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Granddaughter Joelle takes advantage of the relatively warm weather by taking a ride and picking her first flower.
Categories: KGB Family
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When I was a little boy, I was called a nerd all the time because I didn't like sports, I loved to read, I liked math and science, I thought school was really cool, and... it hurt. A lot. Because it's never ok when a person makes fun of you for something like you didn't choose... we don't choose to be nerds. We can't help it that we like these things, and we shouldn't apologize for liking these things.
I wish that I could tell you that there is a really easy way to just... not care. But the truth is it hurts. But here's the thing that you might be able to understand- as a matter of fact, I'm confident you'll be able to understand this, because you asked this question.
When a person makes fun of you, when a person is cruel to you... it has nothing to do with you. It's not about what you said, it's not about what you did, it's not about what you love. It's about them feeling bad about themselves. They feel sad. They don't get positive attention from their parents. They don't feel as smart as you. They don't understand the things that you understand.
Maybe one of their parents is really pushing them to be a cheerleader, or a baseball player, or an engineer, or something that they just don't want to do. So they take that out on you, because they can't go and be mean to the person who's actually hurting them.
So, when a person's cruel to you like that- I know that this is hard- but honestly, the kind and best reaction is to pity them. And don't let them make you feel bad because you love a thing. Maybe find out what they love, and talk about it- how they love it. I bet you'll find out that a person who loves tetherball loves tetherball exactly the same way you love Doctor Who. But you just love different things.
And I will tell you this: it absolutely gets better as you get older. I know it's really hard when you're in school and you're surrounded by the same 400 people a day that pick on you and make you feel bad about yourself. But there's fifty thousand people here this weekend who went through the exact same thing- and we're all doing really well.
Don't you ever let persons make you feel bad because you love something
they decided is only for nerds. You're loving a thing that's for you.
-Wil
Wheaton, responding to a question from a young girl at the
2013 Denver Comic Con.
Categories: Nerds, Observations, Wil Wheaton
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Barnett "Barney" Frank (b. March 31, 1940) is an American politician who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (2007–2011) and was a leading co-sponsor of the 2010 Dodd–Frank Act, a sweeping reform of the U.S. financial industry. Frank, a resident of Newton, Massachusetts, is considered the most prominent gay politician in the United States. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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Anyone who tells you they enjoy running in a campaign for public office is either crazy or lying to you.
Every politician is entitled to privacy, but no politician is entitled to hypocrisy.
I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people's rights to get married, join the army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.
I don't begrudge Ronald Reagan an occasional nap. We must understand it's not the dozing off of Ronald Reagan that causes us problems. It's what he does on those moments when he's awake.
I have this fear that one day there's going to be a fire in the Senate and there are only going to be 57 Senators there and they'll all die because they won't have the 60 votes to allow themselves to leave the building.
I rule out that it was an innocent mispronunciation. I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.
I will miss this job, but one of the advantages of not running for office is I don't even have to pretend to be nice to people I don't like.
I will neither be a lobbyist, nor a historian.
I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.
I've seen anti-Semitism essentially disappear in my adult life as a social and economic factor. There may be some nuts out there, but generally things are fine. I think the same thing will happen with gayness. We'll get to a point soon enough where it's not even an issue anymore. But progress can be slow. I filed my first gay rights bills in 1972 in Massachusetts. Forty years later, it would be nice to have this wrapped up and put to bed.
In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.
It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table: I have no interest in doing it.
Moderate Republicans are reverse Houdinis. They tie themselves up in knots and then tell you they can't do anything because they're tied up in knots.
Race has been much more devastating, but there's one psychological factor (that's different): Very few black kids have ever had to worry about telling their parents that they were black.
Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.
Selling out is an overrated phenomenon. If selling out paid better, I wouldn't have to be here tonight. (at a Gridiron Dinner)
The best antidote to prejudice is reality.
The bumper sticker I'm going to have printed up for Democrats this year is, 'We're not perfect, but they're nuts.'
The issue is not that morals be applied to public policy, it's that conservatives bring public policy to spheres of our lives where it should not enter.
The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality.
The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.
The Republicans' idea of 'right to life' begins at conception and ends at birth.
There are no moderate Republicans left, with the exception of a few who would vote with us when it doesn't make any difference. It's the most rigid ideological party since before the Civil War.
There are rules of excessive civility around here to which I generally subscribe. You do need a certain amount of courtliness in the system. But that, in itself, can become a form of abuse. There are limits to when you restrain yourself from calling a fool a fool.
This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system, and it's expensive to boot.
We have a besetting sin today in our politics where people think that you show your depth of commitment to a cause by rigidity, not just by rigidity, but impugning the motives of those on your side who try to get something done.
Categories: Barney Frank, Quotes of the day
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Can you imagine if CNN was on the air when Titanic sank?
-@AlbertBrooks
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Can't print what I'm trying to print, but I accidentally printed 4 pages
that say, 'Congratulations! You've successfully setup your printer.'
-@PaulaPoundstone
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While you're mocking the people who thought "Noah" was a documentary you
fail to realize "Idiocracy" really was one.
-@JohnFugelsang
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Anyone ever been to a corporate baptism?
-@lizzwinstead
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Motivational Secret of the Week: A clenched fist cannot give the finger.
-The
Covert Comic
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Intelligence officials say they had a hard time predicting Russia's
invasion because Vladimir Putin doesn't own a cellphone or use the
Internet due to fear of being tracked. You can tell Putin doesn't spend
much time online. When he says 'LOL,' he means 'Look out, Latvia.'
–Jimmy
Fallon
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That's right, Putin doesn't have a cellphone. And just like everyone
else without a cellphone, he won't stop bragging about it.
–Jimmy
Fallon
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If you're a Douglas Adams fan, you must watch this.
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Ignore the snow. Spring has officially arrived in South Park,
Pennsylvania.
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Ukraine said it has finished withdrawing the last of its troops from
Crimea, so the split is now final. Well, they're not calling it a split.
They're calling it a 'conscious uncoupling.'
–Jimmy Fallon
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She ran out of toner.
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Today Pope Francis had to fire a German bishop known as the 'Bling
Bishop' after he spent over $43 million to renovate his house. Pope
Francis was nice enough to describe it as a 'conscious unbishopping.'
–Jimmy
Fallon
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One of President Obama's secret service agents is in trouble now after
getting drunk and passing out in a hotel hallway. In his defense, it's
spring break! He was wearing a helmet with a beer on either side. That
was a bad idea.
–Conan O'Brien
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Canine/Feline Furry Infinity
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The first lady is in China. During her trip, Michelle Obama fed panda
bears. Like most people the first lady feeds, the bears politely ate the
bamboo and then had a cheeseburger the minute she left.
–Conan
O'Brien
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After playing clips of MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow stating they would not run purely speculative stories about the lost Malaysian jetliner, unlike CNN and Fox, Jon Stewart commented:
"You know, Sherman and Mister Peabody are right..."
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In an interview, former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan said he
does not have a racist bone in his body. However, he admitted he has
three sexist bones and his spine is homophobic.
–Conan O'Brien
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In a speech, Pope Francis criticized the Mafia and urged its members to
repent. Which is why now every morning the Pope makes his assistant
start the Popemobile.
–Conan O'Brien
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Americans have been given another month to sign up for Obamacare as long
as they check a box on the website saying they tried to sign up before
the original deadline. It's expected to be answered as truthfully as
boxes that say 'Yes, I am 18.'
–Seth Meyers
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It's not every night that we get a great audience. Last night, we had an
ugly crowd. Halfway through the show, they voted to join Russia.
–David
Letterman
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Vladimir Putin was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and two weeks later
he invaded Crimea. So here's what the United States did. They tossed him
out of the G-8 meetings. Really? I mean, that's like being told you
can't go to the Daytime Emmys.
–David Letterman
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President Obama went to the G-8 meetings. He's filling in for Dennis
Rodman.
–David Letterman
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First lady Michelle Obama is in China right now. Today she was busy
doing some official business. She placed a wreath on the grave of
General Tso, the creator of spicy chicken.
–David Letterman
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A group of Secret Service agents went to Amsterdam ahead of President
Obama's visit, but three of them were sent home after they stayed out
all night drinking and one of them passed out in the hotel's hallway. I
always thought Secret Service agents wore sunglasses to look
intimidating. Turns out they're just hung over.
–Jimmy Kimmel
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Toronto held the first mayoral debate of 2014 tonight. Rob Ford faced
four challengers. When Rob Ford ran for mayor in 2010, his slogan was
'Stop the gravy train.' Then he realized he loves gravy. And you need a
train to get it there.
–Jimmy Kimmel
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This is the difference between our countries. None of the other
candidates specifically mentioned drugs. They let Mayor Ford say over
and over again that he's the only candidate with a proven track record.
He's also the only candidate with a proven crack record.
–Jimmy
Kimmel
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And... the desktop is clean.
-KGB
Categories: Cartoons, Cleaning off the desktop, Miscellany, Political Jokes of the Week
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"A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I believe everything positively stinks."
-Lew Col
"I was going to buy a copy of 'The Power of Positive Thinking,' and then I thought: what the hell good would that do?"
-Ronnie Shakes
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As a card-carrying cynical curmudgeon, I have little patience for those cheerful "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" pieces of delusional inanity. That said, there are some grains of wheat in the following chaff. Pick away, but use common sense. Don't get "brightsided."
(See the original article here.)
Categories: KGB Opinion, Observations
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Seán O'Casey (born John Casey, March 30, 1880 - September 18, 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Disease can never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's wailful screaming or faith's cymballic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine.
Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.
I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realise that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.
Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden
fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly
not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent
buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film
stars and cliché-shouting publicity agents.
Their little
knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance,
Ignorance bringing
them nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it.
Jesus, Buddha, Mahommed, great as each may be, their highest comfort given to the sorrowful is a cordial introduction into another's woe. Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another.
Laughter is wine for the soul- laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness- the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.
Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year.
Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another.
The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalysed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's dunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.
The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.
There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.
What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.
Work! Labour the aspergas me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow- security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Sean O'Casey
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Pearl Mae Bailey (March 29, 1918 - August 17, 1990) was an American actress and singer. After appearing in vaudeville, she made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman in 1946. She won a Tony Award for the title role in the all-black production of Hello, Dolly! in 1968. In 1986, she won a Daytime Emmy award for her performance as a fairy godmother in the ABC Afterschool Special, Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale. Her rendition of "Takes Two to Tango" hit the top ten in 1952. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A crown, if it hurts us, is not worth wearing.
A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest.
Everybody wants to do something to help, but nobody wants to be the first.
Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence.
My kitchen is a mystical place, a kind of temple for me. It is a place where the surfaces seem to have significance, where the sounds and odors carry meaning that transfers from the past and bridges to the future.
People see God every day, they just don't recognize him.
Sometimes I would almost rather people take away years of my life than take away a minute.
The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that.
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you- if you don't repeat it.
There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.
To talk to someone who does not listen is enough to tense the devil.
We look into mirrors but we only see the effects of our times on us- not our effects on others.
What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.
When we swallow a little knowledge of ourselves, it becomes either good or sour inside.
When you're young, the silliest notions seem the greatest achievements.
You never find yourself until you face the truth.
Categories: Pearl Bailey, Quotes of the day
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(photo via mashabout.com)
Money alone determines your entire life, political as well as private.
-Germaine
de Stael
Money alone sets all the world in motion.
-Publilius Syrus
Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you
have committed to your mind is yours forever.
-Louis L'Amour
Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.
-Kinky
Friedman
Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while
you're being miserable.
-Clare Boothe Luce
Money can't buy love, but it can definitely rent by the hour.
-Kathy
Lette
Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.
-Laurence
J. Peter
Money can't buy you friends, but you do get a better class of enemy.
-Spike
Milligan
Money can't buy you happiness, but it helps you look for it in a lot
more places.
-Milton Berle
Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
-Dorothy
Parker
Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
-Sean
O'Casey
Money doesn't buy class.
-Andy Rooney
Money doesn't buy happiness, but with it at least you can be miserable
in comfort.
-Unattributed
Money doesn't talk, it swears.
-Bob Dylan
Money is a poor man's credit card.
-Marshall McLuhan
Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source
of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all
history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it
has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
-John
Kenneth Galbraith
Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
-P.T. Barnum
Money is always there, but the pockets change.
-Gertrude Stein
Money is appropriate, and one size fits all.
-William Randolph
Hearst
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
-Woody
Allen
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
-Frederico
Fellini
Money is how people with no talent keep score.
-Unattributed
Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer
capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart
entirely to money.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Money is like a sixth sense-and you can't make use of the other five
without it.
-W. Somerset Maugham
Money is like love; it kills slowly and painfully the one who withholds
it, and it enlivens the other who turns it upon his fellow man.
-Kahlil
Gibran
Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.
-Francis Bacon
Money is not the only answer, but it makes a difference.
-Barack
Obama
Money is only unused power. The real purpose of wealth, after food,
clothing and shelter, is philanthropy.
-Leon Levy
Money is the fruit of evil, as often as the root of it.
-Henry
Fielding
Money is the power of the impotent.
-Leon Samson
Money is the root of all evil. Man needs roots.
-Unattributed
Money is what people without talent use to keep score.
-Jeremy C.
Epworth
Money isn't everything but it sure keeps you in touch with your children.
-J.
Paul Getty
Money isn't everything: usually it isn't even enough.
-Unattributed
Money often costs too much.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money spent on crossing guards cannot be spent on books. Both are
necessary, a choice must be made and that this is the Tragic view of
life.
-David Mamet
Money tends to make you stupid.
-H. Ross Perot
Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money.
-Groucho
Marx
Money will ruin the life of any man who treats it like anything but a
tool with which to work.
-Henry Ford
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
-Henry
James
Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be
miserable in comfort.
-Helen Gurley Brown
Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
-Anton Chekhov
Money-giving is a very good criterion of a person's mental health.
Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.
-Karl Menninger
Categories: Money, Quotes of the day
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Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918) was an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents. His posthumously-published memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize, and went on to be named by The Modern Library as the top English-language nonfiction book of the twentieth century. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
American society is a sort of flat, freshwater pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
History is incoherent and immoral.
It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
They know enough who know how to learn.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
Categories: Henry Adams, Quotes of the day
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Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 - March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
Be curious, not judgmental.
Do anything, but let it produce joy.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes.
Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.
I accept reality and dare not question it.
I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.
I exist as I am, that is enough.
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.
I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
If you done it, it ain't bragging.
In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.
Keep your face always toward the sunshine- and shadows will fall behind you.
Nothing endures but personal qualities.
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.
Resist much, obey little.
Simplicity is the glory of expression.
Society waits unformed and is between things ended and things begun.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
The greater the reform needed, the greater the personality you need to accomplish it.
The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.
The road to wisdom is paved with excess.
The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.
There is no God any more divine than Yourself.
There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
These are the days that must happen to you.
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Walt Whitman
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Gloria Marie Steinem (b. March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. A prominent writer and key counterculture era political figure, Steinem has founded many organizations and projects and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. She was a columnist for New York magazine and co-founded Ms. magazine. In 1969, she published an article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation", which, along with her early support of abortion rights, catapulted her to national fame as a feminist leader. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
A woman reading Playboy feels a little bit like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon.
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'
Each of us has an inner compass that helps us know where to go and what to do.
Evil is obvious only in retrospect.
From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence- and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.
However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.
I don't breed well in captivity.
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?
It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
Logic has nothing to do with oppression.
Male silence is not the same as listening.
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
Perhaps men should think twice before making widowhood our only path to power.
Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy.
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.
The surest way to be alone is to get married.
The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off.
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
Categories: Gloria Steinem, Quotes of the day
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy and was one of the five Fireside Poets. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them.
Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.
Books are sepulchres of thought.
For after all, the best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.
Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide.
It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And
departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
Look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger.
Many critics are like woodpeckers who instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk pecking holes in the bark to discover some little worm or other.
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled by great ambitions.
Music is the universal language of mankind- poetry their universal pastime and delight.
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak to each other in passing, only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness. So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak to one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and silence.
Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven
Blossomed the
lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike.
The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart.
The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable.
This vast ball, the Earth was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women and animals and all that breathe are statues and not paintings.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Categories: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Quotes of the day
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This is the 30th anniversary of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension. If you're a fan, you'll love this video. Note NSFW language. A must-watch...
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A fun thing to say from the toilet stall in a public restroom: "Siri,
why is there so much blood?"
-Jim Hamilton
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Cool, the movie "Network" is on TV… Oh, wait, it's just a psychic
talking about the missing plane on CNN.
-@FrankConniff
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Fun fact: When my kid watches "Terminator" I will have to explain the
concept of a phonebook, but not an autonomous robot killing machine.
-@AsaTait
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I think what pushed Fred Phelps over the edge was the opening of "300:
Rise of an Empire."
-Conan O'Brien
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I love how these nuts say "I don't need insurance. I'm healthy." Equals:
"I don't need food. I'm not hungry right now."
-@kurteichenwald
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Feed me. Now.
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If swimming is great exercise, explain whales to me.
-@BillMurray
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Are fatty acids teased by all the other acids?
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Circular reasoning: see reasoning, circular.
-Unattributed
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Remember those pink "While You Were Out" notes? There has to be a huge warehouse somewhere filled with them...
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Microsoft OneNote is now free on all platforms, including Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone. Check it out..
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This past Thursday was the vernal equinox, but Pittsburgh hit the 12 hours between sunrise and sunset mark last Monday. We're gaining daylight at the fastest rate we'll experience all year: two minutes and 41 seconds more each day until March 27, when things start slowing down. On June 21, there will 15 hours, three minutes and 48 seconds between sunrise and sunset, and the days start getting shorter. Sunrise/sunset isn't the best gauge of day length, though, since we have twilight before the sun rises and after it sets. Morning "civil" twilight (there's also nautical and astronomical twilight) begins at civil dawn, when the center of the sun is 6° below the horizon. It ends at sunrise. Evening civil twilight begins at sunset and ends at civil dusk, when the center of the sun is 6° below the horizon. (Twilight's the period when the street lights go on and off.) So if the day seems longer than 12 hours, it is, by a full hour.
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From a friend who follows everything:
Well, it's been a strange couple of weeks here on planet Earth. First, a modern, well equipped Boeing 777 passenger jet disappeared without a trace into apparently about a third of the planet leaving experts from 26 nations scratching their collective heads in confusion and concern. Then the situation the Ukraine, Crimea and Russia flared up into ever more distressing situations, many of which were deliberately instigated by our leaders here in the U.S. and many of those in the EU ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. And now there is some indication that our munificent (at least to themselves) corporate leaders are dumping their equity interests while the bubbling stock market is still frothing with foam. Just when one begins to think that the time couldn't get much more interesting, it does. It's looking more and more as if this could be a very hot summer indeed. Israel is continuing being Israel- taunting the U.S. and Europe. China and Japan are within a trivial insult of outright war and North Korea keeps doing everything it can- and then some- to attract world attention. This is on top of the continuing chaos in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. India is in its usual state of political chaos and Turkey is about to come apart at the seams. And this doesn't even touch on the newest hot-spots in Africa. All the while the economic security in the U.S. and the EU continues to be eroded by unnecessary and unwarranted neoliberal austerity plans which are doomed to fail and which will insure that inequality of wealth will escalate still further before collapsing in on itself. All in all, what a fascinating time to be alive!
To paraphrase Tom Leher, I'm beginning to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis...
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Big quake. We stood in the doorway, so we could be hit by things from
two rooms.
-@ElayneBoosler
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And... the desktop is clean.
-KGB
Categories: Cartoons, Cleaning off the desktop
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Erich Seligmann Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.
Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion.
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
I believe that none can 'save' his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and without illusion.
I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between 'life' and 'death;' between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.
Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair
People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
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.
Women are equal because they are not different anymore.
Categories: Erich Fromm, Quotes of the day
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William Shatner is 83 today. His toupée is 50.
Categories: William Shatner
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Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (born March 22, 1946) is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits the science fiction webzine Flurb. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A lot of the world's apparent complexity is the result of there being lots of different things in the world rather than a result of the world having complicated laws. You can think of the world as huge parallel computation, with lovely things emerging from the interaction of simple rules.
All these years, and I'm still looking for the big aha.
America isn't young, you know. It's ancient and evil. With aluminum siding.
Culturally speaking, mathematicians are about as close to living and breathing aliens as you'll ever see. Weirder than stoners, weirder than computer hackers, weirder than SF fans. My people.
For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again.
I bet dystopias are becoming fashionable again. Back in the Fifties and Sixties, dystopias were where it was at.
I think people who obsess about becoming immortal are on an ego trip. They don't want to accept that the world will go on just the same without them.
If nobody's pissed off, you're not trying hard enough.
If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!
Kerouac and Poe don't work as role models when you're pushing fifty.
Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
Life is a fractal in Hilbert space.
Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!
No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us.
Nothing lasts. The petals whirl, the leaves fall, the river flows. Why fight it? You get the one lifetime and it's enough.
Our brains are made of the same quantum mechanical matter as everything else in the world, so if there's an explanation to be had, there's no reason we can't understand it.
Physical laws provide, at best, a recipe for how the world might be computed in parallel particle by particle and region by region.
Politics makes me uptight; I have so little control over it. It's like forever being in high school with rah-rah idiots in charge
Programs are writ by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.
Reality is an incompressible computation by a fractal cellular automaton of inconceivable dimensions.
The more that people understand about the secret machinery of the universe, the less likely it is that they will be duped and victimized by television and politicians.
The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.
The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.
There's a persistent tendency for us to very seriously underestimate how much design has gone into our brains in the course of our beloved Gaia's yottaflop parallel computation running on a quintillion processors for several billion years.
Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.
Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons. 'Twas ever thus, if that's any consolation.
What's the big problem with dying anyway? I mean, what's so frigging special about my one particular mind? I don't want to be God, I want to be a human with my spark of God Consciousness. Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?
When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to that garden of Eden.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Rudy Rucker
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(From www.explainthisimage.com)
A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.
-Francois
Sagan
A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense
and no heart.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
-Alfred
Adler
A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the
arena of his impulses.
-Rex Stout
Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it
doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense.
-Ray Bradbury
Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of
existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of
that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the
invention of printing.
-Benjamin Disraeli
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some
blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you
can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high
a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
-Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think
they talk sense.
-Robert Frost
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
-Edward
Albee
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's
deep enough. What do you want- an adorable pancreas?
-Jean Kerr
If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd
never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be
cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the
time and build your wings on the way down.
-Ray Bradbury
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to
put out on the troubled seas of thought.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself
believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.
-Philip K. Dick
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would
make no sense. It would be a description without meaning- as if you
described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
-Albert
Einstein
No sense in being pessimistic. It won't work, anyway.
-Unattributed
No sense makes sense.
-Charles Manson
Of course, Behaviorism 'works.' So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense,
down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical
appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian
Creed in public.
-W.H. Auden
People who feel the need to tell you that they have an excellent sense
of humor are telling you that they have no sense of humor.
-Dave
Barry
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other sins are
invented nonsense.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which
deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
-Carl Sagan
Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application
of external force is pure nonsense. Our threat is from the insidious
forces working from within which have already so drastically altered the
character of our free institutions- those institutions we proudly called
the American way of life.
-Douglas MacArthur
The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a
refuge in nonsense.
-David Mamet
The future depends on assumptions and assumptions are just stuff you
make up. No sense in knocking yourself out.
-Scott Adams
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not
between right and wrong.
-Carl Jung
There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the
vast majority by adequate governmental action.
-Bertrand Russell
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make
a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
-Robertson
Davies
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're
talking about.
-John von Neumann
They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is
nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the
sick bay or the graveyard.
-Alexander Cockburn
This is the sort of pedantic nonsense up with which I shall not put.
-Winston
Churchill
Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of
nonsense.
-Thornton Wilder
While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as
nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of
the community into a moral absolute.
-Daniel J. Boorstin
Categories: Quotes on a topic
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Publius Ovidius Naso (March 20, 43 BC – AD 17/18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, and for collections of love poetry in elegiac couplets, especially the Amores ("Love Affairs") and Ars Amatoria ("Art of Love"). His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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(Today is also the birthday of Henrik Ibsen)
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Blemishes are hid by night and every fault forgiven; darkness makes any woman fair.
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.
Give way to your opponent; thus will you gain the crown of victory.
If you want to be loved, be lovable.
It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.
It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe that there are.
Let love steal in disguised as friendship.
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
Many women long for what eludes them, and like not what is offered them.
Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.
Nothing is stronger than habit.
Plenty has made me poor.
Pure women are only those who have not been asked.
Pursuits become habits.
So art lies hid by its own artifice.
So long as you are secure you will count many friends; if your life becomes clouded you will be alone.
The cause is hidden, but the result is well known.
The gods have their own rules.
The result justifies the deed.
Thus all things are but altered, nothing dies.
We take no pleasure in permitted joys.
But what's forbidden is more
keenly sought.
Wine gives courage and makes men more apt for passion.
You can learn from anyone, even your enemy.
You will be safest in the middle.
Categories: Ovid, Quotes of the day
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The small dog-like creature demands peanut butter toast every morning. It's not pretty.
Categories: Dogs, KGB Family
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YouTube video: This is Neil deGrasse Tyson:
YouTube video: This is Neil deGrasse Tyson, slowed down.
Cosmos for stoners!
Categories: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Video, YouTube
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Arthur C. Clarke (December 16, 1917 - March 19, 2008) was one of the world's best-selling authors of science fiction and was widely considered one of the masters of the genre. Deemed on par with authors like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, he was especially identified with his novels Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke's fiction is credited with combining flawlessly accurate technical details with such philosophically expansive themes as "spiritual" rebirth and the search for man's place in the universe. The recipient of at least three Hugo Awards and two Nebulas, as well as a host of other acknowledgements, he was also well recognized as an inventor, an editor, and a science commentator.
Of his various technical and scientific papers, one of them, "Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" (Wireless World, 1945) introduced the concept that geostationary satellites could make excellent telecommunications relays. So influential was this work that Clarke is credited as the inventor of the first communications satellite, a scientific development which earned him the gold medal of the Franklin Institute, the Lindbergh Award, the Marconi Award, the Vikram Sarabhai Professorship of the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, and the Fellowship of King's College, London. In addition, the geostationary orbit (at 42,000 kilometers above Earth) is named "The Clarke Orbit". In 1954, almost ten years after this development, Clarke's correspondence with Dr. Harry Wexler (then chief of the Scientific Services Division, US Weather Bureau) led to a new branch of meteorology that utilized rockets and satellites for weather forecasting. (Click here for full article)
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A country's armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker.
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible- indeed, inevitable- the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!
As every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved- if it can be achieved at all- within the next few hundred years.
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
Even educated people need some emotional crutch, and it is nice to feel that somebody up there is looking after your concerns. It is harmless unless it becomes an obsession.
For much of history, religion may have been a necessary evil, but why has it been more evil than necessary?
How inappropriate to call this planet 'Earth,' when it is clearly 'Ocean.'
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
I am an optimist; anyone interested in the future has to be, otherwise he would simply shoot himself.
I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in Her.
I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think it's probable that as we develop, we'll move our minds into our machines. You could experience anything, be anywhere, you see. Get an infinite number of real universes as well as imaginary universes.
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
I'm appalled by what we all see on the news every day- massacres, atrocities, injustices, outrages of all kinds. When I see what's happening, I sometimes wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.
I've combined all my beliefs into this phrase I've been circulating: 'Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.'
If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created that whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading mankind?
If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance. For there will be no one to carry our dreams across another Dark Age, when the dust of all our cities incarnadines the sunsets of the world.
If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today.
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run- and often in the short one- the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
It is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. There are, for example, so many different religions, each of them claiming to have the truth, each saying that their truths are clearly superior to the truths of others. How can someone possibly take any of them seriously?
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
New ideas pass through three periods: it can't be done, it probably can be done, but it's not worth doing, and I knew it was a good idea all along!
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.
Perhaps we should thank the Taliban for finishing the task the Crusades began nine hundred years ago- proving beyond further dispute that Religion is incompatible with Civilization.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software. In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive.
Religion is a disease promoted by starvation, because hungry people hallucinate, and then pray for food. This is why so many religions encourage fasting: it weakens the mind.
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor- but they have few followers now.
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.
Science is the only religion of mankind.
Technology is really civilization, let's face it.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
The greatest problem of the future is civilizing the human race.
The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.
The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid.
The only real problem in life is what to do next.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
The psychologist who famously remarked that chastity was the rarest of all sexual perversions might have added that Religion was the most common.
The Solar System is rather a large place, though whether it will be large enough for so quarrelsome an animal as homo sapiens remains to be seen.
The statement that God created man in his own image is ticking like a time bomb in the foundations of Christianity.
The universe must be full of voices, calling from star to star in a myriad tongues. One day we shall join that cosmic conversation.
There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.
There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True wisdom lies in making the right choice.
There is a type of mind that will believe anything if it is sufficiently fantastic, and it is a waste of time arguing with it. No one has ever received much thanks for exposing credulity.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
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.
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Unfortunately, most people do not understand even the basic elements of statistics and probability, which is why astrologers and advertising agencies flourish.
Utopia is very dull. That's the problem with science fiction. Smashing things is more interesting.
We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40- and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?
We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.
What is life but organized energy?
What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy's point of view.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be stranger than you imagine, it will be stranger than you can imagine.
Why is it that almost every man, when confronted by an unhappy woman, immediately assumes that her unhappiness is somehow related to him?
You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
Categories: Arthur C. Clarke, Quotes of the day
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Stephen Grover Cleveland (March 18, 1837 – June 24, 1908) was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States; the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms (1885–1889 and 1893–1897) and to be counted twice in the numbering of the presidents. He was the winner of the popular vote for president three times- in 1884, 1888, and 1892- and, with Woodrow Wilson, was one of the two Democrats elected to the presidency in the era of Republican political domination dating from 1861 to 1933. Cleveland was the leader of the pro-business Bourbon Democrats who opposed high tariffs, Free Silver, inflation, imperialism, and subsidies to business, farmers, or veterans. His crusade for political reform and fiscal conservatism made him an icon for American conservatives of the era. Cleveland won praise for his honesty, self-reliance, integrity, and commitment to the principles of classical liberalism. He relentlessly fought political corruption, patronage and bossism. His prestige was so strong that the like-minded wing of the Republican Party, the 'Mugwumps,' largely bolted the GOP presidential ticket and swung to his support in the 1884 election. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A sensitive man is not happy as President. It is fight, fight, fight all the time.
A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
An ex-President practicing law or going into business is like a locomotive hauling a delivery wagon. He has lost his sense of proportion. The concerns of other people and even his own affairs seem to small to be worth bothering about.
Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.
The laws and the entire scheme of our civil rule, from the town meeting to the State capitals and the national capital, is yours. Your every voter, as surely as your Chief Magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust.
I believe the most important benefit that I can confer upon my country by my Presidency is to insist upon the entire independence of the executive and legislative branches of the government.
Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters
Our citizens have the right to protection from the incompetency of public employees who hold their places solely as the reward of partisan service. (1885)
Party honesty is party expediency.
Public extravagance begets extravagance among the people.
Public officers are the servants and agents of the people, to execute the laws which the people have made.
The laboring classes constitute the main part of our population. They should be protected in their efforts peaceably to assert their rights when endangered by aggregated capital, and all statutes on this subject should recognize the care of the State for honest toil, and be framed with a view of improving the condition of the workingman.
The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization. (1885)
The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their government, its functions do not include the support of the people.
The strong man who in the confidence of sturdy health courts the sternest activities of life and rejoices in the hardihood of constant labor may still have lurking near his vitals the unheeded disease that dooms him to sudden collapse.
Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.
What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?
Whatever you do, tell the truth.
Categories: Grover Cleveland, Quotes of the day
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Helen Hayes Brown (October 10, 1900 - March 17, 1993) was an American actress whose career spanned almost 80 years. She eventually garnered the nickname 'First Lady of the American Theatre' and was one of twelve people who have won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards. Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, from President Ronald Reagan in 1986. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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Achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.
Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.
Actors work and slave- and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.
After all my years in the theater, I can look back on only a handful of moments that met my own standards of perfection. When you transcend yourself and really get inside the character, it's like being touched by God.
Age is not important unless you're a cheese.
Childhood is a short season.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it did alright by me.
Egocentrics are attracted to the inept. It gives them one more excuse for patting themselves on the back.
Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.
From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.
I cry out for order and find it only in art.
If you rest, you rust.
Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.
Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach 'retirement' age seem very admirable to me.
Sometimes I became so melancholic that I felt all actresses should be spayed so they couldn't have children. It's so very difficult to balance the careers of motherhood and the theater.
The faster we travel, the less there is to see.
The good die young- but not always. The wicked prevail- but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.
The hardest years in life are between ten and seventy.
The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo’s Camille pale.
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.
Categories: Helen Hayes, Quotes of the day
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I'm now starting to think CNN took the plane.
-Albert Brooks
Categories: Observations
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It's actually Pi Month (3/14)
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What would aliens say if told that Earthlings shift clocks by an hour to
fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight?
-Neil
deGrasse Tyson
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Jews can't eat ham. Jehovah's Witnesses can't buy Girl Scout cookies.
The Amish can't drive cars. Catholics can't masturbate. Scientologists
can't go to therapy. Baptists can't dance. Sikhs can't shave. And Lord
knows, Muslims can't take a joke.
-Bill Maher
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Wealth is not a virtue, and poverty is not a sin.
-Unattributed
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The E.U. wants to ban American cheesemakers from using the name
"Parmesan?" Fine. Then they can't use the name "Whiz."
-Stephen
Colbert
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The sheer number of people who think Obama’s Between Two Ferns interview
was “real” is reason enough to build an underground end days bunker.
-@CollynMcCoy
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We have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?
-Tshirt
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Three things that make me laugh: my sister's nipples. One's tiny. I
haven't named the other two.
-Emo Phillips
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BURR: On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year? Do you know?
MARTIN: I don’t, sir, but I know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all.
Canadian expert to condescending U.S. Senator
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Prices for monthly Google Drive storage plans dropped massively: 100GB is now $1.99 (instead of $4.99), 1TB is $9.99 (previously $49.99), and 10TB is $99.99. For comparison's sake, you can get 1TB of space every month on Drive for the same amount you'd pay on Dropbox for 100GB. Current paid Drive users will automatically move to the new, cheaper pricing.
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Some things you just don't outgrow.
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When someone is murdered, they always investigate the spouse first. And
that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about marriage.
-@BillMurray
(parody Twitter account)
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Go ahead, open the door. I want to see the expression on the UPS guy's
face.
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The five second rule is real. Which makes no difference when you have a two second dog.
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POLL: Given Choice Between Paul and Cruz, Most Voters Choose Suicide
-Andy
Borowitz
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The other night, President Obama was paying tribute to Aretha Franklin
when he messed up the spelling of her iconic song 'Respect.' President
Obama blamed his speech coach, John Travolta.
–Conan O'Brien
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Retweeted by The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore.
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Jack Albert Kinzler, the NASA tech whiz who saved Skylab, died last week. He was a Pittsburgh native.
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"He's a congenial liar."
"Don't you mean congenital?"
"Well,
that too."
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Today I gave the hospital permission to youthanize my grandma. I can’t
wait to see how much younger she looks!
-The
Covert Comic
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Our family crest is a child's jacket on the floor right next to a row of
hooks.
-@KenJennings
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Looks like more snow, starting at 7 pm tonight. By the way, this is a
great program... Weatherspark.
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God will continue to punish the northeast with winter weather until Neil
deGrasse Tyson stops undermining his authority.
-@pourmecoffee
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NASA-funded
study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?
So I don't have to worry about replacing the fence around my yard, then?
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Jimmy Fallon, reading a rebuttal from "Sam I Am" to Sarah Palin after she rewrote Dr. Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" to criticize Obamacare: "I do not like the speech you spoke. The speech you spoke was quite a joke. I found your words were lacking taste. You first hit copy, then hit paste. I would not like this on a beach. So next time write your own damn speech."
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Sometimes the Good Old Days were real. PanAm economy class in the 1960s.
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Our first president could have owned our current president so maybe we
shouldn't fret so much about the dignity of the presidency.
-@LOLGOP
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You not believing in climate change because it's snowing is like me not
believing in education because you exist.
-@LOLGOP
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And... the desktop is clean.
-KGB
Categories: Cartoons, Cleaning off the desktop
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James Madison, Jr. (March 16, 1751 - June 28, 1836) was an American statesman, political theorist and the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817). He is hailed as the "Father of the Constitution" for being instrumental in the drafting of the United States Constitution and as the key champion and author of the United States Bill of Rights. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Besides the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations.
But what is Government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
Conscience is the most sacred of all property...
During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.
Equal laws protecting equal rights, are found as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty, and love of country; as well as best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony and most favorable to the advancement of truth.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes.
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions.
In every political society, parties are unavoidable. A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them. The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort. 4. By abstaining from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expence of another. 5. By making one party a check on the other, so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented, nor their views accommodated. If this is not the language of reason, it is that of republicanism.
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Justice is the end of Government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.
Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure and perpetuate it needs them not.
Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.
Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.
The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
The establishment of the chaplainship in Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles. The danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by ecclesiastical bodies has not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S.
The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages.
The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.
The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer.
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, 'that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the Manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.'
We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society, and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.
Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?
With respect to the words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
Categories: Quotes of the day
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Benjamin McLane Spock (May 2, 1903 – March 15, 1998) was an American pediatrician whose book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, was one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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(Today is also the birthday of Rebecca West)
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Better to make a few mistakes from being natural than to try to do everything letter-perfect out of a feeling of worry.
Don't take too seriously all that the neighbors say. Don't be overawed by what the experts say. Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense.
Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be.
Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.
I really learned it all from mothers.
I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.
I've come to the realization that a lot of our problems are because of a dearth of spiritual values.
Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God.
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
Parental trust is extremely important in the guidance of adolescent children as they get further and further away from the direct supervision of their parents and teachers. I don't mean that trust without clear guidance is enough, but guidance without trust is worthless.
Respect children because they're human beings and they deserve respect, and they'll grow up to be better people. But I've always said ask for respect from your children, ask for cooperation, ask for politeness. Give your children firm leadership.
The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.
The fact is that child rearing is a long, hard job, the rewards are not always immediately obvious, the work is undervalued, and parents are just as human and almost as vulnerable as their children.
The loving person makes other people feel good, and he is usually a happy person himself. He is able to form strong, long-lasting friendships.
There are only two things a child will share willingly- communicable diseases and his mother's age.
There is no one way of raising your children.
Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?
Categories: Benjamin Spock, Quotes of the day
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(Photo from jamesmcgillis.com)
Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by radical environmental groups, and the non-fiction work Desert Solitaire. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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(Today is also the birthday of Albert Einstein)
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A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'
An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
An empty man is full of himself.
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life...
Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.
Freedom begins between the ears.
God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal.
If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself- not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.
In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.
Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us- if only we were worthy of it.
Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death.
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key.
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages- as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism- a Mongoloid metaphysic.
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may not ever need to go there.
We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism.
When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.
Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Categories: Edward Abbey, Quotes of the day
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Susan Brownell Anthony (February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906) was an American social reformer who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people who have no intelligent knowledge of what they condemn?
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.
Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best word, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.
I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealthy, she became a pet and a doll.
I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'
I shall not sit down. I will not lose my only chance to speak.
If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.
Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.
No self respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her sex.
Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.
Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.
The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.
The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.
We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights.
What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it.
Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals.
Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
You would better educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles than to organize a thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Susan B. Anthony
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Edward Franklin Albee III (b. March 12, 1928) is an American playwright of The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.
Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
Death is release, if you've lived all right.
Every monster was a man first.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
I swear, if you existed, I'd divorce you.
I think we should all live on the precipice of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible.
I'm not one of these playwrights who thinks directors and actors should have free rein to do whatever they want to do. If they want to do what they want to do, they should write their own plays.
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.
If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.
Life must be lived usefully, not selfishly. And a usefully lived life is probably going to be, ultimately, more satisfying.
Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.
Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.
Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it did not matter
The gods too are fond of a joke.
The world is a zoo.
What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.
You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?
Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.
Categories: Edward Albee, Quotes of the day
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(Today is also the birthday of Douglas Adams.)
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC (March 11, 1916 – May 24, 1995) was a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976. He won four general elections, and is the most recent British Prime Minister to have served non-consecutive terms. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A week is a long time in politics.
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
Every dog is allowed one bite, but a different view is taken of a dog that goes on biting all the time. He may not get his licence returned when it falls due.
Everybody should have an equal chance- but they shouldn't have a flying start.
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
I get a little nauseated, perhaps, when I hear the phrase 'freedom of the press' used as freely as it is, knowing that a large part of our proprietorial press is not free at all.
I'm an optimist, but an optimist who takes his raincoat.
I've buried all the hatchets. But I know where I've buried them and I can dig them up again if necessary.
One man's wage rise is another man's price increase.
The main essentials of a successful prime minister are sleep and a sense of history.
The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.
The only limits of power are the bounds of belief.
Unemployment more than anything else made me politically conscious.
Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power.
Categories: Harold Wilson, Quotes of the day
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A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an
occasional animal, and the common cold.
-Ogden Nash
Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.
-Charles
Dickens
Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to
play.
-Joyce Rebeta-Burditt
All government originates in families, and if neglected there, it will
hardly exist in society... The foundation of all free government and of
all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth.
-Noah
Webster
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.
-Leo Tolstoy
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.
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)
America's a family. We all yell at each other. It all works out.
-Louis
C.K.
Americans are fat all year round, but the holidays are when we really
hit our stride. And you can bet the food we eat will be just as
unhealthy as the families we're forced to visit.
-Lewis Black
Among Republicans, family values seems to be an article of faith, like
heaven, rather than an actual way of life.
-John Bonnano
Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my
family is.
-P.J. O'Rourke
Do you want to trace your family tree? Run for public office.
-Patricia
H. Vance
Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life,
which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and,
underneath, another- secret and passionate and intense- which is the
real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our
friends.
-Willa Cather
Every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after
they have gone.
-Mitch Albom
Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
-Matt
Groening
Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.
-George
W. Bush
Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each
other.
-E.W. Howe
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules.
They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin
that won't heal because there's not enough material.
-F. Scott
Fitzgerald
Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis
for family life.
-Oscar Wilde
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the
curious delusion that some families are older than others.
-W.H.
Auden
Heredity runs in our family.
-Don Marquis
I am not here, of course, as one pretending to any expertness on
questions of youth and children- except in the sense that, within their
own families, all grandfathers are experts on these matters.
-Dwight
D. Eisenhower
I come from a big family. As a matter of fact, I never got to sleep
alone until I was married.
-Lewis Grizzard
I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
-Erma
Bombeck
I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
-Fred
Allen
I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.
-George
W. Bush
I'll keep it short and sweet- Family. Religion. Friendship. These are
the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.
-Matt
Groening
I've been to all 50 states, and traveled this whole country, and 90
percent of the people are good folks. The rest of them take after the
other side of the family.
-Jeff Foxworthy
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a
story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not
fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the
life of the average family.
-Quentin Crisp
If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for
good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.
-John
Updike
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you might as well make it
dance.
-George Bernard Shaw
If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest family in the
world, all you have to do is go to a state fair.
-Jeff Foxworthy
In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but
they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which
gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.
-Isaac Rosenfeld
In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away
the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability
to speak the language viciously.
-David Mamet
In our family we don't divorce our men, we bury them.
-Ruth Gordon
It sometimes happens, even in the best of families, that a baby is born.
This is not necessarily cause for alarm. The important thing is to keep
your wits about you and borrow some money.
-Elinor Goulding Smith
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined
with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
-Quentin Crisp
The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial.
-G.K.
Chesterton
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-George Santayana
The family is our refuge and our springboard; nourished on it, we can
advance to new horizons.
-Alex Haley
The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going
to have.
-Ring Lardner
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but
parents never grow out of parenthood.
-Evan Esar
There is no such thing as 'fun for the whole family.'
-Jerry
Seinfeld
When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and
combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an
adventure.
-E.B. White
When someone asks if I'm the black sheep of the family I always say no,
we're all black sheep.
-Sarah Vowell
When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking
about every person on earth.
-Alex Haley
Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting
another?
-Peter De Vries
Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and
spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.
-Clare
Boothe Luce
You should come from a good family, because while breeding isn't
everything, it is said to be lots of fun.
-Gracie Allen
-----
(Today is also the birthday of Clare Boothe Luce)
Categories: Quotes on a topic
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It took an hour, mild sedation, three Milk Bones, my beard trimmer, two adults and an oven mitt, but we finally trimmed the hair around the eyes of the small, dog-like creature (aka Pixie the Shih Tzu).
Categories: Dogs, KGB Family
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The idea of Daylight Saving time is like trying to be taller by cutting
off your head and standing on it.
-Unattributed
-----
I was thinking about the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. It would explain a lot of things, like quantum physics. Programmers often take short cuts. In cgi-generated motion pictures, distant subjects lack the detail of foreground objects. Why spend the time programming the texture of every stone in a castle wall when it's going to appear to be a mile away? Maybe the programmer who wrote the code for our simulated universe got to the subatomic level and figured the typical simulated life forms that would develop here would never reach the point where they'd start poking around at the level of quantum states, so no one would ever see the bug that made it impossible to simultaneously determine the position and momentum of subatomic particles. And the division by zero errors responsible for those pesky black holes? That'll be fixed in the next release.
Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your
beliefs.
-Don DeLillo (via Sareesa Boyd)
-----
-----
The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a
question, it's to post the wrong answer.
-Ward Cunningham
-----
Stephen Hawking with nine guys dressed as Bananaman.
You're welcome.
-----
-----
The Swiss must've been pretty confident in their chances of victory if
they included a corkscrew in their army knife.
-@ChevyChase
(parody account)
-----
-----
News
Headline: "Arizona lawmaker: 'I'm gay, Latino and a state senator.'"
Hats
off to him.
It can take courage for a man to announce he’s an Arizona
state senator.
-Zay
Smith, "Quick Takes"
-----
-----
This week the Russian government gave all 44 of its Olympic medalists a new Mercedes. When asked what happened to the athletes who didn't medal, Putin said, 'Do not open trunk.'-----
-----
Pope Francis told the press today that the Catholic Church could
tolerate same-sex civil unions. You know, I think lately when people
say, 'Is the Pope Catholic?' they're actually asking.
–Seth Meyers
-----
-----
Russia is threatening to invade Ukraine, and the U.S. is stepping in. In
fact, just yesterday the U.S. gave a billion dollars to Ukraine to help
stabilize the region. Then Detroit said, 'Hey, can WE go to war with
Russia?'
–Jimmy Fallon
-----
-----
Commercial Drones Declared Legal; Release the Tacocopters
-----
-----
The last time a Republican was elected president without a Nixon or Bush on the ticket was 1928.
-----
Maximum number of dildos a Texan may legally own: 5
-Harper's
Index
-----
Hockey is more enjoyable if you pretend they're fighting over the
world's last Oreo.
-@BillMurray (parody account)
-----
This is appalling. And tremendous.
(YouTube video: Debut Criminal Defense Commercial
from
Pittsburgh's Criminal Defense Rookie of the Year)
-----
Radio Shack is closing 1,100 stores so you will have to go to Wal Mart
if you need a universal remote that breaks in a month.
-@pourmecoffee
-----
-----
March is National Kidney Month! Fun Fact: There are actually two kidney
months, but you only need one.
-Stephen Colbert
-----
-----
The world's most expensive place to live is Singapore. For the world's
cheapest place, check your clothing label.
-Stephen Colbert
-----
Good thing George W. Bush isn't President or we'd already be at war with
the people who make Cremora.
-Paul Lander
-----
Conservatives love Sarah Palin because she pisses off liberals, which is
like eating rubber cement because everyone tells you not to.
-@LOLGOP
-----
Newsmax is starting their own channel, hoping to poach Fox News’s
younger viewers, the coveted 72 to 86 demographic.
-Kara Vallow
-----
And... the desktop is clean.
I'm giving up giving up things for Lent for Lent.
-Kevin G. Barkes
Categories: Cartoons, Cleaning off the desktop
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Pumpkin turns 17 today and retains the title of oldest non-human mammal in the house.
Her nickname for the longest time was "Demon Cat From Hell." She does not suffer fools gladly, and she pretty much considers herself to be surrounded by fools.
Fortunately, she's mellowed somewhat in her old age. Treat her with respect, and you'll get it in return.
As long as you feed her.
Now.
Categories: Animals, KGB Family
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George Burns (January 20, 1896 – March 9, 1996), born Nathan Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor and writer. He was one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, film, radio, and television. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became familiar trademarks for over three-quarters of a century. At the age of 79, Burns' career was resurrected as an amiable, beloved and unusually active old comedian in the 1975 film The Sunshine Boys, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He continued to work until shortly before his death, in 1996, at the age of 100. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.
Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house.
Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.
First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.
For forty years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.
(from
Gracie: A Love Story)
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family- in another city.
How can I die? I'm booked.
I can do everything now that I could do when I was 18. I was pretty pathetic at 18.
I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.
I can't understand why I flunked American history. When I was a kid there was so little of it.
I was always taught to respect my elders and I've now reached the age when I don't have anybody to respect.
I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
I'd go out with women my age, but there are no women my age.
I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than be a success at something I hate.
If I'd taken my doctor's advice and quit smoking when he advised me to, I wouldn't have lived to go to his funeral.
If it's a good script I'll do it. And if it's a bad script, and they pay me enough, I'll do it
If you live to be a hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.
It's good to be here. At my age, it's good to be anywhere.
Old age is when you resent the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated because there are fewer articles to read.
Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.
Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and have the two as close together as possible.
The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile.
You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.
You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoes and wonder what else you can do while you're down there.
Categories: George Burns, Quotes of the day
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Gene Fowler (March 8, 1890 - July 2, 1960), born Eugene Devlan, was a writer and actor, known for The Mighty Barnum (1934), What Price Hollywood? (1932) and Billy the Kid (1941). (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
A book is never finished; it's abandoned.
An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he'd have someone to look up to.
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
Everyone needs a warm personal enemy or two to keep him free from rust in the movable parts of his mind.
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
He has a profound respect for old age. Especially when it's bottled.
Hollywood is a place where you either ride in a Rolls Royce or are run over by one.
If they haven't heard it before, it's original.
It is easier to believe than to doubt.
Love and memory last and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness.
Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.
Never thank anybody for anything, except a drink of water in the desert- and then make it brief.
News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day.
Perhaps no mightier conflict of mind occurs ever again in a lifetime than that first decision to unseat one's own tooth.
Psychoanalysts seem to be long on information and short on application.
The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.
They that will not be counseled, cannot be helped. If you do not hear reason she will rap you on the knuckles.
What is success? It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins.
Whatever one believes to be true either is true or becomes true in one's mind.
Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarisms, in order to dodge the difficulty.
Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Categories: Gene Fowler, Quotes of the day
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Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 - March 7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and editor who did most of his work as an expatriate in the United Kingdom. He is regarded by many as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. His films, typically adaptations of novels or short stories, are noted for their "dazzling" and unique cinematography, attention to detail in the service of realism, and the evocative use of music. Kubrick's films covered a variety of genres, including war, crime, romantic and black comedies, horror, epic and science fiction. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
-----
All great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.
Do we lose our humanity if we are deprived of the choice between good and evil?
Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men but it didn't do them, or anyone else, much good.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.
If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
Include utter banalities.
It's a mistake to confuse pity with love.
It's intimidating, especially at a time like this, to think of how many books you should read and never will.
Modern science seems to be very dangerous because it has given us the power to destroy ourselves before we know how to handle it. On the other hand, it is foolish to blame science for its discoveries, and in any case, we cannot control science. Who would do it, anyway?
More people read books about the Nazis than about the UN. Newspapers headline bad news. The bad characters in a story can often be more interesting than the good ones.
Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.
No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.
One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
People can misinterpret almost anything so that it coincides with views they already hold.
The most memorable scenes in the best films are those which are built predominantly of images and music.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.
The power and authority of the State should be optimized and exercized only to the extent that is required to keep things civilized.
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
There has always been violence in art. There is violence in the Bible, violence in Homer, violence in Shakespeare, and many psychiatrists believe that it serves as a catharsis rather than a model.
There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.
This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
What chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Stanley Kubrick
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Ringgold Wilmer Lardner (March 6, 1885 - September 25, 1933) was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the sports world, marriage, and the theatre. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
An optimist is a girl who mistakes a bulge for a curve.
'Are you lost, Daddy?' I asked tenderly. 'Shut up,' he explained.
He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle.
He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.
How can you write if you can't cry?
No one, ever, wrote anything as well even after one drink as he would have done without it.
The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.
There isn't anything on earth as depressing as an old sportswriter.
They gave each other a smile with a future in it.
Where do they get that stuff about me being a satirist? I just listen.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Ring Lardner
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A mission statement is defined as 'a long awkward sentence that
demonstrates management's inability to think clearly.' All good
companies have one.
-Scott Adams
All good work is done in defiance of management.
-Bob Woodward
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but management won't
pay a penny for it.
-Gerald Weinberg
Bank failures are caused by depositors who don't deposit enough money to
cover losses due to mismanagement.
-Dan Quayle
Catching people doing things right is a powerful management concept.
-Ken
Blanchard
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder
aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-Doug
Larson
Eighty percent of good management is hiring the right people. The other
20 percent is getting out of their way.
-Scott Adams
Engineering without management is art.
-Jeff Johnson
Every layer of management exists for the sole purpose of warning us
about the layer above.
-Scott Adams
I fire staff regularly, sometimes for no reason at all. Terror is a
marvelous, often underutilized management tool.
-(From the
magazine Forbes FYI)
I learned about stress management from my kids. Every night after work,
I drink some chocolate milk, eat sugary cereal straight from the box,
then run around the house in my underwear screaming like a monkey.
-Randy
Glasbergen
I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the
modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That
would solve the entire problem of management.
-Jean Giraudoux
If at first you don't succeed, try management.
-Unattributed
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of management.
-Unattributed
It's a lot easier to fake good management than to fake good code.
-Unattributed
It's vital for employees to accept the 'buy-in' process. That way
management has someone to blame when things go wrong.
-Scott Adams
Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.
-Frank McKinney
(Kin) Hubbard
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
-Peter
Drucker
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership
determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
-Stephen
Covey
Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is
Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes
haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition
when prosperity comes.
-Harry S. Truman
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for
people to work.
-Peter Drucker
Sometimes when I get direction from management I have to stop, take a
deep breath, and ask myself, 'What would MacGyver do in a situation like
this?'
-Unattributed
The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of
management is that success equals skill.
-Robert Heller
The trick of management is finding people with the right demons.
-David
Carlson
When people stare at you in disbelief, do you repeat what you just said,
only louder and slower? Good, you're management material.
-Scott
Adams
You cannot manage a man into combat; you must lead him. You manage
things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot
about leadership.
-Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
Categories: Quotes of the day, Quotes on a topic
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Forget the Oscars. This is the best version.
(YouTube
video: Jimmy Fallon, Idina Menzel and The Roots perform "Let It Go" on
classroom instruments!)
The song as it appears in the film was undoubtedly assembled from
multiple takes and enhanced electronically- a necessity when you're
planning to exhibit it in huge IMAX venues with several thousands watts
of audio amplification.
(YouTube
video: Idina Menzel performs "Let It Go" in "Frozen.")
Frankly, her Oscar performance wasn't her best... having John Travolta mangle her name didn't help. Think about it- you're following Bette Midler, you're the last musical performer of the night, singing what everyone expects to win the Oscar for Best Song, the live orchestra is in a recording studio over a mile away, and "Let It Go" (which its authors say was specifically written to be "Idina's Badass Song") is the Power Ballad from Hell, ranging from F3 to E♭5.
Go ahead... follow along...
(YouTube
video: Let It Go arranged by Larry Moore)
Anyway, it was nice to see her actually enjoying herself with Fallon and The Roots.
Categories: Frozen, Idina Menzel, Jimmy Fallon, Music, Video, YouTube
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Robert Orben (b. March 4, 1927) is best known as an American professional comedy writer, though he also worked as a speechwriter for Gerald R. Ford and as a magician. He has written multiple books on comedy, mostly collections of gags and 'one-liners' originally written for his newsletter, Orben's Current Comedy, and he has also written books for magicians. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that individuality is the key to success.
Did you ever figure to be living in a time when your check is good, but the bank bounces?
Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?
Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He'd go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.
Do your kids a favor- don't have any.
Don't think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.
Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't.
I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
If somebody accuses you in a story of being a crook, you can demand that they prove it. But if a comic says it and you protest, people say, 'What's the matter, you can't take a joke?'
If you can get someone to laugh with you, they will be more willing to identify with you, listen to you. It parts the waters.
Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.
Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards.
Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.
Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson... you find the present tense and the past perfect.
Old people shouldn't eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.
Planned obsolescence is not really a new concept. God used it with people.
Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral.
Summit meetings tend to be like panda matings. The expectations are always high, and the results usually disappointing.
There are only two kinds of people in this world. The realists and the dreamers. The realists know where they are going and the dreamers have already been there.
These detective series on TV always end at precisely the right moment-after the criminal is arrested and before the court turns him loose.
Time flies. It's up to you to be the navigator.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Robert Orben
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It's Scotty's birthday, which is a major holiday around these parts.
We'll be givin' it all we've got. Check out the Doohan links.
See you tomorrow.
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Hollywood is a factory. You have to realize that you are working in a
factory and you're part of the mechanism. If you break down, you'll be
replaced.
-Mel Gibson
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
-Fred
Allen
Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a
kiss, and 50 cents for your soul.
-Marilyn Monroe
Hollywood is a place where you either ride in a Rolls Royce or are run
over by one.
-Gene Fowler
Hollywood is full of genius. And all it lacks is talent.
-Henri
Bernstein
Hollywood is Hollywood. There's nothing you can say about it that isn't
true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be
bitter- you're the one who sat down, and joined the game.
-Orson
Welles
Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.
-Liv Ullman
Hollywood is making, because of costs, fewer interesting films. So,
basically you end up with a lot of explosions.
-William Goldman
Hollywood is the kind of town where they stick a knife in your back and
then arrest you for carrying a concealed weapon.
-Raymond Chandler
Hollywood is where they write the alibis before they write the story.
-Carole
Lombard
Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or
sober.
-Raymond Chandler
Hollywood's a great place to live... if you're a grapefruit.
-Rod
Serling
Hollywood, where the stars are in the sidewalk and the dirt is in the
sky.
-Bill Maher
Hollywood: that's where they give Academy Awards to Charlton Heston for
acting.
-Shirley Knight
Hollywood: They only know one word of more than one syllable there, and
that is 'fillum.'
-Louis Sherwin
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Kentucky is fighting same-sex marriage tooth and nail, just as it fought
indoor plumbing.
-Andy Borowitz
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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer today reflected on her decision to veto the
state's anti-gay law: "The decision was a no-brainer, which is why I was
capable of making it."
-Andy Borowitz
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Why I canceled my 20+ year subscription to The Wall Street Journal
after it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch, in one photo:
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It's a bit odd that when you ask certain conservatives to Love Thy
Neighbor they feel their religious freedom is at risk.
-Frank
Conniff
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Dutch police have begun using rats to detect drugs and guns in suspects'
clothing, so next time you smoke weed in Amsterdam, try not to get
paranoid about the Hyper-Intelligent Police Rats.
-Seth Meyers
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Losing to Canada in hockey is like losing to France in cowardice.
-David
Burge
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Hi, I'm a guy who supported the Iraq war and is outraged Putin would
invade a smaller country that hasn't attacked him.
-John Fugelsang
Categories: Andy Borowitz, Cartoons, Cleaning off the desktop, John Fugelsang
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Granddaughter Joelle has the official Star Fleet wardrobe, is working on
the Vulcan salute...
YouTube video: 3,965-day-old Leanna and 296-day-old Joelle hang out.
Categories: KGB Family
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Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. (b. March 2, 1931) is an American author and journalist, best known for his association and influence over the New Journalism literary movement in which literary techniques are used in objective, even-handed journalism. Beginning his career as a reporter he soon became one of the most culturally significant figures of the sixties after the publication of books such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and his collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His first novel entitled The Bonfire of the Vanities, released in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and was a great commercial success. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A cult is a religion with no political power.
A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.
Criminal law is a thing unto itself, because the stakes are not money but human life and human freedom, and I tell you, that sets off a lot of crazy emotions.
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Don't confuse the water with the pump.
For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946, Bugsy Siegel hired Abbot and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.
Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
If you label it this, then it can't be that.
It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.
The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.
You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.
You're either on the bus or off the bus.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Tom Wolfe, Jr.
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A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful
mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his
tranquility.
-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There
is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and
imperfection of practice. And, as one would expect, the feeling of guilt
promotes hate and brazenness. Thus it seems that the more sublime the
faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds.
-Eric Hoffer
A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural
art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion
as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from
its imperfections.
-Reinhold Neibuhr
Aim for success, not perfection.
-Dr. David M. Burns
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that
English women only hope to find in their butlers.
-W. Somerset
Maugham
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from
the last church falls on the last priest.
-Emile Zola
Don't expect perfect products unless you are willing to pay for
perfection.
-Robert Siegmeister
Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are
lumps in it.
-James Stephens
Have no fear of perfection- you'll never reach it.
-Salvador Dali
History balances the frustration of 'how far we have to go' with the
satisfaction of 'how far we have come.' It teaches us tolerance for the
human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our
generation, but of all time.
-Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.
-Anatole
France
I remember what it is like to be in love before any of love's
complexities or realities or disturbances has entered in, to dilute its
splendor and challenge its perfection.
-E.B. White
If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.
-Leo Tolstoy
Imperfections create character.
-Ellen Hopkins
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in
perfectionism.
-Hannah Arendt
It is not given to us to right every wrong, to make perfect all the
imperfections of the world. But neither is it given to us to sit content
in our storehouses- dieting while others starve, buying eight million
new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. We are
simply not doing enough.
-Robert F. Kennedy
No man is entirely free from weakness and imperfection in this life. Men
of the most exalted genius and active minds are generally most perfect
slaves to the love of fame. They sometimes descend to as mean tricks and
artifices in pursuit of honor or reputation as the miser descends to in
pursuit of gold.
-John Adams
Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is
inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary,
to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency.
-Napoleon
Bonaparte
People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which
they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it.
-Edith
Schaeffer
Perfection does not exist. To understand this is the triumph of human
intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of
madness.
-Alfred de Musset
Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that
this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
-W.
Somerset Maugham
Perfection is a waste of time.
-Kim De Coite
Perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to
add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
-Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry
Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem- in my opinion- to
characterize our age.
-Albert Einstein
So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of
words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.
-John
Locke
The division of labor, which has brought such perfection in mechanical
industries, is altogether fatal when applied to productions of the mind.
All work of the mind is superior in proportion as the mind that produces
it is universal.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
-George
Orwell
The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice,
absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men
have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of
genial frailty.
-Brooks Atkinson
The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it
consist in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone
gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
-Logan
Pearsall Smith
The maxim 'Nothing but perfection' may be spelled 'Paralysis.'
-Winston
Churchill
The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
-George F.
Will
There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world
is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time,
all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere;
and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who
is a burlesque of what he should be.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and
railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be
ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
-H.G. Wells
To obey orders is all perfection.
-Horatio Nelson
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
-Michelangelo
We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the
share of mortals.
-Martha Washington
We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in
the possibility of perfection.
-Stephen Vizinczey
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