ACORNS:
To be planted and nourished
in a time of prickly pears
and blighted bushes
by Doc
Cuddy
We culled these from Sam Smith's rich collection of quotations. If you like
these, by all means click here
to see many, many more like them.
|
A criminal is a person with predatory
instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation.
--Clarence Darrow |
A family is like having a bowling alley
installed in your brain.
--Martin Mull |
As nightfall does not come at once, neither
does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything seems seemingly
unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air
--however slight --lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
--Justice William O. Douglas |
At any given moment there is a sort of
all-prevailing orthodoxy, a genercal tacit agreement not to discuss some large and
uncomfortable fact,
--George Orwell |
But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in
yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long
prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation. Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is
won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.
--Matthew 23:13-15 |
Danger lies not in what we don't know, but in
what we think we know that just ain't so.
--Mark Twain |
Educational television should be absolutely
forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable expectations and eventual disappointment when
your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and
dance around the room with royal blue chickens.
--Fran Lebowitz |
Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies --in the final sense --a theft from those who
hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This is not a way of life
at all, in any true sense. . . . It is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954 |
Everything great in the world comes from
neurotics. They alone have founded our religions, and composed our masterpieces. Never
will the world know all it owes to them, nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
--Marcel Proust |
Everything the Communists said about Communism
was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.
--21st century Russian proverb |
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort
when you have forgotten your aim.
--George Santayana |
Honesty is no substitute for experience.
--Texas politician |
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned
way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then
I killed them and took their land.
–Jon Stewart |
If fascism came to America it would be on a
program of Americanism.
--Huey Long |
In an age of universal deceit, telling the
truth is a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell |
In our time, political speech and writing are
largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of
euphemisms, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Political language is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to
pure wind.
--George Orwell |
In time of war the loudest patriots are the
greatest profiteers.
--August Babel 1870 |
It is my impression that the Capitol is now
rather more like the Kremlin during Stalin's feisty reign than a place where the citizens
used to wander about and feel at home . . . We have made so many enemies all around the
world that, in the name of terrorism, a quite effective police state has ever so gradually
replaced the old republics. . . When the people dislike the state as much as the state
dislikes them, what happens next?
--Gore Vidal |
May your trails be crooked, lonesome,
dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into & above the
clouds, May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling
with bells, past temples & castles & poets' towers into a dark primeval forest
where tigers belch & monkeys howl, through miasmal & mysterious swamps & down
into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes & pinnacles & grottos of endless
stone, & down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight
blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come
& go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful &
more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you – beyond that next turning
of the canyon walls.
--Edward Abbey |
Our military establishment today bears little
relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime ... We have been compelled
to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions ... Three and a half million
men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on
military security more than the net income of all corporations. "This conjunction of
an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American
experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every
city, every state house, every office of the federal government. In the councils of
government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought
or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic process.
--President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell
speech, January 17, 1961 |
Our quarrel with efficiency is not that it
gets things done, but that it is a thief of time when it leaves us no leisure to enjoy
ourselves and that it frays our nerves in trying to get things done perfectly. An American
editor worries his hair gray to see that no typographical mistakes appear on the pages of
his magazine. The Chinese editor is wiser than that. He wants to leave his readers the
supreme satisfaction of discovering a few typographical mistakes for themselves. More than
that, a Chinese magazine can begin printing serial fiction and forget about it halfway. In
America it might bring the roof down on the editors, but in China it doesn't matter simply
because it doesn't matter.
--Lin Yutang |
Patriotism is the conviction that this country
is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
--George B. Shaw |
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
--Oscar Wilde |
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be
killed for trivial reasons.
--Betrand Russell |
Puritanism: the haunting fear that somebody,
somewhere, might be having a good time.
--H.L. Mencken |
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one,
as yet, is suspicious.
--HL Mencken |
Technology: the knack of so arranging a world
that we need not experience it.
--Max Frisch |
The average age of the world's greatest
civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this
sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from
courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from
selfishness to complacency; from complacence to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from
dependency back again into bondage.
--Alexander Tytler |
The Constitution supposes what the history of
all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in
war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war
in the legislature.
--James
Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798 |
The highest form of literary subtlety, in a
corrupt social order, is to tell the plain truth.
--Edward Abbey |
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the
rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread.
--Anatole France |
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the
people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than
their democratic state itself. That, in its essense, is fascism --ownerhips of government
by an indiviual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt |
The men the American people admire most
extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who
try to tell them the truth.
--H. L. Mencken |
The people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders... All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.
--Hermann Goering |
The police state that politicians are building
isn't some cartoony reproduction of Nazi Germany; it's an America of the future that looks
much like the United States of today, but works as if the whole country has been turned
into an airport security checkpoint. It'll be like Mexico, with everybody averting their
eyes as the cops stroll by, but with better plumbing. It's a country that has a familiar
flag, regular elections and outraged civil liberties columnists, but where it's easier
than ever to get yourself arrested for things that our parents wouldn't have considered
crimes - or just for annoying the wrong people. Yes, America is becoming a police state.
But unless you pay attention, you might not notice until it's too late.
--J. D. Tuccille |
The problem in defense is how far you can go
without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
--Dwight Eisenhower |
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed - and thus clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H.L. Mencken |
There have been three totalitarian forces in
our lifetime. The totalitarianism of fascism, of communism, and now of capitalism.
--French farmer-activist José Bové |
There is, of course, no reason why the new
totalitarianisms should resemble the old . . . In an age of advanced technology,
inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state
would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of
managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love
their servitude.
--Aldous Huxley |
They that can give up essential liberty to
obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
--Benjamin Franklin |
Those who want the government to regulate
matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they
commit suicide.
--Harry Truman |
To me it seems a dreadful indignity to have a
soul controlled by geography.
--George Santayanna |
Unless we change direction, we are likely to
end up where we are headed.
--Chinese proverb |
We are mad, not only individuals but nations
also. We restrain manslaughter and individual murders; but what of war and the so-called
glory of killing whole peoples? . . . Deeds of cruelty are done every day by command of
the Senate and popular assembly, and servants of the state are ordered to do what is
forbidden to the private citizen. The same deeds which would be punished by death if
committed in secret are applauded when done openly by soldiers in uniform.
--Seneca, Letters 95, c. 63 CE |
We in America are nearer to the final triumph
over poverty than ever before in the history of the land. We have not yet reached the
goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we
shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from
the nation.
--Herbert Hoover, 1928 |
WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT
WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD.
--Kurt Vonnegut's
suggested last words of humans
to be carved perhaps on the Grand Canyon
for "flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever." |
What happened was the gradual habituation of
the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions
deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the
government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so
dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of
national security. ~ The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that
they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing
remoter and remoter. ~ To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it --please try
to believe me --unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than
most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so
well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.' ~ Believe me this is true. Each act, each
occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the
next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes,
will join you in resisting somehow. ~ Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see
what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was
all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) . . . You remember everything
now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
--German professor, in They Thought They Were Free by Milton
Mayer |
When I pray for peace, I pray not only that
the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country
will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.
--Thomas Merton |
When it shall be said in any country in the
world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my
jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes
are not oppressive --when these thing can be said, then may that country boast of its
constitution and government.
--Thomas Paine |
Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine
villages.
--Turkish saying |
Why all of a sudden this unrest and confusion.
(How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
--Constantine P. Cavafy (1904) |
You have to take the long view. First, when
Moses came down from Mt. Sinai,
man has already progressed to the point where a commandment against
cannibalism was no longer necessary. And, second, it's like pissing on a
boulder. For the first few thousand years, you don't see any effect. But
after that, you start to see a definite impact.
--I.F. Stone, when asked by fellow journalist John Neary how "he
could stand shoveling the same shit year after year after year, covering the same
poltroons explaining and miscreants committing the same miserable malfeasances." |
