.

I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest.

If you possess something but you can't give it away, then you don't possess it... it possesses you.

I'm gonna live 'til I die.

I'm not one of those complicated, mixed-up cats. I'm not looking for the secret to life... I just go on from day to day, taking what comes.

I'm not unmindful of a man's seeming need for faith; I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle.

I'm supposed to have a Ph.D on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them.

I've always had a theory that whenever guys and gals start swinging, they begin to lose interest in conquering the world.

People often remark that I'm pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you've got to have talent and know how to use it.

Put your sunglasses on, because you ain't going home 'til the morning comes.

Stop worrying about communism; just get rid of the conditions that nurture it.

What I do with my life is of my own doing. I live it the best way I can.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I'm honest.

When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.

You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad- if you're indifferent, endsville.

You gotta love livin', baby, 'cause dyin' is a pain in the ass.

(YouTube video: "Fly Me to the Moon")

(Today is also the birthday of Gustave Flaubert)


Categories: Frank Sinatra, Music, Video, YouTube


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Quotes of the day: Stephen Colbert
(permalink)

Published Monday, May 13, 2013 @ 6:29 AM EDT
May 13 2013

Stephen Tyrone Colbert (b. May 13, 1964) is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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Agnostics are just atheists without balls.

Any religion whose messiah's name isn't recognized by Microsoft Word can’t be that much of a threat.

Contraception leads to more babies being born out of wedlock, like fire extinguishers lead to more fires.

Contrary to what people may say, there’s no upper limit to stupidity.

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self- imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

Equations are the devil's sentences.

I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit.

I can't prove it, but I can say it.

I love making observations. That one is a classic example.

I may be just an empty flesh terminal relying on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that, everything that makes me a unique human being, is still out there, somewhere, safe in the theoretical storage space owned by giant multi-national corporations.

I'm disappointed that my own Catholic Church has decided that capital punishment is wrong. Which is pretty hypocritical if you think about it, because they wouldn't even have a religion if it wasn't for capital punishment.

If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

If you repeat it, it's true. If you repeat it, it's true. Through repetition, something becomes true, if you repeat it enough until it becomes true. Do I need to repeat that for you?

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Reporting the facts can change the course of history. Then again, so can Wikipedia.

The fate of our country is now in the hands of people who don't think about what they want until they get right up to the register at McDonald's.

The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you.

The more you know, the sadder you get.

The worst thing about affirmative action is that it encourages reverse discrimination, so-called because it goes in the opposite way of how we naturally discriminate.

There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.

There's nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell.

You can't laugh and be afraid at the same time.

You cannot correct an old person every time they say something offensive. You would never make it through Thanksgiving dinner.


Categories: Quotes of the day, Stephen Colbert


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My faith in the 21st century is restored...
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Published Monday, May 13, 2013 @ 6:22 AM EDT
May 13 2013

The first Canadian commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield, is scheduled to return to earth this evening with U.S. astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko.

Hadfield's been in orbit for 148 days, and during that time he's not only done whatever it this they do on the ISS, he's maintained constant contact with the people of this strange little blue ball via Twitter and other media. But he obviously saved the best for last.

(YouTube video: "A Space Oddity," from the ISS.

Godspeed, guys. May you have a safe and uneventful landing.

And eat your heart out, William Shatner.


Categories: Chris Hadfield, ISS, Music, NASA, Video, YouTube


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But somebody has to do it...
(permalink)

Published Sunday, May 12, 2013 @ 6:20 AM EDT
May 12 2013

Don’t get me wrong. Being a mom is no picnic. Raising the kids is the mother’s responsibility. It’s a thankless, solitary job, like sheriff or Pope.
-Stephen Colbert


Categories: Mothers, Observations, Quotes of the day, Stephen Colbert


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Quotes of the day: Yogi Berra (and a lesson in etymology)
(permalink)

Published Sunday, May 12, 2013 @ 4:43 AM EDT
May 12 2013

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra (born May 12, 1925) is a former American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager. He played almost his entire 19-year baseball career (1946–1965) for the New York Yankees. Berra is one of only four players to be named the Most Valuable Player of the American League three times, and is one of seven managers to lead both American and National League teams to the World Series. As a player, coach, or manager, Berra appeared in 21 World Series. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

Berra is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. He was named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team in a voting of fans in 1999. According to the win shares formula developed by sabermetrician Bill James, Berra is the greatest catcher of all time and the 52nd greatest non-pitching player in major-league history. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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For those who compile quotations, Yogi Berra is both a delight and a nightmare.

There's absolutely no doubt that Berra uttered every comment listed below. The problem is in determining whether the comments were original, or attributed remarks he later "adopted." As he confessed in The Yogi Book, "I really didn't say everything I said."

Consider one of Berra's most frequently repeated comments:

"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."

That quote is variously attributed to Berra, Casey Stengel, Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and many others. Software architect Larry Denenberg maintains a page on his website with links crediting the line to over two dozen sources.

Some of Berra's verbal contortions ("He's a big clog in their machine.") are called malapropisms, a word with an interesting- and eminently traceable- etymology.

It's directly derived from the word-mangling Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan's 1775 English comedy The Rivals, which in turn was based upon the word malapropos, an antonym of the far more commonly used apropos. (In French, "à propos" means, literally, "to the purpose." The prefix mal means "badly.")

Note the two words are not interchangeable. A malapropism is "the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one that sounds similar," while malapropos, when used as a noun, is "something inopportune or inappropriate."

Also note the majority of Berra's memorable comments aren't malapropisms, they're malaphors- a portmanteau of malapropism and metaphor coined by writer Lawrence Harrison,

But I digest. It was not my detention to rambulate.

-----

A home opener is always exciting, no matter if it's home or on the road.

A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.

All pitchers are liars or crybabies.

Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours.

Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked.

Don't count on me. I'm playing way over my mind.

Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.

He's a big clog in their machine.

I can't concentrate when I'm thinking.

I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.

I knew the record would stand until it was broken.

I looked like this when I was young, and I still do.

I really didn't say everything I said... Then again, I might have said 'em, but you never know.

I usually take a two hour nap from one to four.

I'm a lucky guy and I'm happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.

I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.

If people don't want to come to the ballpark how are you going to stop them?

If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

If you ask me a question I don't know, I'm not going to answer.

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.

It ain't over 'til it's over.

It ain't the heat, it's the humility.

It gets late early out there.

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

It's déjà vu all over again.

It's not too far. It just seems like it is.

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future

Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.

Little things are big.

Mantle can hit just as good right-handed as he can left-handed. He's just naturally amphibious.

Never answer an anonymous letter.

Ninety percent of putts that are short don't go in.

Ninety percent of this game is half-mental.

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

Pair up in threes.

Slump? I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting.

Swing at the strikes.

Texas has a lot of electrical votes.

The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing.

The future ain't what it used to be.

The other teams could make trouble for us if they win.

The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.

There are few folks who, if they don't already know, you can't tell 'em.

Think? How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?

We made too many wrong mistakes.

We were overwhelming underdogs.

What time is it? You mean now?

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Why buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel.

You have to give 100 percent in the first half of the game. If that isn't enough, in the second half, you have to give what is left.


Categories: Quotes of the day, Yogi Berra


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Observation of the day
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Published Saturday, May 11, 2013 @ 3:01 AM EDT
May 11 2013

The flight to Mars is six months; eight, if you leave from Newark.
-David Letterman


Categories: David Letterman, Observations


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Quotes of the day: Mort Sahl
(permalink)

Published Saturday, May 11, 2013 @ 2:25 AM EDT
May 11 2013

Morton Lyon "Mort" Sahl (born May 11, 1927) is a Canadian-born American comedian and actor best known for his stream of consciousness monologues centered on current events and politics. His low-key, droll delivery of withering, ascerbic observations prompted Time to refer to him as "Will Rogers with fangs." (Sahl has his own web site here.

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A conservative is someone who believes in reform. But not now.

A social historian is someone who reports accidents to eyewitnesses.

Did anyone ever wrestle with his conscience and lose?

God is watching us. If we support someone we don't believe in and say he's electable, then God will make sure he's not elected and hope we do better the next time.

Hitler said that he always knew you could buy the press. What he didn't know was that you could get them cheap.

"I Aim for the Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London." (suggested title of Werner von Braun's autobiography)

I don't think there's any reward beyond participating, beyond being here.

I made the mistake early in my career, when I moved to Hollywood, of being attracted to actresses. I used to go out exclusively with actresses and other female impersonators.

I'm not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government.

If anybody comes up to you and says, "My kid is a conservative- why is that?" you say, "Remember in the 60s when we told you if you kept using drugs your kids would be mutants?"

If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you will eventually be accused of treason.

If you were the last man on earth, I'd have to oppose you. That's my job.

In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.

I’m for capital punishment. You’ve got to execute people. How else are they going to learn?

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.

Most people past college age are not atheists. It's too hard to be in society, for one thing. Because you don't get any days off. And if you're an agnostic you don't know whether you get them off or not.

My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.

People tell me there are a lot of guys like me, which doesn't explain why I'm lonely.

Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.

Say what you will (about former Disney chairman Michael Eisner), he made the monorail run on time.

Television is never more false than when it's openly sincere.

That feeling of hopelessness only serves your masters.

The bravest thing that men do is love women.

The Democrats don't want anyone to be born, but if you are, they will take care of you from the cradle to the grave. The Republicans don't mind if you are born, if you assure them that you don't plan to live long enough to collect your Social Security.

There's a danger our fiscal bankruptcy might overtake our moral bankruptcy.

There's a magazine of obscure poetry - called Whither.

This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.

Those who learn nothing from history are condemned to rewrite it.

Those who the gods would make rich and famous on TV, they first drive mad.

Two hundred years ago, we had Jefferson, Washington, Ben Franklin and Tom Paine, and there were four million people. Today we have 220 million, and look at our leaders. Darwin was wrong.

Washington couldn't tell a lie, Nixon couldn't tell the truth, and Reagan couldn't tell the difference.

We all know that America is the worst country in the world, except for all the others.

We claim we believe in compassion, which is an abstract, and when it's personified we discredit the man.

We would have broken up except for the children. Who were the children? Well, she and I were.

When the Democrats form a firing squad, they stand in a circle.


Categories: Mort Sahl, Observations, Politics, Quotes of the day


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More about mom
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Published Friday, May 10, 2013 @ 9:57 PM EDT
May 10 2013

In the previous post, we searched the database for "mother" but we forgot about deal old Mom:

Every time I walk into a singles bar I can hear Mom's wise words: "Don't pick that up, you don't know where it's been."
-Unattributed

Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Four words every mom dreads hearing: "You're under arrest, Mom."
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

I thought of becoming born again, but mom refused.
-Unattributed

I wonder if a plastic surgeon's mom ever yells at him to stop making faces.
-Olivia Ramsey

My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, "Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim."
-Paula Poundstone

Never let Mom comb your hair when she's been arguing with Dad.
-Unattributed

Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
-Nelson Algren

Nobody loves me but my mama, and she could be jivin' too.
-B.B. King

Yo mama is so fat, when she sings, it's over.
-Unattributed

Grandmas are moms with lots of frosting.
-Unattributed

Whoever said "Grandmas are moms with lots of frosting" obviously never licked one.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)


Categories: Mothers, Quotes on a topic


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M is for the massive guilt trip she's gonna put on you if you forget...
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Published Friday, May 10, 2013 @ 8:05 AM EDT
May 10 2013

Today marks the 105th anniversary of the first observance of Mother's Day, which is a subtle way to remind you that you have just two days to get a card, and the most of the good ones are already gone. That's okay, don't worry about it. I'm just a bit disappointed in you.

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A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
-Unattributed

A grandmother will put a sweater on you when she is cold, feed you when she is hungry, and put you to bed when she is tired.
-Erma Bombeck

A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
-Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.
-Washington Irving

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
-Peter de Vries

All mothers are working mothers.
-Unattributed

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.
-Oscar Wilde

An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest. (Spanish Proverb)
-Unattributed

Anything that makes your mother cry is fun.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Being a mother is a noble status, right? So why does it change when you put "unwed" or "welfare" in front of it?
-Florynce Kennedy

Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Consult a real expert: call your mother.
-Unattributed

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.
-Pope Paul VI

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
-W. Somerset Maugham

God invented mothers because he couldn't be everywhere at once. Then he invented guilt, because mothers couldn't be everywhere at once.
-Unattributed

I don't always enjoy being a mother. At those times my husband and I hop up somewhere in the wine country, eat, drink, make mad love and pretend we were born sterile and raised poodles.
-Dorothy DeBolt

I have always admired the Esquimaux. One fine day a delicious meal is cooked for dear old mother, and then she goes walking away over the ice, and doesn't come back.
-Agatha Christie

I would have gone home to my mother, but I'm not that crazy about my mother.
-Cher

If nothing is going well, call your grandmother.
-Unattributed

Just about the time a woman thinks her job is done, she becomes a grandmother.
-Edward H. Dreschnack

Mother is a verb, not a noun.
-Shonda Rhimes

Mother told me a couple of years ago, "Sweetheart, settle down and marry a rich man." I said, "Mom, I am a rich man."
-Cher

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
-Rebecca West

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be President but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.
-John F. Kennedy

Mothers are all slightly insane.
-J.D. Salinger

Mothers of teenagers know why animals eat their young. (T- shirt)
-Unattributed

My grandmother gave me five dollars and said, "Don't tell your mother." I told her, "It's going to cost you more than that."
-Steven Wright

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.
-Ellen DeGeneris

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
-Margaret Mead

My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping.
-Rita Rudner

My grandmother was insane. She had pierced hearing aids.
-Steven Wright

My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch.
-Richard Jeni

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.
-Nora Ephron

My mother's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.
-Buddy Hackett

My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors.
-Tony Martin

No man is responsible for his father. That is entirely his mother's affair.
-Margaret Turnbull

Sometimes you need a B-2 bomber and sometimes you need your mother.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
-Honore de Balzac

The key to living a moral life is this: Do nothing in private that you would be ashamed to discuss openly with your mother.
-J.P. Morgan

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
-Calvin Trillin

The only thing that seems eternal and natural in motherhood is ambivalence.
-Jane Lazarre

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother.
-Florence King

Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint, and sometimes sounds distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.
-Woodrow Wilson

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.
-Aristotle

To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.
-Victor Hugo

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
-James Joyce

When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they're not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They're upset because they've gone from supervisor of a child's life to a spectator. It's like being the vice president of the United States.
-Erma Bombeck

Wise children always choose a mother who was a shocking flirt in her maiden days, and so had several offers before she accepted their fortunate papa.
-James M. Barrie

Women who miscalculate are called "mothers."
-Abigail Van Buren

You never get over being a child, long as you have a mother to go to.
-Sarah Orne Jewett

Your mother knows how to push your buttons because she installed them.
-Unattributed


Categories: Mothers, Quotes on a topic


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Ye of little faith...
(permalink)

Published Thursday, May 09, 2013 @ 3:56 AM EDT
May 09 2013

(Or, if you prefer, today is the birthday of J.M. Barrie, author of "Peter Pan." See a collection of his quotes here.)

A dead atheist is someone who's all dressed up with no place to go.
-James Duffecy

A little philosophy makes a man an Atheist: a great deal converts him to religion.
-David Hume

All thinking men are atheists.
-Ernest Hemingway

America is a place where Jewish merchants sell Zen love beads to agnostics for Christmas.
-John Burton Brimer

An atheist is one who hopes the Lord will do nothing to disturb his disbelief.
-Franklin P. Jones

Atheism is a necessary condition for emancipation of the mind, but it's not a sufficient one.
-Christopher Hitchens

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
-Unattributed

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
-Sam Harris

Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity.
-T.S. Eliot

Atheism is really a term we do not need, in the same way that we don't have a word for someone who is not an astrologer.
-Sam Harris

Atheism, like agnosticism and skepticism, can be a dignified posture when it is based on careful reflection and civilly expressed. It should not be mean-spirited. Many of us prefer a kinder and gentler form of secular humanism.
-Paul Kurtz

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
-Don Hirschberg

Don't be an agnostic. Be something.
-Robert Frost

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
-Christopher Hitchens

God made me an atheist. Who am I to argue with Him?
-Unattributed

He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.
-Sinclair Lewis

Hypocrite: a guy who writes a book on atheism and prays that it sells.
-Woody Allen

I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
-Clarence Darrow

I am an atheist for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.
-Stanislaw Lem

I considered atheism but there weren't enough holidays.
-Unattributed

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

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure- that is all that agnosticism means.
-Clarence Darrow

I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.
-John Buchan

I think [the Bible] reads as if it were written by men and women, and men and women, as we know, are one-half chromosome away from chimpanzees.
-Christopher Hitchens

I'm a polyatheist- there are many gods I don't believe in.
-Dan Fouts

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
-George Bernard Shaw

I`am a very hard-line, angry atheist. Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.
-Joss Whedon

If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color.
-

If God saw the way some Republicans invoked his name, he'd turn atheist.
-Dennis Miller

If I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.
-H.L. Mencken

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
-Isaac Asimov

If the American Atheists Society or Saddam Hussein himself ever sent an unrestricted gift to any of my ministries, be assured I will operate on Billy Sunday's philosophy: The Devil's had it long enough, and quickly cash the check.
-Jerry Falwell

If there is a God, why did He make me an atheist?
-Ricky Gervais

In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.
-Jonathan Miller

Maybe the atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.
-Unattributed

Nah, there's no bigger atheist than me. Well, I take that back. I'm a cancer screening away from going agnostic and a biopsy away from full-fledged Christian.
-Adam Corrola

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has the Truth. To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
-Tom Lehrer

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Properly read, it [the Bible] is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
-Isaac Asimov

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins.
-Christopher Hitchens

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science. (Life of Pi)
-Yann Martel

She was an atheist and I was an agnostic. We didn't know what religion not to bring our children up in.
-Woody Allen

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
-Martin Buber

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
-Eric Hoffer

The two most evangelical groups in the world are atheists and vegetarians, especially the least knowledgeable and least intelligent individuals within those groups.
-Clark Coleman

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
-Dante Rossetti

"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.
-James Morrow

There are no atheists in foxholes.
-William J. Clear

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call atheists, and those who think they are facts are religious. Which group really gets the message?
-Joseph Campbell

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

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
-Richard Dawkins

What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness and an Atheist? Someone who knocks at your door for no apparent reason.
-Stan Kelly-Bootle

When agnostics die, do they go to the Great Maybe?
-Unattributed

When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes, atheism is a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's own redemptive nature.
-Isaac Asimov

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
-H.L. Mencken


Categories: Atheism, Quotes on a topic, Religion


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Khan, Bilbo Baggins, and a pair of Spocks
(permalink)

Published Wednesday, May 08, 2013 @ 7:13 AM EDT
May 08 2013

Possibly the funniest Trek-related commercial ever made. Definitely the one with the most Spocks. Congratulations to Leonard Nimoy for achieving a Shatner-esque level of self-aware self-parody, and Quinto for being such a good sport. (Quinto, by the way, is from the Pittsburgh suburb of Green Tree and is a graduate of Central Catholic and CMU.)

(YouTube video: Zachary Quinto vs. Leonard Nimoy: "The Challenge")

Speaking of self-aware self-parody, Nimoy outdid himself with this oldie but goodie:

(YouTube video: Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song [official alternate version])


Categories: Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek, Video, YouTube, Zachary Quinto


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Quotes of the day: Ted Sorensen
(permalink)

Published Wednesday, May 08, 2013 @ 12:06 AM EDT
May 08 2013

Theodore Chaikin "Ted" Sorensen (May 8, 1928 – October 31, 2010) was an American presidential advisor, lawyer and writer, best known as President John F. Kennedy’s special counsel, adviser and legendary speechwriter. President Kennedy once called him his "intellectual blood bank." (Click for Wikipedia article).

A nation without credibility and moral authority cannot lead, because no one will follow.

A speech is made great, not from the words used, but from the ideas conveyed. If the ideas, principles and values and substance of the speech are great, then it's going to be a great speech, even if the words are pedestrian. The words can be soaring, beautiful and eloquent but if the ideas are flat, empty or mean, it's not a great speech.

Above all, we shall wage no more unilateral, ill-planned, ill-considered, and ill-prepared invasions of foreign countries that pose no actual threat to our security.

Consistently wise decisions can only be made by those whose wisdom is constantly challenged.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest- but the myth- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

I believe in an America in which the fruits of productivity and prosperity are shared by all, by workers as well as owners, by those at the bottom as well as those at the top; an America in which the sacrifices required by national security are shared by all, by profiteers in the back offices as well as volunteers on the front lines.

I still believe that the mildest and most obscure of Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes. I believe it because I lived it.

I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism- Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy- that's what the Democratic party ought to reach for.

I wasn't involved in politics at all- until about the age of four.

I'm simply saying that there are advantages in sending a skilled diplomat who can always say, 'I'll get back to you on that, Mr. Minister'.

If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness.

Military strength in reserve is better than military strength being reigned upon the other side including all of its innocent civilians.

Now people all across America are starting to believe in America again. We are coming back, back to the heights of greatness, back to America's proud role as a temple of justice and a champion of peace.

Number one, that it is smart to communicate and negotiate with your enemy instead of just waging war with bombs and weapons of mass destruction.

Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values.

Presidential candidates don't chew gum.

Public opinion rarely considers the needs of the next generation or the history of the last. It is frequently hampered by myths and misinformation, by stereotypes and shibboleths, and by an innate resistance to innovation.

The ambassador was never present, but his presence was never absent.

The American people still believe in peace, human rights and justice; they are still a generous, fair-minded, open-minded people.

The damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul, is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us.

The good news, to relieve all this gloom, is that a democracy is inherently self-correcting. Here, the people are sovereign. Inept political leaders can be replaced. Foolish policies can be changed. Disastrous mistakes can be reversed.

Two roads diverged in the Old Senate Office Building and I took the one less recommended, and that has made all the difference. The truth is more prosaic: I wanted a good job.

We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal. (John F. Kennedy speech at American University, delivered June 10, 1963)

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. (John F. Kennedy speech at Rice University delivered September 12, 1962)

We have convinced over one billion members of the Islamic faith that we are prejudiced against their religion, that we would deny them freedom of religion, that we want suppress their culture and invade their governments.

We have treated our most serious adversaries, such as Iran and North Korea, in the most juvenile manner- by giving them the silent treatment. In so doing, we have weakened, not strengthened, our bargaining position and our leadership.

We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient- that we are only six percent of the world's population- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem. (John F. Kennedy speech at the University of Washington, delivered November 16, 1961)

We need not renounce the use of conventional force. We will be ready to repel any clear and present danger that poses a genuine threat to our national security and survival.

We remain essentially a nation under siege.

We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might.

We will always apply the same principles of collective security, prudent caution, and superior weaponry that enabled us to peacefully prevail in the long cold war against the Soviet Union.

We will be safer from terrorist attack only when we have earned the respect of all other nations instead of their fear, respect for our values and not merely our weapons.

When, in the late 1940s, we faced a global Cold War against another system of ideological fanatics certain that their authoritarian values would eventually rule the world, we prevailed in time. We prevailed because we exercised patience as well as vigilance, self-restraint as well as self-defense, and reached out to moderates and modernists, to democrats and dissidents, within that closed system.

With the help of dedicated Americans from our party, every party, and no party at all, I intend to mount that stairway to preach peace for our nation and world.


Categories: Quotes of the day, Ted Sorensen


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Quotes of the day: David Hume
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Published Tuesday, May 07, 2013 @ 1:11 AM EDT
May 07 2013

David Hume (May 7, 1711 - August 25, 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. (Click for full Wikipedia article).

-----

A little philosophy makes a man an Atheist: a great deal converts him to religion.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.

Art may make a suit of clothes; but nature must produce a man.

Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

He is happy, whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent, who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

Hear the verbal protestations of all men: Nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: You will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them.

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

Here am I who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies- except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.

Hypothetical liberty is allowed to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.

In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition.

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause.

It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave: Though at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact.

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.

Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude.

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men's dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

The greatest and truest zeal gives us no security against hypocrisy: The most open impiety is attended with a secret dread and compunction.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny ; flattery to treachery ; standing armies to arbitrary government ; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature.

Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.


Categories: David Hume, Quotes of the day


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The party of the first part...
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Published Monday, May 06, 2013 @ 1:54 PM EDT
May 06 2013

I never paid much attention to the insurance policy on my cell phone. But recent events make me wonder whether I'm adequately covered:

This insurance does not apply to loss or damage caused directly or indirectly by any of the following:
a. Governmental Authority Seizure or destruction of property by order of governmental authority.
b. Nuclear Hazard Nuclear reaction or radiation , or radioactive contamination, however caused. If physical loss or damage by fire ensues, we will pay only for such ensuing loss or damage.

What's the difference between a nuclear holocaust that melts your phone instead of causing it to burst into flame? And who's going to be around to process the claim?

c. War
(1) War, including undeclared or civil war;
(2) Warlike action by a military force; or
(3) Insurrection, rebellion, revolution, usurped power or action taken by governmental authority in hindering or defending against any of these.

Technically, the United States hasn't been in a declared war since World War II, so this is a bit fuzzy. Who, precisely, determines what's a "warlike action by a military force?" As for "insurrection," etc., does that mean if someone steps on my phone at a Tea Party or ACLU rally that I'm out of luck?

Then there's this:

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO POLICYHOLDERS-
TERRORISM RISK INSURANCE ACT OF 2002
 
You are hereby notified that, under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002, as amended, we must make terrorism coverage available if your policy covers commercial property. However, the actual coverage provided by your policy for acts of terrorism, as is true for all coverages, is limited by the terms, conditions, exclusions, limits, other provision of your policy, any endorsements to the policy and generally applicable rules of law. Any terrorism coverage provided by this policy may be partially reimbursed by the United States Government under a formula established by Federal Law. If applicable, under this formula, the United States Government will pay 85% of covered terrorism losses exceeding a statutorily established deductible paid by insurers until such time as insured losses reach the $100 billion cap that limits U.S. Government reimbursement as well as insurers' liability for losses. If that occurs, your coverage may be reduced. You will not be required to pay a premium for terrorism coverage at this time. If a premium is going to be charged for terrorism coverage, we will provide you with advance notification of what that premium will be.

Oh, what the hell. The cellular network will have collapsed, anyway.

Have a great Monday.


Categories: Tea Party, Terrorism, Verizon, WTF?


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Riiight...
(permalink)

Published Monday, May 06, 2013 @ 11:55 AM EDT
May 06 2013


Categories: Barack Obama, Cartoons, Second Amendment


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Quotes of the day: Sigmund Freud
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Published Monday, May 06, 2013 @ 6:07 AM EDT
May 06 2013

Sigmund Freud (born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

-----

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.

All that matters is love and work.

America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Anatomy is destiny.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations.

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them, on the whole, are trash.

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.

It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.

It is tragic when a man outlives his body.

Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

One day in retrospect the year of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

Psychoanalysis is for hysterical pathological cases, not for silly rich American women who should be learning to darn socks.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."

Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

The ego is not master in its own house.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders.

The paranoid is never entirely mistaken

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.

When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.


Categories: Quotes of the day, Sigmund Freud


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Recommended Twit
(permalink)

Published Sunday, May 05, 2013 @ 5:26 PM EDT
May 05 2013

If you're on Twitter, consider following Bill Murray (SNL, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, et al.) These are just a few from the past week...

Smart people: start having babies or the other side wins.

The only thing to fear is fear itself.
Also:
-Zombies.
-Velociraptors.
-Unwanted pregnancy.
-The Hamburglar.
-Spiders.
-Madonna's arms.

If video games are really the problem I think in the 80's we'd have heard a lot more stories of plumbers being assaulted with barrels.

Had to pause Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory to go buy a Snickers. This is why I can't watch Breaking Bad.

I don't trip. I do random gravity checks.

It would be hilariously perfect if Jessica Biel would name her first child Batmo.

My favorite pick-up line is the one where I don't say anything to a girl and I just go home to watch Netflix, because Netflix won't hurt me.

I hate when people pour my cereal. They don't know how much I want. They don't know my life. They don't know what I've been through.

I come from a long line of parents.

If you had to choose between your girlfriend and winning the lottery, what kind of car would you buy first?

Unless you are a pizza, the answer is yes, I can live without you.

fingers are so weird…… our arms just split into other smaller arms…... ok

I wonder if the girls on "16 and pregnant" will come back on "32 and a Grandma."

The amount of people who confuse "to" and "too" is amazing two me.

If I ever get Alzheimer's, I want someone to put a cape on me and tell me every morning that I used to be superman.

I wish more events in life involved dumping a cooler full of Gatorade on people...

Unless you’re Batman, I can’t see how anything clipped onto your belt will impress women.

Don't try to understand women... Women understand women and they hate each other.

Gay marriage is on legal in 6 states, yet having sex with a horse is legal in 23. Good going, America.

Hamsters are just tiny grizzly bears.

I bet snowmen think it's weird that the ground is completely covered in their skin.

Some days you just have to fill the tub with skittles and pretend to be Godzilla in a ball pit

Probably the worst thing about being a penguin is after youre in an argument you'll try to waddle away angrily but still look adorably cute.

I've always wanted to walk up to a stranger and hand him a briefcase and whisper "you know what to do" and walk away.

I'm not an alcoholic, I only drink two times a year. When it's my birthday, and when it's not my birthday.


Categories: Bill Murray, Twitter


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Quotes of the day: Kierkegaard
(permalink)

Published Sunday, May 05, 2013 @ 6:36 AM EDT
May 05 2013

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (May 5 1813 - November 11, 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and religious author. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology and philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. He is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. (Click for a New York Times feature on the philosopher, whose 200th birthday is today.)

-----

A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household.

Freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.

I must find a truth that is true for me.

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

If I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven't ventured at all, who helps me then?

If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I would not despair over her. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to remain one for five years, I would give him up.

In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed- amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.

It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste they hurry past it.

My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known- no wonder, then, that I return the love.

My sorrow is my castle.

Once you label me, you negate me.

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence- it smells of nothing.

Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self- deception.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

The dread of sin can sometimes in effect drive a person into sin through dread.

The initial expression of defiance is precisely despair over one's weakness.

The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

What really counts in life is that at some time you have seen something, felt something, which is so great, so matchless, that everything else is nothing by comparison, that even if you forgot everything, you would never forget this.

When a person grows older he often scrutinizes his thoughts and retards himself.

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?


Categories: Quotes of the day, Soren Kierkegaard


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Quotes of the day: George F. Will
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Published Saturday, May 04, 2013 @ 6:46 AM EDT
May 04 2013

George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is an American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winner best known for his conservative commentary on politics. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

-----

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a doubleheader.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are "up to a point."

Americans are overreachers; overreaching is the most admirable of the many American excesses.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are crated equal.

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

In government the sin of pride manifests itself in the recurring delusion that things are under control.

In the lexicon of the political class, the word "sacrifice" means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

Patrick Buchanan wants to build a better yesterday.

Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Populism is always pandering, and pandering is always the reverse of leadership.

Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country- President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.

Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.

The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of America is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

The problem with intelligent design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet- a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school’s curriculum.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.

There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.

Umpires would be natural Republicans- dead to human feelings.

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

When you don't know where you're going, any gust of wind will take you there.

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

You don't want your mind so open that your brains fall out.


Categories: George F. Will, Quotes of the day


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Kids
(permalink)

Published Friday, May 03, 2013 @ 6:08 AM EDT
May 03 2013

[A]dults are just obsolete children, and the hell with them. (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
-Dr. Seuss

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
-Thomas Szasz

A child is a gift that parents give to themselves, forever expecting the child to be grateful.
-Robert Brault

A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.
-Frank A. Clark

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
-Ogden Nash

A happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life.
-Kinky Friedman

A hungry child knows no politics.
-Ronald Reagan

A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
-H.L. Mencken

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
-Peter de Vries

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
-H.L. Mencken

A suspicious parent makes an artful child.
-Richard Haliburton

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.
-Unattributed

Adorable children are considered to be the general property of the human race. Rude children belong to their mothers.
-Judith Martin

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
-Thomas Szasz

All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace.
-Truman Capote

All children should be aptitude-tested at an early age and, if their main or only aptitude is for marketing, drowned.
-David Canzi

All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.
-Fran Lebowitz

All good qualities in a child are the result of environment, while all the bad ones are the result of poor heredity on the side of the other parent.
-Elinor Goulding Smith

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children.
-Robert A. Heinlein

All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
-Dorothy Parker

Although today there are many trial marriages... there is no such thing as a trial child.
-Gail Sheehy

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
-Phyllis Diller

American children grow up to be valuable citizens. Bangladeshi children grow up to be part of the world population problem. They just aren't giving birth to any Marky Marks or Howard Sterns in Dhaka.
-P.J. O'Rourke

An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's children devoured by wolves.
-H.L. Mencken

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
-Fran Lebowitz

Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children; now, I have six children and no theories.
-John Wilmot

But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
-Joseph Heller

Catholics believe life begins at conception. Protestants believe life begins at birth. Jews believe life begins when the children leave home and the dog dies.
-Unattributed

Childhood is a promise that is never kept.
-Ken Hill

Childhood is short and maturity is forever. (From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson

Childhood used to end with the discovery that there is no Santa Claus. Nowadays, it often ends when the child gets his first adult, the way Hemingway got his first rhino, with the difference that the rhino was charging Hemingway, whereas the adult is usually running away from the child.
-James Thurber

Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads.
-Harry S. Truman

Children are a great comfort in your old age- and they help you reach it faster, too.
-Lionel Kauffmann

Children are all foreigners.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.
-H.H. Munro Saki

Children are God's spies.
-Elizabeth Bowen

Children are the true connoisseurs. What's precious to them has no price- only value.
-Bel Kaufman

Children are the universal scapegoats for any political agenda.
-Unattributed

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
-Salman Rushdie

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.
-Ogden Nash

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
-Oscar Wilde

Children don't drop out of high school when they are 16, they do so in the first grade and wait 10 years to make it official.
-Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo)

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
-James Baldwin

Children haven't changed. Childhood has.
-Barbara Oehlberg

Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.
-Fran Lebowitz

Children should be like waffles- you should be able to throw the first one away.
-Mary Alice Messenger

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food and tyrannize their teachers.
-Socrates

Choosing to have a child that you can't take care of is like farting in an elevator. Sure, you got it out, but now it's everyone else's problem.
-Richard Jeni

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
-Stephen Fry

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Do not allow children to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too much vermouth.
-Steve Allen

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it's the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband's mood.
-Marquis de Sade

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Do not videotape your child in the bathtub. Do not name your child after a Scandinavian deity or any aspect of the weather.
-Daniel Menaker

Don't bother discussing sex with small children. They rarely have anything to add.
-Fran Lebowitz

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky. One can only assume that this has something to do with not smoking enough.
-Fran Lebowitz

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet tired of man.
-Rabindranath Tagore

Every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians; we call them "children."
-Hannah Arendt

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Everyone has been a child. All can understand through muffled memory how childhood was. But none has been old except those who are that now.
-Bert Kruger Smith

Experts say you should never hit your child in anger. When is a good time? When you're feeling festive?
-Roseanne

Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Familiarity breeds contempt- and children.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. (at 1992 GOP Convention)
-Rev. Pat Robertson

Grandchildren are our reward for not having strangled our children.
-Unattributed

Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.
-G. Norman Collie

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?
-Hannah Arendt

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
-Francis Bacon

Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.
-Bill Cosby

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
-P.J. O'Rourke

I believe the children are like our future: nasty, brutish and short. (From The Onion)
-Unattributed

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have certainly seen more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink or harlots.
-William Butler Yeats

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
-Harry S. Truman

I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week, four kids escaped.
-Rodney Dangerfield

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?
-Fran Lebowitz

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: Checkout Time is 18 years.
-Erma Bombeck

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
-Robert Orben

I want to have children and I know my time is running out: I want to have them while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.
-Rita Rudner

If a child looks like his father, that's heredity. If he looks like a neighbor, that's environment.
-Unattributed

If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum.
-Unattributed

If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.
-Bette Davis

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.
-Norman Douglas

If you want your children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.
-Abigail Van Buren

If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they'll murder you in your sleep.
-Frank Zappa

In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.
-David Sedaris

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
-Erma Bombeck

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
-Neil Gaiman

It kills you to see [your children] grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
-Barbara Kingsolver

It takes a village to raise a child. The village is Washington. You are the child.
-P.J. O'Rourke

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
-Tom Robbins

It's no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
-Kingsley Amis

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
-Clarence Darrow

Kids are not nice, innocent, flower-loving little rainbow children. Kids are all little bastards; they don't have any kind of social tact or etiquette.
-Matt Stone

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.
-Robert Byrne

Lies are like children: they're hard work, but it's worth it because the future depends on them.
-Pam Davis

Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around.
-David Lodge

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
-William Penn

Midlife crisis is that moment when you realize your children and your clothes are about the same age.
-Bill Tammeus

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
-Evelyn Waugh

My father was frightened of his father, I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.
-King George V

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
-Rita Rudner

Never raise your hand to children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
-Robert Orben

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
-Margaret Mead

Noble fathers have noble children.
-Euripides

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.
-Garrison Keillor

Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave
When they think that their children are naive.
-Ogden Nash

Once you have children, it forever changes the way you bore other people.
-Bruce Eric Kaplan

One of the first things schoolchildren in Texas learn is how to compose a simple declarative sentence without the word "shit" in it.
-Unattributed

Parents are the bones upon which children sharpen their teeth.
-Peter Ustinov

Parents must remember, what we do in private, our children will do in public, and what we do in moderation, our children do in excess.
-Carey Casey

Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.
-Ogden Nash

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children. (From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson

Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age.
-William Feather

She was an atheist and I was an agnostic. We didn't know what religion not to bring our children up in.
-Woody Allen

Some children have the most disagreeable way of getting grown-up.
-Lewis Carroll

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.
-Bradley Millar

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
-Oscar Wilde

The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed.
-Scott Adams

The difference between broccoli and nose pickings is you have to tell your children to eat broccoli.
-Unattributed

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.
-Katherine Whitehorn

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
-Clarence Darrow

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
-Bertrand Russell

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
-Theodore Hesburgh

The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.
-Frank A. Clark

The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow.
-Buckminster Fuller

The old- like children- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secret are one's own.
-Eugene O'Neill

The real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
-Ann Beatty

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
-Sam Levenson

The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
-Mel Lazarus

The trouble with children is that they are not returnable.
-Quentin Crisp

There are only two things a child will share willingly- communicable diseases and his mother's age.
-Dr. Benjamin Spock

There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
-Otto von Bismarck

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children and children love hamsters.
-Alice Thomas Ellis

There is no such thing as other people's children.
-Hillary Rodham Clinton

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.
-Aristotle

Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
-Roger Lewin

We childproof our homes, but they keep getting in.
-Unattributed

We had a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child, eventually.
-Steven Wright

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it."
-Sydney J. Harris

We spend half our lives trying to escape our parents and the other half trying to escape our children.
-Migaela Iosof

We spend the first year of children's lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson

We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.
-Stacia Tauscher

What is done to our children will be done to our society.
-Karl Menninger

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
-Brian Aldiss

When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they're not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They're upset because they've gone from supervisor of a child's life to a spectator. It's like being the vice president of the United States.
-Erma Bombeck

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
-Nora Ephron

Why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?
-Robert G. Ingersoll

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
-Franklin P. Jones

You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.
-John Plomp

You never get over being a child, long as you have a mother to go to.
-Sarah Orne Jewett

You're not a good parent, if at some point you are not an embarrassment to your children.
-Malcolm S. Forbes

Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
-John Updike

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
-George Bernard Shaw


Categories: Children, Kids, Quotes of the day


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Observation of the day
(permalink)

Published Thursday, May 02, 2013 @ 8:42 AM EDT
May 02 2013

Congress: the legislative stone in America's urethra.
-Jon Stewart


Categories: Jon Stewart, Observations


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Quotes of the day- Nancy Astor
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Published Thursday, May 02, 2013 @ 7:00 AM EDT
May 02 2013

Nancy Witcher Langhorne, Viscountess Astor, CH (May 19, 1879 - May 2, 1964) was the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament (MP) in the British House of Commons. She was the wife of Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor. Nancy was born Nancy Witcher Langhorne in Danville, Virginia, in the United States to Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

-----

A fool without fear is sometimes wiser than an angel with fear.

Dreams are great. When they disappear you may still be here, but you will have ceased to live.

I can imagine nothing worse than a man-governed world- except a woman-governed world.

I married beneath me. All women do.

I refuse to admit that I am more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate.

I would be a socialist if I thought it would work.

It is no use blaming the men- we made them what they are- and now it is up to us to try and make ourselves- the makers of men- a little more responsible.

It isn't the common man at all who is important; it's the uncommon man.

My vigor, vitality and cheek repel me. I am the kind of woman I would run from.

One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.

Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

Take a close-up of a woman past sixty? You might as well use a picture of a relief map of Ireland!

The first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything... or nothing.

The only thing I like about rich people is their money.

The penalty of success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

We are not asking for superiority for we have always had that; all we ask is equality.

We women talk too much, but even then we don't tell half what we know.

I used to dread getting older because I thought I would not be able to do all the things I wanted to do, but now that I am older I find that I don't want to do them.

The most practical thing in the world is common sense and common humanity.

No one sex can govern alone. I believe that one of the reasons why civilization has failed so lamentably is that is had one-sided government.

(from Wikipedia):

...the most famous quotations attributed to her are taken from alleged exchanges between her and Winston Churchill, though... these are not well documented and may be inaccurate. Examples include an instance in which Churchill is supposed to have told Lady Astor that having a woman in Parliament was like having one intrude on him in the bathroom, to which she retorted, "You’re not handsome enough to have such fears." Lady Astor is also said to have responded to a question from Churchill about what disguise he should wear to a masquerade ball by saying, "Why don't you come sober, Prime Minister?" Possibly the most famous of all such anecdotes reports that Lady Astor said to Churchill, "If you were my husband, I'd poison your tea," to which he responded, "Madam, if you were my wife, I'd drink it!" This retort is of dubious authenticity and has been attributed to others before Churchill, for instance David Lloyd George in responding to a suffragette.


Categories: Nancy Astor, Quotes of the day, Winston Churchill


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Quotes of the day: Mother Jones
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Published Wednesday, May 01, 2013 @ 6:09 AM EDT
May 01 2013

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (May 1, 1830 – 30 November 1930) was an Irish-American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She then helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World. (Click here for biography on biography.com, also "The History of Mother Jones" from Mother Jones magazine.)

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.

My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

No matter what the fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.

I will tell the truth wherever I please.

Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.

A lady is the last thing on earth I want to be. Capitalists sidetrack the women into clubs and make ladies of them.

I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword.

I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!

Men's hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

The rank and file have let their servants become their masters and dictators... Provision should be made in all union constitutions for the recall of leaders. Big salaries should not be paid. Career hunters should be driven out, as well as leaders who use labor for political ends. These types are menaces to the advancement of labor.

I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.

All the average human being asks is something he can call a home; a family that is fed and warm; and now and then a little happiness; once in a long while an extravagance.

I believe that no man who holds a leader's position should ever accept favors from either side. He is then committed to show favors. A leader must stand alone.

The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.

Injustice boils in men's hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time.


Categories: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Mother Jones, Quotes of the day


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