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Edited on Tue May-02-06 09:05 PM by Old Crusoe
I know it's an election night, and our attention may be drawn to several key races at home and in other states.
But here's a break for when you get back. Some random quotations culled from the ol' bookshelf.
I appreciate the associations I've made here on DU -- the posters, the mods, the admins and the overall good vibe of an alert blue community. Many thanks to all.
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“I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”
--James Baldwin, 1984
“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”
--Rev. Jerry Falwell, 1979
“I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.”
--Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition, 1991
“The people don’t take baths and they don’t speak English. No golf courses, no room service. Who needs it?”
--then-Bears quarterback Jim McMahon, on Europe upon his return therefrom
“Distrust all men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” --Frederich Nietzsche
“The ability to think for one’s self depends on one’s mastery of the language.”
--Joan Didion, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
“Where there is no magic, one remains a toad.” --Kathleen Spivack
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
--Oscar Wilde
“My music is best understood by children and animals.” --Igor Stravinsky
“What will happen cannot be avoided. Aim for grace.” --Ann Beattie
“Taking a baby to a restaurant is like taking a moose to an opera.” --Dave Barry
“Do you want me to tell you what Dallas is? It’s the city that proves once and for all that God is really dead.”
--George de Mohrenschildt, in Don DeLillo’s LIBRA
“A man who could not seduce men cannot save them either.” --Soren Kierkegaard
“Ordinary fuckin’ people--I hate ‘em.” --Harry Dean Stanton in REPO MAN
“He who speaks the truth should always have one foot in the stirrup.” --Turkish proverb
“You’ve got to scrape that shit right off your shoes.”
--the Rolling Stones, last line of chorus to “Sweet Virginia,” on EXILE ON MAIN STREET
“I read him for the first time in the early 1940s, something about bells, balls, and bulls... and I loathed it.”
--Vladimir Nabokov on Hemingway
“The faithfulness I imagine would be a weed flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.” --Adrienne Rich
“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”
--Peking Restaurant fortune cookie, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1990
“We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it.... That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.” --Rose Elizabeth Bird
“Advertising is the rattle of a stick inside a swill bucket.” --George Orwell
“Can I get a new bike?”
--Chad Brenner, age 8, of Rockville, Maryland, mistakenly sent an IRS refund of $39,541.55
“I hated that man. First two fights, he tried to make me a white man. Then he tried to make me a nigger. How would you like it if your kids came home from school crying, because everyone was calling their daddy a gorilla? I’d like to fight Ali-Clay-whatever-his-name-is again tomorrow. I still want to take him apart piece by piece and send him back to Jesus.”
--Joe Frazier, on Muhammad Ali
“Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.” --Bernardo Bertolucci
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
--Stephen J. Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb”
“And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., CAT'S CRADLE
“I don’t give a good goddam about greyhound racing. I can’t think of anything that interests me less.”
--Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa, a linguist, responding to the question of legalized dog racing in California, 1976
“For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I, too, abide to dispel the misery of the world.”
--Dalai Lama, traditional prayer quoted at Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
“The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.” --Eric Hoffer
“In the interior wilderness no one is bloodied by history, and it is no coincidence that the Pentecostal churches have their strongest hold in places where Western civilization has its most superficial hold.”
--Joan Didion, THE WHITE ALBUM
“In the long history of divinities, the inhabitants of Olympus were the first who wished to be perfect rather than powerful. Like an obsidian blade, the aesthetic for the first time cut away all ties, connections, devotions. What remained was a group of figures, isolated in the air, complete, initiated, perfect--three words that in Greek covers in just one--teleios. Even though it would not appear until much later, the statue was the beginning, the way in which these new beings would manifest themselves.”
--Roberto Calasso, THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY
“I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” --John Wayne
“The poet must continue to stand in an adversarial relationship. The most elementary of our adversarial relationships are in terms of the power of the state, which has never been so great in the history of mankind. That power can destroy us all. It’s a terrible power to entrust to people who are not spiritually great, that’s all there is to it. You see it in the callousness, self-aggrandizement, insensitivity to the plight of the poor. In the general level of ethical conduct, the state has become an abomination. The Vietnam War--I was very angry about that, as I am about our policy in Nicaragua--all such difficulties lead one to feel more and more separated from the heads of state and the conduct of the state. A poet can’t change anything, but the poet can demonstrate the power of the solitary conscience. It’s an example. Any gain, even the conquest of a small part of oneself, is a triumph.”
--Stanley Kunitz, interview in the Washington POST, May 12, 1987
“If Patty Hearst had been on United Artist Records, she would NEVER have been found.”
--Dean Torrence, United Artist spokesman, bemoaning his company’s slide in sales
“There was a winning, irresistible magnetism in the presence of this man. Except my father, there was no man in whose company I liked to be so much as in his. I had little to say to him, and demanded nothing more than a silent recognition from him, but his voice, his looks, his gestures, his gait, the spiritual sphere of him, were delightful to me; and I suspect that his rise to the highest office in our nation was due quite as much to this power or quality in him as to any intellectual or even executive ability that he may have possessed. He was a good, conscientious, patriotic, strong, man and gentle and tender as a woman. He had the old-fashioned ways, the courtesy, and the personal dignity which are not often seen nowadays. His physical frame was immensely powerful and athletic, but life used him hard and he was far from considerate of himself, and he died at 65, when he might under more favorable conditions have rounded out his century.”
--Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathanial Hawthorne, writing as a boy in his teens, on Franklin Pierce, quoted in FRANKLIN PIERCE, by Roy Franklin Nichols
“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
-- Dorothy Parker
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