Quotations (gleaned in the 1990s)

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?    Stanislaw Lec

The modern world is a culture of death.   Pope John Paul II

Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted.   Erich Fromm

Albert Camus said future historians would summarize modern man: "He fornicated and read newspapers."

The profoundest truths are paradoxical.   Lao Tzu

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,  that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Thomas Jefferson

My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it.   Chuang Tzu

He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.   Koran

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.   Lord Acton

In politics.... you need two things: friends, but above all an enemy.   Brian Mulroney

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.   Mother Teresa

We have sunk to such a depth that the restatement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men.    George Orwell

Genius is having a profound grasp of the obvious.     Albert Camus

Life is an open secret.    Tibetan Buddhist saying

We shall not cease from exploration

and the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

and to know the place for the first time.                      Thomas Stearns Eliot

I could talk until about the cows come home about the minority status of Catholics in the North of Ireland. But that ground has been gone over a lot. I would say that the more important Catholic thing is the actual sense of eternal values and infamous vices which our education or formation gives us. There's a sense of profoundness, a sense that the universe can be ashimmer with something , and Catholicism - even if I don't like sentimentalizing it - was the backdrop to that whole thig. The world I grew up in offered me a sense that I was a citizen of the empyrean - the crystalline elsewhere of the world.    Seamus Heaney

And here I stand with all my lore

no wiser than I was before.     Faust

Yesterday, nine weeks into the NATO bombing of Kosovo/Serbia, an ongoing NPR report on the life of a young Kosovar, had this to say: "The war has gotten to the point where there's nothing to do but stay inside all day and watch television."

Chapel Hill bumper sticker:

"The Labor Movement:

The People Who Brought You The Weekend."

One never sees what has been done. One can only see what still needs to be done. Madame Curie

(Curie's observation is thoroughly modern. However, humankind has not always experienced this relentless compulsion "to get on to the next thing." Medieval Europeans, for example, sat back and enjoyed their cathedrals. Even moderns suspend busyness-as-usual to gawk at these works of majesty. Take the Orvieto cathedral whose facade is graced with a mural that is as stunning as it is elaborate. The opposite side of  Cathedral Square is rimmed by centuries-old stone benches where people sit, look, talk and gawk. There is no pressure to "get on with the program," but rather, unharried enjoyment of the past. The modern assumption that we must always look to the future ensures we will never be conscious of the present. Is our absented-mindedness a good way to live?)

In the United Oil Emirate, Abu Dhabi, it is law that all buildings must be razed every 30 years.

There is more to life than increasing its speed.   Mahatma Gandhi

My favorite animal is the mule... He knows when to stop eating --- and he knows when to stop working.   Truman

Trains stop at the train station.

Buses stop at the bus station.

I have a workstation.                                          Steven Wright

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy. I don't mind, I think they're crazy.   John Lennon

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down. Pigs treat us as equals. Winston Churchill

A female MP who routinely goaded Churchill, once accused him of being drunk, to which Churchill replied: "Madam, I may be drunk. But tomorrow, I will be sober, and you will still be ugly."

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of birds?   Picasso

It is easy to be brave from a distance.  Aesop

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.  Longfellow 

(When I taught public school, "inert" students seemed to spend more time and mental anguish suffering from not having taken the little time required to learn. Few behavioral "interventions" are as important as reversing the self-satisfied behavior I call "aggressive ignorance.")

Not to know is bad. Not to wish to know is worse.  Wolof West African Proverb

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse.   Washington Irving

(Pleasure is experienced when energy is released. On the one hand are the educated - or, at least, the technically instructed - who release energy by creative bonding, by "associative energy," through "building up." Those who are neither educated nor instructed often access the pleasure of "energy release" through "dissociative energy," by breaking bonds, through witless destruction.)

There's small choice in rotten apples.  Shakespeare

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.   Theodore Roosevelt

The unexamined life is not worth living.   Socrates

I was really too honest a human to be a politician and live.  Socrates, upon drinking hemlock

What has made this nation great? Not heroes but households.  Sarah Josepha Hale

To sing and dance well is to be well-educated.   Plato

Service is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.   Marian Wright Edelman

We make our friends. We make our enemies. God sends us our neighbors.   G. K. Chesterton

Love your enemies. Do good to those persecute you.   Y'eshua, the Nazarene

Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.   Lao Tzu

Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.  Alfonso X, King of Spain (1221 - 1286)

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.   May Sarton

"The Community Stories Project," by Janice Hodges, Independent, 6/23-29/99

"'I received a lot of flak for not having any type of academic requirements,' says Delia Gamble, program coordinator for the 1997 and 1998 projects. But she says her main objective was to get students into the program and doing the work, regardless of how they did in school. 'We've had people with learning disabilities, attitude problems and dropouts, but it all worked out.'"

(Such flak shows how "schooled" people oppress the relatively "unschooled." America's "meritocracy" is not based on excellence but on the willingness of "the mediocre" to sit quietly in State-assigned seats, and, furthermore, to pay for "the privelege." Real excellence - excellence that breaks the box, winged excellence that flies higher than any glass ceiling - is a threat to the "meritocratic" system of which schooling and credentialing comprise the foundation. A.A.)

The fate of empires depends on the education of youth.   Aristotle

It is a greater work to educate a child... than to rule a state.   William Emery Channing

Tis education forms the common mind:

Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.           Alexander Pope

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.   William Butler Yeats

Achieve excellence in some way. Then you will not sorrow when you see excellence in others.  Rumi

I only hire people whose language I don't understand. Americans don't care about their work. (A general contractor from Hillsborough, North Carolina, explaining why he only employs Hispanics.)

In the baby lies the future of the world... His father must take him to the highest hill to see what his world is like.   Mayan Proverb

He who does not love his wife dishonors himself.   Mexican Proverb

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

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money. It lies... in the thrill of creative effort.   F. D. Roosevelt

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.   Borges

He who has never failed cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.   Melville

History teaches us that men and nations will behave wisely once they have exhausted all other possibilities.   Abba Eban

Susan Goodman: What excuses do people offer for bad behavior?

Laura Schlesinger: "I did this because I was hurt or upset or needy." Hey, if I acted on the range of feelings I have, I'd be pregnant and people would be dead.  Interview, Fall, '99

Excusers are losers.   Stelton Mitchell, former second baseman for the Houston Astros, and my "master teacher" at Berkeley High. A.A.

To Martha Washington's grand-daughter (who was on the brink of marriage), George wrote: "Experience will convince you that there is no truth more certain than that all our enjoyments fall short of our expectations; and to none does it apply with more force, than to the gratification of the passions."

The difference between a spiritual good and a material good is that the material good tends to disappoint in the instant of its attainment. Augustine of Hippo (paraphrase)

The notion of obeying... "a higher law"  rather than the traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian one. Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a race one. Just as the Soviet cadres were taught to justify the most revolting crimes in the name of a moralistic class warfare, so the SS acted in the name of race --- which Hitler insisted was a far more powerful and central human motivation than class. Service to the race, as opposed to the Marxist proletariat, was the basis of Nazi Puritanism.

Paul Johnson

Marxist theory cannot ... make absolute distinctions between violence against a race and violence against a class... As he saw it, races, peoples and nations were subjected to the same Hegelian processes as classes. (Marx) often discussed with Engels the notion of inferior... races... Engels liked to quote a saying of Hegel's that "residual fragments  of peoples" always become "fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution." Thus you could have a reactionary people as well as a reactionary class --- a thought which appealed strongly to Stalin as well as Hitler, and indeed to Mao Zedong... when he dealt... with that reactionary little people, the Tibetans.          Paul Johnson

There is, indeed, no place for mercy in determinist systems such as Marxism. Mercy, like free will, is an anti-determinist idea... So-called "history," as the dynamic of Marxism, has no mercy because it is an impersonal idea and mercy implies a person. The notion of "socialism with a human face," though superficially attractive, is self-contradictory in terms of Marxism. Mercy is thus greater than justice and it can be so because it is non-deterministic and embodies free will.                                                   Paul Johnson

(Hitler) hated Christianity and showed a justified contempt for its German practitioners. Shortly after assuming power, he told Hermann Rauschning that he intended to stamp out Christianity in Germany "root and branch." "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both." ... "Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished..."  Paul Johnson

Orwell... was an almost classic case of the Old Intellectual in the sense that for him a political commitment to a utopian, socialist future was plainly a substitute for a religious idealism in which he could not believe. God could not exist for him. He put his faith in man but, looking at the object of his devotion too closely, lost it.    Paul Johnson

Orwell has always put experience before theory... Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivaled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld.                                                                                Paul Johnson

"Put them side by side and our Jesus is better than their Jesus."

          CBS Television CEO Leslie Moonves on the two mini-series about Jesus on NBC and CBS

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?   T. S. Eliot

Growth has become addictive. Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgments. Addicts of any kind are willing to pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions. They are blind to deeper frustrations because they are absorbed in playing for always mounting stakes. Products that are new and improved promise the concept of being 'better', but leave the concept of 'whether or not good' for the individual or society completely unaddressed. Often new and better products create more wants, dependency, and dissatisfaction for most, and constantly renovate poverty for the poor.          Ivan Illich

We Americans are an unprincipled nation, when you come down to it. Not that we're bad or anything. It's just that it's hard for us to pay attention to abstract matters when we have so many concrete matters -- cellular phones, ski boats, salad shooters, trail bikes, StairMasters, snow boards, pasta-making machines, four-door sport utility vehicles, palmcorders, rollerblade skates and CD players for our cars -- to occupy us. No wonder all the great intellectual concepts ... come from pastoral societies...   P.J. O'Rourke

Everything is so relativized. I think we've got ourselves into a terrible jam there, with all kinds of ideologies that have taught us not to be judgemental. Not being judgemental also, in a way, means not thinking.   Salman Rushdie, Mother Jones, July-August, 1999

Things are already going on in a very strict way. Wherever there is something, there is some rule or truth behind it that is always strictly controlling it, without any exceptions. We think we care for freedom, but the other side of freedom is strict rule. Within this strict rule there is complete freedom. Freedom and strict rule are not two separate things. Originally we are supported by strict rules of truth. That is the other side of absolute freedom.   Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, "Zen Talks on the Sandokai," University of California Press, 1999

Entertainment executives eagerly support "progressive" political causes, but are unwilling to even consider that they might be just as responsible for the Columbine slaughter as Smith and Wesson and the NRA.   Terry Teachout

Governments mostly don't do much. And you've also got to understand the level of incompetence out there. Nobody knows what they're doing. They just pose and act as if they know and walk through life and get away with it. And so, attack government. Get at them and you find they know nothing Most politicians are half people. Talk to them. They don't have anything on their minds but themselves. They don't have any real knowledge of anything. They're untrustworthy and they see everything as what they could do for themselves.   Jimmy Breslin

We have a culture of a ratcheted-up bombardment of everyone, a great wash of talk, blather, chatter. And it's all sending the same message: 'You have to pay attention to this right now. The zeitgeist is changing from what it was two minutes ago, and you don't want to miss it.' (The Atlantic should be an) antidote to the absurd topicality of everything   Michael Kelly, editor of The Atlantic (co-founded by poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, 142 years ago.)

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves. G. K. Chesterton, Toronto, 1930  www.chesterton.org

"Data Smog" --- book by David Shenk, 1997

'You are not responsible' sang the sirens of Liberation. 'Whatever you do that does not bring you joy --- from living in the suburbs and having babies to hanging out in bars and being promiscuous to spending your days in a job that bores you --- is not your fault. They -- men, society, your mothers, your fathers --  made you do it.' What can be more tempting than the notion that no decision taken in your life for which you may harbor some regret was a decision actually taken by you for yourself? And thus the whining began, cast, to be sure, in the language of social justice, and revolutionary determination, but whining all the same. So it went  -- and went with flying success -- in those early years. Now it's three decades later. Young women are being as mercilessly exploited as young men in the white-shoe law firms, girl marines slog through the mud at Parris Island, and females train for the attempt to land airplanes on aircraft carriers.... Successful careers turn out to be a source not of liberation but of unending worry and demand.

   From "Liberating Germaine Greer," a review by Midge Decter "First Things," #96, October, 1999

Modern culture discourages meaningful work. Even occupations that appear meaningful are infected with fear, compulsiveness and wasteful haste. This Dark Trinity conspires to pre-empt peace, both personal and corporate. We have deified "The Good Job," and are too busy cultivating career to ponder the detrimental context in which we work. There is never time nor energy to mount meaningful resistance. We have become willing agents of organizations animated by invidious obsession with mere survival. Once survival is insured, these same organizations strategize metastatic expansion. Occasionally, "modern work" supplies a sense of real accomplishment. However, the "driven" nature of modern accomplishment creates a neo-caste culture comprised of "the overworked" and "the under-employed." Our lives are intrinsically out of balance and we are determined to exacerbate the disharmony. We have sanctified market forces that define money and material standard-of-living as meaningful measures of human value. Property is more highly prized than human life. It is our common lot to serve an essentially heartless System, collaborating in progressive dehumanization, accelerated resource consumption and ominous erosion of biospheric integrity. We are all clients in the brothel of modernity. Denial of collusion is widespread, especially among university-trained professionals who benefit most from the rising valuation of intellectual skills at the expense of The Sacred Heart. Inability to perceive the meretriciousness of our alliances is a measure of The Machine's dominance. Alan Archibald

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.  John Taylor Gatto

Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled  "Secrets of Success."  He replied:  "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.  If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this:  Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."

There is a pervasive form of contempory violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.  Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander," 1964

Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of the ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet.  Sogyal Rinpoche

The grudge against God is the keystone to all one's unhappiness.  Follow all your petty, middling, and major grudges back to this keystone grudge, and then ask yourself the question, "Is it more likely that God was wrong to make the world this way, or that I am somehow wrong in the way I'm looking at it?"  If you decide that God is wrong --- or that there is no God, just a faceless, mechanical universe that cares nothing about the human drama --- then there isn't much you can do.  But if you realize that you can always adjust your perceptions of the world, you can start learning and contributing again.  This seems to be the way to both humility and power.     

D. Patrick Miller, A Primer on Forgiveness, "The Sun", 9/94

To shine truly, learn to dull your brilliance.   Lao Tzu

The profoundest truths are paradoxical.   Lao Tzu

The social and psychological destruction inherent in obligatory schooling is merely an illustration of the destruction implicit in all international institutions which now dictate the kinds of goods, services, and welfare available to satisfy basic human needs. Only a cultural and institutional revolution which reestablishes man's control over his environment can arrest the violence by which development of institutions is now imposed by a few for their own interest. Maybe Marx has said it better, criticizing Ricardo and his school:  "They want production to be limited to 'useful things,' but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.''   Ivan Illich: Celebration of Awareness, 1971

You are fed up with words and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes.  I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes.  This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean.  It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it.  And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make meaning be there again by magic...  Thomas Merton

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.   Kurt Vonnegut

We are not debating the right issues.   Jeremy Rifkin 

I'm impressed with the reluctance of society to confront certain issues, and the ingenuity people show in developing a rhetorical defense against certain controversial concerns. Garrett Hardin

The formulation of the problem is more important than the solution.  Einstein

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.   Louis Brandeis

Scrooge trembled... "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge. "Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business."  

                                                                                                                                  Charles Dickens

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 not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children.  Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

We have encouraged our best thinkers to concentrate their talents not on understanding the whole but on analyzing smaller and smaller parts... Means become ends. Tactics prevail over principles.  Al Gore, "Earth in the Balance"

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

                                                                                                    General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

It is time we steered by the stars, not by the light of each passing ship.  General Omar Bradley

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.   Thomas Jefferson

We must be the change that we wish to see in the world.   Mahatma Gandhi

Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its life-style.  Pope John Paul II

We have met the enemy and he is us.  Pogo 

It is impossible to give the whole planet the kind of life-style you have here, that the Germans have, that the Dutch have ... and we must face this reality. 

                                                            Jose Lutzenberger, Brazil's Secretary of State for Environment

To believe that exponential growth may last eternally in a limited world, you must be crazy, or, an economist. Kenneth Boulding

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. Winston Churchill

Sometimes I suspect that we are already on this 'other side of the looking glass,'  where the images are inverted and the faster we run the 'behinder' we get.  Herman Daly

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.   Tolkien

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversation these days.  One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.  Leonard Cohen

The fact that we are totally unable to imagine a form of existence without space and time by no means proves that such an existence is itself impossible.   Carl Jung

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.  Tom Stoppard

We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel:  we cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions.  We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.  William Irwin Thompson

The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.  Simone Weil

Aymara Indian women from Peruvian highland villages near Juli gather once a week to talk and work.  They have formed an artisans' association that enables them to increase their earnings by directly marketing their own products.  Two women sit side by side embroidiering a large wall hanging.  Others spin thread and work on smaller projects.  The same cooperative spirit that fills the air as they work prevails at lunch.  Each woman taks out a cloth filled with somehting she brought for the noon meal and places her contributrion on a lartge colorful cloth known as an aguayo.  Then the women seat themselves on the ground in a circle around the cloth and share the food: chunno (freeze dried potatoes), puffed corn, and patties made from quinua, a high-protein grain.  Thew women discuss events in their villages as they eat.  Not long ago a food aid program offering milk powder, flowur, and iol began in their region.  Some women have stopped coming to the cooperative gatherings so they can atteedn the day-long meetings that are required to receive the food aid.  The women gathered around the aguayo spread with traditional foods lament the absence of these weomen and quickly agree they do not want these new foods.  "We're happy with the food we and our ancestors have always eaten," comments one.  "We do not want aid," concludes another.  "All we want are markets in which to sell our embroidery so we can keep growing our own food."

Linda Shelly, La Esperanze, Honduras - "Extending the Table... A World Community Cookbook" by Joetta Handrich Schlabach

Pascal was right in noting that 'humans sink lower than beasts when we aspire to become like angels.' It is also true, however, that humankind must aspire to some spiritual destiny if it is to avoid zoological calamity. The notion that humans are children of God - whether or not God exists - is a mantle that wears well, and which, at minimum, offers more protection to humankind as members of the animal kingdom than turning clever humans loose as mere animals.  Alan Archibald

There are people for whom killing a whale is not very different from killing a human being. In fact, for some people killing a whale is worse than killing a human.

          Animal rights spokesperson quoted in an NPR documentary reviewing a recently approved Native American whale hunt. 6/1999

To recognize conflicting parties, we must have the ability to understand the suffering of both sides. If we take sides, it is impossible to do the work of reconciliation. And humans want to take sides. That is why the situation gets worse and worse. Are there people who are still available to both sides? They need not do much. They need do only one thing: Go to one side and tell all about the suffering endured by the other side, and go to the other side and tell all about the suffering endured by this side. That is our chance for peace. That can change the situation, but how many of us are able to do that?  Thich Nhat Hanh

What we see in the Heaven's Gate tragedy is a movement as old as the first-century Gnostics, who mixed pseudo-Christianity with a hatred of the body, urging their followers to focus only on their spiritual selves. As millennialists come creeping out of the woodwork during the next few years, we will discover anew the truth of G. K. Chesterton's admonition that when a man stops believing in God, he will not believe in nothing: he will believe in anything. T. J. Howard                                        

(The) final Victory of Capitalism has rendered obsolete most of the questions of justice --- indeed, all the moral questions.  Susan Sontag, New York Times, 1999

          One day in 1892, a teenage American girl sat down with her diary and made a list of her latest plans for self-improvement. "Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings," she wrote. "To work seriously. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others." Nearly a century later another girl sat down with her diary and resolved to better herself, but she took a rather different view of the enterprise. "I will lose weight," she wrote. "Get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories."

          What transpired in American history and culture to turn the first girl into the second is the subject of Joan Jacobs Brumberg's  fascinating and important new book, "The Body Project" (Random House, $25.00), which tracks girls and their bodies from the era of repression to the culture of obsession. "Before the twentieth century, girls simply did not organize their thinking about themselves around their bodies," she writes. "Today... they believe that the body is the ultimate expression of the self."

          Brumberg, a Cornell professor of history and women's studies, draws on 150 years of girls' diaries as she traces the rise of Clearasil, training bras and junior-high sex. Many of these changes came about because girls have been reaching puberty  at ever younger ages - just over 12 today, compared with 15 or 16 two centuries ago. But a major spur was commerce. Until the 1950s, for instance girls simply waited to wear a bra until their breasts grew big enough to fit the adult sizes. But new synthetic, stretchable fabrics, developed during the war, needed a civilian market. Hence the era of what department stores called "junior figure control." Magazines like Seventeen advertised "Bobbie" bras and girdles, which came in sizes small enough to fit the skinniest preteen, and home-ec teaches showed their classes such films as "Figure Forum," supplied by the Warner Brassiere Co.

          Perfect breasts, flawless skin, gleaming hair, slim legs - one after another these fetishes accumulated until, as Brumberg writes, the chief mantra for American girlhood was "I hate my body." Even her students, whom Brumberg describes as very savvy about the way they're targeted by commercial and pop culture, admit to living with a nonstop voice-over criticizing what they eat and how they look. Pathological insecurity has become a feminine reflex.  

                                                                                Laura Shapiro, "Ideas," Newsweek, Sept. 22, 1999

Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.    Mother Teresa

There is nothing so powerful in the whole world as feeling that one is not liked.   

                                                                                                              Sei Shonagon 966 B.C.- 1013 B.C.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.

                                                                                                                                  Vincent van Gogh

Over increasingly large areas.... the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.... No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. R. Carson

Nature is not human-hearted.   Lao Tzu

The wealthy make of poverty a vice.   Plato

The man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.    Thoreau

Tell the truth but tell it slant -

The truth must dazzle gradually -

Or every man be blind.                                         Emily Dickinson

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. Paulo Freire

Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is cheap moral swagger. In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone... it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument.  Rebecca West          

Not to dream boldly may turn out to be simply irreponsible.  John Leonard

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.  Thomas Jefferson

If God doesn't strike down this generation's Sodom and Gomorah, he owes the first ones an apology.        

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasioin of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.   Louis Brandeis

Authority has simply been abused too long in the Catholic church, and for many people it just becomes utterly stupid and intolerable to have to put up with the kind of jackassing around that is imposed in God's name. It is an insult to God himself and in the end it can only discredit all idea of authority and obedience. There comes a point where they simply forfeit the right to be listened to.

          Thomas Merton in a letter to W. H. Ferry, dated January 19, 1967, 23 months before Merton's death.

I could talk until about the cows come home about the minority status of Catholics in the North of Ireland. But that ground has been gone over a lot. I would say that the more important Catholic thing is the actual sense of eternal values and infamous vices which our education or formation gives us. There's a sense of profoundness, a sense that the universe can be ashimmer with something , and Catholicism - even if I don't like sentimentalizing it - was the backdrop to that whole thig. The world I grew up in offered me a sense that I was a citizen of the empyrean - the crystalline elsewhere of the world.    Seamus Heaney

A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.  Martin Heiddeger

We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human.  Jacquelyn Small

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.  Erich Fromm

People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.   Emerson

Our irrational contemporary Western impatience and our blind adulation of speed for speed's sake are wreaking havoc on the education of our children. We force them as if they were chicks in a pullet factory. We drive them into premature awareness of sex even before physical puberty has overtaken them. In fact we deprive our children of the human right of having a childhood.  Arnold Toynbee

In this modern world we are confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideas because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of.   G. K. Chesterton

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. Chesterton, 1910

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.           Charles Kuralt

"Despite Federal aid expenditures on Puerto Rico of approximately $9 billion per year (close to the total amount of United States aid to the rest of the world combined), 60 per cent of Puerto Ricans live below the poverty line..." From Thomas Caruthers review of "Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World" by Jose Trias Monge (Yale U. Press) in The New York Times Book Review, November 2, 1997

It should be pointed out that if we tried to build education on the single pattern of the scientific idea of man and carry it out accordingly, we could only do so by distorting or warping this idea: for we should have to ask what is the nature and destiny of man, and we should be pressing the only idea at our disposal, that is the scientific one, for an answer to our question. Then we would try, contrary to its type, to draw from it a kind of metaphysics. From the logical point of view, we would have a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight; and from the practical point of view, we would have a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state.   Jacques Maritain

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.  Gandhi

Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.           Jerry Garcia

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

Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.   John  Adams

Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and conniptions.  E. B. White

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.   Tennessee Williams

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.   John Mason Brown

The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote.... The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only minority of the voter votes.  Chesterton

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.  Mort Sahl

Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.   Lewis Mumford

In this country we encourage "creativity" among the medicore, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow "too much."   Pauline Kael

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.   Antonin Artaud

The question becomes: what is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What is the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?   Leonard Cohen

There is a marvelous story of a man who once stood before God, his heart breaking form the pain and injustice in the world. "Dear God," he cried out, "look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in the world. Why don't you send help?" God responded, "I did send help. I sent you." David J. Wolpe

"Realistic" people who pursue "practical" aims are rarely as realistic or practical in the long run of life as the dreamers who pursue their dreams.  Hans Selye

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.  Frank Zappa

When I was 19, I went to live in Tanzania because it was a socialist country, and I wanted to see socialism. It was the closest thing to African socialism, called ujamaa. It means unity in Swahili. I lived in an ujamaa village, and it was boring to me.

                                                                                          Henry Louis Gates, The Progressive 1/98

"For white people there are only two types of Indians. Drunken bums and noble Indians. In the old days, we used to be savages, but that's gone. Now it's drunks and noble Indians. I like the white men better who think we're all drunks. At least they're looking at us as people. They're saying what they see. Then when they meet one of us who's not drunk, they have to deal with us.... The ones who see us all as wisse men don't care about the Indians at all. They just care about the idea of Indian. It's just another way of stunting our humanity and making us into a fantasy that fits the needs of white people."

          Neither Wolf nor Dog (On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder --- Tape transcriptions) by Kent Nerburn

"An awkward term at best, "presentism" nevertheless names a malaise that plagues American discussions of anything and everything concerning the past: the widespread inability to make appropriate allowances for prevailing historical conditions.   Douglas L. Wilson

          In the sixties, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia, I lived in a so-called third-world country. In those years and since, I have traveled in Asia and Africa through much of the so-called under-developled world. In the sixties and seventies I worked as a legal services lawyer on Chicago's West Side, representing primarily poor people in criminal and civil actions. Nothing I saw as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa or as a traveler in Africa and Asia comes close to matching the despair and misery that today strangles the American underclass. What was beginning to happen in the inner city in the sixties and early seventies was mild compared to what occurs now

          I consider myself a liberal. And I'm proud to be a liberal, though I dread the direction in which many so-called liberals have gone. Actually I view the liberal left as reactionary -- conservative -- because they refuse to question any of their cherished opinions or even consider countervailing evidence....

          ... By criticizing liberals I do not inferentially suggest that the right holds the answer. If the left is ideologically bankrupt, the right is intellectually dead."

          "Wasted: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children" (1997) by Patrick T. Murphy, Public Guardian of Cook County, Illinois

(In 1855) la Ley Lerdo obliged the Church to sell its lands with sales tax going to the state. Speculators snapped up lands. The educational and charitable functions which the Church carried on among Indios ceased. For all its encouragement of superstition and reverence for the existing order, the religious corporations never, as the liberals came to admit, matched the rapacity and cruelty of the new private owners. The Ley Lerdo, in the name of progress, caused a further barbarization of the countryside. from "Fire and Blood" by T.R. Fehrenbach

"I have prayed to the Lord every day. It's just so sad that someone could take such beautiful children. I have put all my trust and faith in the Lord that he will bring them home to us."

          Susan Smith, after accusing a black man of kidnapping her children and before it was discovered she had rolled the car containing them into a lake where they drowned.

I just wish they'd give me one speck of proof that this world of theirs couldn't have been set up and handled better by a half dozen idiots bound hand and foot at the bottom of a ten mile well.  Kenneth Patchen

It is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.  Cherríe Moraga

Life is that which --- pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially --- interrupts.  Cynthia Ozick

Whenever an interruption occurred, St. Frances de Sales immediately set aside what he was doing. Then, he greeted his interruptor with good humor and a deep sense of gratitude.

Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.   John Lennon

St. John of the Cross, alone in his room in profound prayer, experienced a rapturous vision of Mary. At the same moment, he heard a beggar rattling at his door for alms. He wrenched himself away and saw to the beggar's needs. When he returned, the vision returned again, saying that at the very moment he had heard the door rattle on its hinges, his soul had hung in perilous balance. Had he not gone to the beggar's aid, she could never have appeared to him again.   David Whyte

Dante says that the journey begins right here. In the middle of the road. Right beneath your feet. This is the place. There is no other place and no other time. Even if you are successful and follow the road you have set yourself, you can never leave here. Despite everything you have achieved, life refuses to grant you immunity from its difficulties. Becoming aware of this after a lifetime of accepting success as the ultimate healing balm is, declares Dante, like waking up in a dark wood.   David Whyte

If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. I this good news?   Robert Anthony

Wishing to be known only for what one really is, is like putting on an old, easy, comfortable garment. You are no longer afraid of anybody or anything. You say to yourself, "Here I am --- just so ugly, dull, poor, beautiful, rich, interesting, amusing, ridiculous. Take me or leave me...." It is like a great burden rolled off a man's back when he comes to want to appear nothing that he is not, to take out of life only what is truly his own, and to wait for something strong and deep within him or behind him to work through him.   David Grayson

Did you ever see little dogs caressing and playing with one another? So that you might say there is nothing more friendly? But, that you may know what friendship is, throw a bit of flesh among them, and you will learn.   Epictetus

The world is divided into people who thing they are right.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey.                                        Marcel Proust

I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickkness is a place, more instructive than a long rtrip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.   Flannery O'Connor

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the causes of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs; we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.  P.J. O'Rourke

Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind.           

Frances FitzGerald

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them.  Anatole France

It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.  Felix Okoye

At the structural level, most authentic work is not so much "doing," but "undoing."

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

   Jay Gould, Railroad Owner, before 1886 strike on his Southwestern system

Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.  An English journalist observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. (Quoted by Annie Dillard)

"The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of," Mao told Nehru. "China has many people..... The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of." A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China's population.

          Does Mao's reckoning shock me really? If sanctioning the death of strangers could save my daughter's life, would I do it? Probably. How many others' lives would I be willing to sacrifice? Three? Three hundred million?"   Annie Dillard

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell. Walter Bagehot

A full belly does not believe in hunger.   Italian proverb

Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history of civilization. Who cares whether Caesar stole or Caesare Borgia cheated?.... The real evil that follows a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it generates. John J. Chapman

Don't confuse having a career with having a life. They are not the same. First Lady Hillary Clinton, delivering Howard University's commencement speech

Did you ever notice that when the other driver is going slower than you are he's a moron, and when he's going faster he's a maniac?  George Carlin

Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.  Terry Tempest Williams

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.  Clarence Darrow

Every adult, no matter how unfortunate a childhood he had or how habit-ridden he may be, is free to make choices about his life. To say of Hitler, to say of the criminal, that he did not choose to be bad but was a victim of his upbringing is to make all morality, all discussion of right and wrong, impossible. It leaves unanswered the question of why people in similar circumstances did not all become Hitlers. But worse, to say "It is not his fault; he was not free to choose" is to rob a person of his humanity, and reduce him to the level of an animal who is bound by instinct.   Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.   Barbara Johnson

It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love. Thomas Sowell

For an anthropologist, the widespread failure to marry is a sign of impending disaster In Africa there is a saying: "They are our enemies, and so we marry them." Marriage helps families multiply their economic capital --- and, perhaps even more important, their social capital. You and your wife's uncle may not like each other, but marriage imposes a set of reciprocal obligations; you are at least partly responsible for each other's well-being.  David Murray

The fundamental task of education in a democracy is what Tocqueville once called the apprenticeship of liberty: learning to be free. I wonder whether Americans still believe liberty has to be learned and that its skills are worth learning. Or have they been deluded by two centuries of rhetoric into thinking that freedom is "natural" and can be taken for granted?

          The claim that men are born free, upon which America was founded, is at best a promising fiction. In real life, as every parent knows, children are born fragile, born needy, born ignorant, born unformed, born weak, born foolish, born dependent --- born in chains. We acquire our freedom over time, if at all Liberal-arts education actually means education in the arts of liberty; the "servile arts" were the trades learned by unfree men in the Middle Ages, the vocational education of their day...

          Jefferson and Adams both understood that the Bill of Rights offered little protection in a nation without informed citizens. However, once educated (and not merely instructed in the performance of a trade) a people was safe from even the subtlest tyrannies. Jefferson's democratic proclivities rested on his conviction that education could turn a people into a safe refuge -- indeed "the only safe depository" for the ultimate powers of society. "Cherish therefore the spirit of our people," he wrote to Edward Carrington in 1787, "and keep alive their attention. Do not be severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves."

We have been nominally democratic for so long that we presume it is our natural condition rather than the product of persistent effort and tenacious responsibility. We have de-coupled rights from civic responsibilities and severed citizenship from education on the false assumption that citizens just happen. We have forgotten that the "public" in public schools means not just paid for by the public but procreative of the very idea of a public....          Benjamin Barber

.... in a world where doing nothing has such dire consequences, complacency has become a greater sin than malevolence... Benjamin Barber

"I'd be happy to give him (oral sex) just to thank him for keeping abortion legal." Former Time magazine White House correspondent Nina Burleigh, discussing an article in Mirabella magazine in which she recalled a willingness to be "ravished by the President" after playing hearts with him on Air Force One. Newsweek, July 20, 1998

I had only one stock and I figured out that if the stock hit a certain point, I was going to be a billionaire. I was still in the tiny office where I was when I was worth a few million. I couldn't tell anyone at the office. All of my friends were working at the company --- the highest-paid person made about $100,000.00 -- and I was so much richer than my other friends in Atlanta that I couldn't tell them, because they'd think I was bragging. So I went home and told my wife, and she said, "I don't care, I've got to help the kids with their homework." No one even cared. I thought bells and whistles would go off. Nothing happened at all. Having great wealth is one of the most disappointing things. It's overrated, I can tell you that. It's not as good as average sex. Average sex is better than being a billionaire.

                                                                                Ted Turner

          According to Chesterton, tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything. Chesterton meant that as a critique of tolerance. But it captures nicely the upside of unbelief: where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution. When it is believed that on your religion hangs the fate of your immortal soul, the Inquisition follows easily; when it is believed

that religion is a breezy consumer preference, religious tolerance flourishes easily. After all, we don't persecute people for their taste in cars. Why for their taste in gods?

          Oddly, though, in our thoroughly secularized culture, there is one form of religious intolerance that does survive. And that is the disdain bordering on contempt of the culture makers for the deeply religious, i.e., those for whom religion is not a preference but a conviction.

  A letter fragment from Erik Schultes' friends who are homesteading in Norway

Charity is no substitute for justice witheld. Augustine of Hippo

Modern "productive" institutions at the same time foster and mask invidious individualism, something the subsistence-oriented institutions of all past ages were designed to reduce and to expose... The history of economic individualism coincides with the modernization of envy. In this essay, I discuss the appearance of a new kind of envy, characteristic of  the relations between the sexes, one that arises only as gender fades from a society... Malevolent disparagement between men and women is not a new social phenomenon; the institutionalization of lifelong invidious comparison between genderless individuals is historically unprecedented.   Ivan Illich, "Gender"

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.    John Steinbeck

Poverty is not the problem. Wealth is the problem. Poverty is the solution. 

                                                                       Satish Kumar, Editor, "Resurgence," September-October, 1999 www.resurgence.org

The wealthy make of poverty a vice.  Plato

   The corporatization of the world is how we both manifest and cover our collective compromises: It's nobody's fault, nobody's responsibility, we must do business in this new bland, soulless way because of corporatization - the market - while we refuse to acknowledge that a corporate vision is merely one individual compromise after another in which everything is judged by its value in money.

   And all the while we writhe in the throes of a massive contradiction: We want the depths and consequent rigors of self-knowledge, while also expecting, as our due, the previously unheard-of luxuries that the corporatized Western world now confers... To live in a state of technological luxury you must accede, in a thousand ways, to the conditions and demands that create your affluence. How much of your self can you express without endangering your affluence? This is an essential question now in all spheres of life --- business, psychology, education, art, religion, science. The fact that this question is rarely asked --- or is asked with so many qualifications as to make the question meaningless --- is symptomatic not only of ambivalence but of cowardice. The more you try to fit in, the less you own yourself... and if you can't find a way to fit in, you face ruin...   Michael Ventura

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious... you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels... to indicate to the people who run it,... that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.  Thoreau

I've taught public school for 26 years but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know.  John Gatto

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.  John Taylor Gatto

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. . . . 1. Confusion.

2. Class Position. 3. Indifference. 4. Emotional Dependency. 5. Intellectual Dependency. 6. Provisional Self-Esteem. 7. One Can't Hide. from John Taylor Gatto's speech upon accepting the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year Award. The entire text is found in Gatto's "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992)

Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.  John Gatto

This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle that the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.  Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," 1879

In large part, American politics is a fiefdom of the wealthy because "government franchise schools" mold the nation's intellect, character and behavior. It is baffling that the left -- especially the radical left -- supposes that a nation which does everything wrong in health care, race relations, foreign policy, military spending, globalization, welfare, the prison system etc. will, mirabile dictu, do a splendid job of education our young if only we authorize more spending on compulsory government instruction. (It is an inconvenient fact that the Washington D.C. Public School District spends over $9000.00 per student per year.) The belief that public schools undergird democracy fails the straight face test. Public schools are an essential mechanism for perpetuating the dysfunction that characterizes society at large. Giving the government a monopoly on education is like putting the Pope in charge of Planned Parenthood. How did so many people

- from across the political spectrum - come to assume that public schools are the sine qua non of educational virtue? Perhaps group delusion is so total on this issue that to think otherwise rattles the underpinnings of individual identity, threatening uncontrollable psychological upheaval: "If I was so wrong - for so long - on such a fundamental issue as public schooling, who knows what else I may have mistaken?" I'm reminded that the Buddha, when asked about the nature of his "realization," simply said "I am awake." The word "Budda" - from the Sanskrit "bodhi" - means "awake." While one might argue what "awake" meant for Buddha, it clearly suggests that the rest of us have been lulled into deep sleep. Before we stir, who knows what dreams may come?  Alan Archibald

The children who know how to think for themselves, spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone (would be) interdependent... Independent self-reliant people (would be) a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future... (where) people will be defined by their associations.  John Dewey, proponent of modern public schools. 1896

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening... Average Americans (will be) content with their humble role in life because they're not tempted to think about any other role.  William T. Harris, U.S. Comissioner of Education, 1889

Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity.  It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.   Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, speaking as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar

Damn, we know that it's the schools and our parents that are crazy, not us.   New York High School Free Press

Schools do not give a damn what students think.  John Holt

We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. Hey teacher, leave the kids alone.   Pink Floyd

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school.  Woody Allen

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so kept me out of school.  Margaret Mead

Adults are obsolete children.  Dr. Seuss

Unless you become like little children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.  Jesus of Nazareth

Neil Postman's book is about the problem of education not being so much "how" we teach or "what" we teach, but that we lack a substantial goal. We lack a metaphysic. If you do not understand what it means to lack a metaphysic, then this book is for you. It is one thing to lose something and know that we have lost it (a wallet, for example), but if we lose something (such as a sense for what a metaphysic is) and we don't even know it is lost, we will not even know enough to look for it. If we have lost the sense of our lives being ordered toward some end, then indeed we are permanently lost. And we are just teaching randomly and learning randomly, as we try to become better producers and better consumers. Is that what we are? Neil Postman says no. We are much more. I encourage every teacher who cares about teaching to read this book. I encourage every student who has wondered why we have to study so many unnecessary things, to read this book. It will help the teacher reorient his or her teaching and it will help the student articulate the pain and fear he or she feels upon entering a classroom, and the reasons for his or her boredom in the face of what ought to be adventurous learning about the world and about himself or herself. It will give the student words so he or she can stand up in class and demand something better. Peter Gilboy's review of "The End of Education, Redefining the Value of School" by Neil Postman. Postman begins by describing how schools early in the century sought to forge a coherent and unified culture from the diverse traditions, languages, and religions in the US. He then contrasts today's goals of economic utility, consumership, mechanical solutions, and separatist multiculturalism.   www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~drc/critical_tools/e306_fall_1999/addlink/postman

Yet for all their wild profusion... the essential promise at the heart of the world's wisdom traditions is often moribund today in a way that it never was before. Real wisdom - the kind that once held individuals together and told them who they were and what they might become - seems to be retreating from us at precisely the speed that so many people suggest it is approaching... Wisdom... It is we who must commit ourselves to it and not the other way around. It is that call to unqualified investment -- commitment to the full course of the wisdom-getting project -- that has been lost in the modern wisdom smorgasbord.  "Wisdom for Dummies," Ptolemy Tompkin, Utne Reader, January - February, 2000

Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.

Martin Luther King Jr. told us we must take the pain of moral progress upon ourselves, rather than inflict it upon others--what an amazing and ethical concept! And more amazing still, is the fact that it works better than any other method of social change (Our representatives) are all running on high-speed treadmills of fund-raising that give them time to listen only to big money lobbyists, and latitude to do only their bidding or do them no harm.  Granny D. Haddock, a 90 year old woman who walked 3000 miles across the United States to address Congress on the evils of "big money."

We must be the change we want to see in the world.  Gandhi

Baudrillard may have had a point in claiming "we live in a universe where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning."

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . . and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2000, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great, (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "AMERICA" in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee. (By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.)

In any society where the State is the sole employer, opposition means death by slow starvation. Who does not obey, shall not eat.  Leon Trotsky

Regarding the nationalization of industry or private property:  "Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper.  It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."  Adolf Hitler to Herman Rauschning, pre-WWII 

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.  Gerald R. Ford

"Freiheit stirbt in kleinen Teilen."  "Freedom dies in small pieces."

Before, we had 'crimes' that oppressed us. Now, we have 'laws' that oppress us.  Roman Historian Tacitus, in 56 B.C.

Whatever you may say something is, it is not ! ... the map is not the territory ... the word is not the thing.   Alfred Korzybski

There are others whose state of mind is still more extraordinary. They not only do not need the landscape to corroborate their history, but they do not care if the landscape contradicts their history... If the map marks the place as a waterless desert, they will declare it as dry as a bone, though the whole valley resound with the rushing river. A whole huge rock will be invisible if a little book on geology says it is impossible. This is at the opposite extreme to the irrational credultiy of the rustic, but it is infinitely more irrational... This great delusion of the prior claim of printed matter, as something anterior to experience and capable of contradicitng it, is the main weakness of modern urban society. The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one, anything that he could not find in the other. One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself; he was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed too hasty a disposition to tear the book up or toss the book away. But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of faith. He could believe his eyes. G.K. Chesterton, "William Cobbett"

The whole is more than the sum of its parts"  Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory

During the decade now beginning, we must learn a new language, a language that speaks not of development and underdevelopment but of true and false ideas about man, and his needs and his potential.  Ivan Illich

'In 1926, the American novelist James Branch Cabell wrote, "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." The evidence of this century gives some support for the latter view.'  Lester B. Pearson

'In his farewell address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1971, the retiring Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, Mr. Paul Hoffman, summed up the situation thus:  "Far too much of our technological wizardry has been needlessly employed for exploiting the earth's resources, rather than for rationally using and continually replenishing them. And far too much of our technology has been applied without due consideration for its impact on the human spirit, on our cultures and on our ways of life. As a result, while technology has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to improve their material conditions, our planet is in many ways becoming a more dangerous and less humanly satisfying home-site for the entire race of man." There is not enough evidence to prove that Mr. Hoffman is too pessimistic.'  Lester Pearson

Definition of a lecture: a means of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either. Graffiti at Warwick University

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep. Albert Camus

Hobbes, Kant, Locke and Mill believed "virtues are necessary to the origin of liberalism. Liberalism lives off the inheritance of pre-modern virtue without having the resources to replenish it.  "Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism" by Peter Berkowitz, Princeton U. Press

Sex without religion is like an egg without salt.  Luis Buñuel

What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.  Erasmus

'Perhaps the most important question I could ask my Christian friends who mistrust the Harry Potter books is this: is your concern about the portrayal of this imaginary magical technology matched by a concern for the effects of the technology in our world that displaced magic. The technocrats of this world hold in their hands power infinitely greater than those of Alban Dumbledown and Voldemort: how worried are we about them and their influence over our children? Not worried enough I would say. As Ellul (a French historian and critic of technology) suggests, the task for us is in "the measuring of technique by other criteria than those of technique itself," which measuring he also calls "the search for justice before God." Joan Rawling's books are more helpful than most in  prompting such measurement. They are also  and let's not forget the importance of this point  a great deal of fun.'  From "Harry Potter's Magic" by Alan Jacobs, "First Things," 1/2000

Humor seems to be the way we get to learn to live with our own brains. Eric Idle

"It's your life. Why should other people decide how you live?" Air Force advertisement

    This morning, I was unexpectedly reminded that the Spanish word "apuro" means both "hurry" and "trouble."

    Haste makes waste.

    Time is money.

    "A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of

nothing." Oscar Wilde

Even idleness is eager now. George Eliot

At the beginning of the road they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said  GOD EXISTS. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The lives of our ancestors, when we look back to them, appear to have been infinitely less troubled and momentous than our own - it is rather as if fate had designed us for the denouement of the drama in which we are acting." Andre Breton

The supremacy of the law of self-interest is the conclusion of Herbert Spencer's materialistic philosophy; and of the wretched pessimism of Hartmann and Schopenhauer. It is the principle upon which Cain slew his brother. It was the seductive whisper of the serpent in Eve's ear. It is the principle upon which crime is committed. It is the principle upon which the capitalist acts who treats labor as no more than a commodity subject to the lowest market rate and the law of supply and demand. It is the principle upon which railroads are bonded and bankrupted for private ends. It is the law by which money (is loaned to farmers at) usurious and impoverishing rate of interest It is the principle upon which a Chicago financier proceeds, with no more moral justification than the highwayman's robbery of an express train, to "corner" the pork market, and thus force from the mouths of toiling families a million and a half of dollars into his private treasury - a deed for which the giving of some thousands to found city missions and orphans' homes will be no atonement in the reckoning of the God who judges the world in righteousness and not by the ethics of the stock exchange. The law of self-interest is the eternal falsehood which mothers all social and private woes; for sin is pure individualism - the assertion of self against God and humanity. George D. Herron, "The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth," 22 September 1890 Occasion: An address delivered before the Minnesota Congregational Club, at its annual meeting held in Plymouth Church, Minneapolis, September 22, 1890

Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Anatole France

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.  G. K. Chesterton

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining

I believe in love even when I am alone

I believe in God even when He is silent.   

(Written on a basement wall where a Jewish refugee had been hiding from agents of the Holocaust.)

It doesn't take money or power to be kind to a stranger, stand by a loved one, or fight injustice. ... We are free, each and every one of us, to determine our own history. To take responsibility for our life and the well-being of those around us.

-- Ron Jones, a Palo Alto high school gym teacher who accidentally started a fascist movement when trying to teach his students about the dangers of fascism.

Through and through the world is infected with quantity. To talk sense, is to talk in quantities. Albert North Whitehead

Statistics are the domain of death. Hilaire Belloc

Referring to the recent controversy at the Brooklyn Museum, Anna Quindlen bemoans that feeling of "déjà vu all over again." But what strikes me as truly redundant is the conventionally liberal mantra she reiterates. True, this is a tempest in a teapot. Equally true, there are other issues (like the health and well-being of our children) that are more urgent. But what if the elephant dung were included in a portrait of gay men? Or perhaps on the photograph of a civil-rights march? In that case, we'd receive a lecture about hate crimes. But in the present situation, not only is elephant dung on a painting of the Virgin Mary called art; it's also deemed worthy of taxpayer money. Steve Ramsey, Lebanon, Indiana, Newsweek, 11/09/99

You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself. Galileo Gallilei

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all. Paul Simon

Men who have both made and given away millions testify that giving intelligently is much more difficult than making a fortune. We who are not rich may find that hard to believe, but we should be impressed by overwhelming agreement among those in a position to know.  Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly

Money... It's actually harder to give it away intelligently than it is to make it.  Ross Perot

The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.  Albert Einstein

Whether you believe you can or can't, you're right. Henry Ford.

In the movie "As Good as it Gets," a gushing secretary puts one hand on her head and another on her heart and asks Jack Nicholson, a wildly successful writer of romance novels: "How do you understand what goes on in here?" After a few facial contortions, Jack looks at the woman and says: "It's easy. I imagine a man, and then I take away reason and accountability."

Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither--these make the finest company in the world.  Logan Pearsall Smith

Without the inner beauty of a free and harmonious life, (fine food) and eau de cologne can become merely forms of barbarism. Without tolerance and broad spiritual understanding, hygiene will only make for clean animals, very clean and very healthy, but also very animal. External riches will merely smother us, if we do not cultivate inner riches. Miguel de Unamuno

The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.  Dorothy Day

Poverty is not the problem. Wealth is the problem. Poverty is the solution. Kumar Satish, Editor Resurgence Magazine www.resurgence.org

In Spain, erudition tends to mask the fetid sore of moral cowardice that has poisoned our collective soul. In many, it serves as a kind of opium to appease or extinguish longing and anguish; others use it to shirk the necessity of thinking for themselves, limiting themselves to expounding what other men have thought. They pick out a book here and there, extracting sentences and doctrines which they put together and stew, or they spend a year or two or twenty rummaging through files and stacks of papers in some archive or other so that they may announce this or that discovery. The object is to avoid looking into one's own heart and plumbing it, to avoid thinking and, even more, feeling. Unamuno

And he again rejoined: "I have no desire to find myself in the middle of the ocean, like a victim of a shipwreck, drowning and without a plank to cling to." I countered once again: "A plank? I myself am a plank. I don't need any other because the ocean you mention and in which I float is God. Man floats in God without needing any sort of plank... Have you so little confidence in God that though you are in Him, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), you still need a plant to hang on to? He will keep you afloat without any spar or plank." Unamuno

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.   Unamuno

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.  St. Theresa of Avila

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.  Gertrude Stein

I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions . . .  Kurt Vonnegut

People are as you see them on the streets. The other thing is a lie.  Albert Camus

The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good.

When I have something to say that is too difficult for adults, I write for children. They have not closed the shutters. They like it when you rock the boat.  Madeline L'Engle

Adults are obsolete children.  Dr. Seuss

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.  Helen Keller

There are two kinds of people in the world; those who say to God, 'Thy will be done', and those to whom God says, 'Go ahead, then, have it your way'.  C. S. Lewis

"Football combines the worst elements of America: mass violence punctuated by committee meetings."  Eisenhower

The tactic of nonviolence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption of the opponent, not his castigation, humiliation, and defeat. A pretended nonviolence that seeks to defeat and humiliate the adversary by spiritual instead of physical attack is little more than a confession of weakness.  Thomas Merton

We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity.  Thomas Merton

It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not "what he ought to be." If we do not first respect what he "is" we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.  Thomas Merton

A demonic existence is one which insistently diagnoses what it cannot cure, what it has no desire to cure, what it seeks to bring to full potency, in order that it may cause the death of its victim.  Thomas Merton

I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. Anne Frank

It's just so uninteresting to live without love. Life has not risk. Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event. Toni Morrison

There are no emergencies.  Toni Morrison

There seems no plan because it's all plan. There seems no center because it's all center.  C. S. Lewis

The more you complain the longer God lets you live.

You will not die until you embody the vices of those you disdain.

You are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.   Bulgarian proverb

A full belly does not believe in hunger.  Italian proverb

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.  Jonathan Swift

All music jars when the soul's out of tune.  Miguel de Cervantes

The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.  Father Robert F. Capon

          "....Walter Lippman - the American journalist and commentator - once noted the special importance of propaganda in a situation in which the national narrative is relentlessly at odds with the facts. What he called 'manufacture of consent' becomes terribly important in this situation. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in 'Manufacturing Consent' (1988) - the title echoing Lippman - offer a systematic analysis of the propaganda system in the United States. They outline rather starkly how bias is created and maintained by the media:

          'Institutional critiques such as we present in this book are commonly dismissed by establishment commentators as 'conspiracy theories,' but this is an evasion. We do not use any kind of 'conspiracy' hypothesis to explain mass media performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a 'free market' analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces. Most biased choices in the media arise from the pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.'

          To be sure, within the system there will always be disagreements. One gets used to seeing dignified men in suits (and a few women) sitting around a table before TV cameras to discuss which of several options might be chosen to promote a certain end. But do they ever challenge real premises? Or even note them? Does the language of debate move outside the most prescribed and narrow circles? When, for instance, the subject of a debate is terrorism, what would happen if one debater simply assumed that the United States, in its activities - past and present - in Central America or the Middle East, might be guilty of state terrorism? The case can be made; indeed, it is often made in marginal journals and books, but how often is it argued in the mass, or mainstream, media?

          ...For the most part, the people who are chosen to conduct public discourse are carefully self-selected; they know what - in a free market society - will upset a sponsor. They realize that certain kinds of arguments will not even be heard by the audience, which has been subtly educated to screen out certain kinds of analysis. Cultural power devolves on those, it seems, who are willing and able to reinforce the assumptions already shared by those in power. These men and women are intellectuals, of course; they are people trained in discourse of a particular kind, and many of them are experts in some field, such as economics or sociology or international politics. But we cannot safely look in their direction for a discourse that is free of cant, that is fully imagined, and where the grain of a unique voice is heard. Here is where the artist - the imaginative writer - comes in           

          After World War II, the US was in a unique position of power relative to other nations. George Kennan perhaps the leading architect of the cold war, understood our situation and expressed it with icy plainness in Policy Planning Study #23, released to other members of the State Department in February, 1948:

          'We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and out attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and benefaction.... The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'" Jay Parini

Forgive and forget - Washington did once.

Reclaiming the remaining debts must be justified.

By Noam Chomsky

The Guardian  -- Tuesday May 12, 1998

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away. Someone pays, and history generally confirms what a rational look at the structure of power would suggest: risks tend to be socialized, just as costs commonly are, in the system mislabeled 'free enterprise capitalism'.The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects. But they are the ones who bear the burdens of repayment, along with taxpayers in the West - not the banks who made bad loans or the economic and military elites who enriched themselves while transferring wealth abroad and taking over the resources of their own countries.

The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital - in some cases,

overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations. The World Bank estimated that Venezuela's flight capital exceeded its foreign debt by 40 per cent in 1987. In 1980-82, capital flight reached 70 per cent of borrowing for eight leading debtors, according to Business Week estimates. That is a regular pre- collapse phenomenon, which we saw again in Mexico in 1994.

The current IMF 'rescue package' for Indonesia approximates the estimated wealth of the Suharto family. One Indonesian economist estimates that 95 per cent of the country's foreign debt of some $80 billion is owed by 50 individuals, not the 200 million who end up suffering the costs.

Debt can be and has in the past been canceled. When Britain, France and Italy defaulted on US debts in the 1930s, Washington "forgave (or forgot)" as the Wall Street Journal reported. There are other relevant precedents. When the US took over Cuba 100  years ago it canceled Cuba's debt to Spain on the grounds that the burden was "imposed upon the people of Cuba without their consent and by force of arms". Such debts were later called "odious debt" by legal scholarship, "not an obligation for the nation" but the "debt of the power that has incurred it", while the creditors who "have committed a hostile act with regard to the people" can expect no payment from the victims.

When Britain challenged Costa Rica's attempts to cancel the debt of the former dictator to the Royal Bank of Canada, the arbitrator - US SupremeCourt Chief Justice William Howard Taft - concluded that the bank lent the money for no "legitimate use", so its claim for payment "must fail". The logic extends readily to much of today's debt: 'odious debt' with no legal or moral standing, imposed upon people without their consent,  often serving to repress them and enrich their masters.

These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people.  Abraham Lincoln

All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left.  Bertrand Russell, 1912

In so far as people think they can see the "limits of human understanding", they think of course that they can see beyond these. Ludwig Wittgenstein

Private opinion creates public opinion.... That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important. Jan Struther (Joyce Anstruther), English poet (1901-1953)

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.  Helen Keller

This passage was written by a London reporter on the eve of the England-West Germany Soccer World Cup final of 1966... "If, on the morrow, the Germans defeat us at our national sport, be not dismayed. For twice in this century, we've defeated them at theirs.  San Jose Mercury News, 7 July 1990

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

Nor do I agree with the viewpoint of the Libertarians, who seem to think that citizenship carries with it an inalienable right to selfishness. Heidi Wolf

Self-interest remains the very religion of the corporate world.  Paul Wachtel

A lady came up to me on the street and pointed at my suede jacket. "You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too." Jake Johansen

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself toward which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope... Consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater --- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters." Simone Weil

The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.  Simone Weil

"She sees a way to come to terms with idolatry. 'A power comes to reside in any object which has been approached with intense feeling by large numbers of men. To adore this power is idolatry. True adoration consists in contemplating such an object with the thought that it has become divine through a convention ratified by God.'"  Coles/Weil

Only one thing can be taken as an end, for in relation to the human person it possesses a kind of transcendence: this is the collective. The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth.   Simone Weil

Religion insofar as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith.... Love is not consolation, it is light. Simone Weil

The great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the 19th century was to think that by walking straight on one mounted upward into the air.  Simone Weil

The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands. But except for souls which are fairly near to saintliness, the victims are defiled by force, just as their tormentors are. The evil which is in the handle of the sword is transmitted to its point. So the victims thus put in power and intoxicated by the change, do as much harm or more, and soon sink back again to where they were before. Simone Weil

Scientists believe in science in the same way that the majority of Catholics believe in the Church, namely as Truth crystallized in an infallible collective opinion; they contrive to believe this in spite of the continual changes in theory. In both cases it is through lack of faith in God. Simone Weil

'One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another. If one affirms God one is either worshipping God or else some things of this world labeled with his name. If one denies God, either one is worshiping him unknown to oneself or else one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself, imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.Idolatry is due to the fact that, while athirst for absolute good, one is not in possession of supernatural attention, and one has not the patience to let it grow.

Idolatry is in our very nature, she is declaring, and when disguised (as scientific pursuit, as politics, as a deep affection for nature, as a religious ritual and practice) is no less what it is, though perhaps more dangerous, potentially, because not even acknowledged. If only some of us who have been psychoanalyzed, and who look deeply into the psychological life of others, were able to be so forcefully analytic about ourselves! I remember an aphorism I used to hear from William Carlos Williams as he went from home to home, making his rounds (of the NJ working class poor), still recovering he'd say from some disappointment or serious impasse in his 'other life,' that of the writer. "It's gold or glory or God --- what people worship.' Once when I added the worship intellectuals accord their own ideas and theories, he replied curtly, annoyed with my lack of imagination, "I think that comes under glory, or maybe God!'" Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles M.D.

Life is god's novel.  Let him write it.  Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you're able to be yourself, then you have no competition.  All you have to do is get closer and closer to that essence.     Barbara Cook

The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.             Alden Nowlan

If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.                                                                                                               Jules Renard

There is a strange relationship between the system of a country and its people. In England, the people are hostile to a man but the system is compassionate. The very old, the very young, and the ill-equipped-to-live will always be looked after. In America everyone is friendly --- almost doggie-like --- but the system is ruthless. Once you can be pronounced unproductive, you've had it.  Quentin Crisp

"I have more or less equated limits with losses. The losses of aging are so numerous that they could fill books and so huge that they are incomprehensible to the young. We need every skill at our command to cope with them. One such skill is gallows humor. A particularly male variant of it goes: "At forty I would have settled for a beautiful woman. At fifty five I would have settled for a great meal. Now that I'm seventy I'd settle for a good bowel movement."

          Again without whitewashing, let me note that some of these losses may eventually come, for at least a few, to be experienced as liberation. Take the "beautiful woman" bit. In my fifty fifth year I experienced a relatively sudden and dramatic loss of libido. It was not total, but along with it my capacity to attain and sustain erections became distinctly iffy. Such a loss of sexual potency would have sent many men, despite their embarrassment, running to their physicians in panic. Not me. Since I was a traveling man at the time, not infrequently subject to the attentions of beautiful women, this dimunution of testosterone coursing through my veins felt as if I'd gotten a monkey off my back. It did take a while to accept, but when the while was done it seemed to me more like a healing than a disease.

          I focus on this matter of sexual potency because potency --- power, whether for women or for men --- is what's most at stake. By power I do not mean just political power, as we ordinarily think of it. The loss of such power may be one of the great losses of aging."

"Denial of the Soul: Spiritual and medical Perspectives on Euthanasia and Mortality" by M. Scott Peck M.D.

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."  Paulo Friere

"We gotta throw our televisions away. It's all trash. It's like talking about how cocaine might have some vitamins." David Mamet

                                              

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of

extremists will we be?  Will we be extremists for hate or extremists for love?  Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice--or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?'  Martin Luther King Jr.

"In spite of this prevailing tendency to conform, we as Christian

have a mandate to be nonconformist.  There are some things in our world to which [people] of goodwill must be maladjusted.  I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive [people] of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.  Human solution lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."  Martin Luther King Jr.

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.  It must be guide and critic of the state and never its tool.  If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority."  Martin Luther King Jr.

In part it was watching music videos and seeing the images of scantily clad female "bootays" shaking and jiggling to the beats of some man's song that strengthened my reserve. As did observing the faceless women being pimped across the screen according to some brother's understanding of their sexuality. It was also attempting to ease the late-night, teary-eyed phone sessions of sisters wondering why their man wasn't acting right and how they were going to fix that slut he was cheating with. But ultimately, I think, it was listening to the sweet-talking lips of brothers themselves that did it for me.

          Their refusal to uphold visions of female sexuality that were about more than just "getting some" made me decide early on that I wanted to be in control of and empowered by my sexuality.

          Thus I chose, and still am choosing, virginity.

"Am I the Last Virgin? Ten African American Reflections on Sex and Love," Tara Roberts

                                                                                                                   

  There is no greater illusion than fear,                                     

  no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,                         

  no greater misfortune than having an enemy.                                 

  Whoever can see through all fear                                            

  will always be safe.                              Lao-Tsu, "Tao Te Ching"  

We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity. Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander"    

                                                

"What you do with your own Communists is your own business. They are Trotskyists anyway. If you must, shoot them, and if you can't handle them, I'll help." Josef Stalin, as reported by NY Times correspondent Otto Tolischus, when asked during the Baltic negotiations what to do with Communists imprisoned in those countries.  

Really that little dealybob is too far away from the hole. It should be built right in.  Loretta Lynn

Love... is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.   Iris Murdoch

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person.  Margaret Anderson 

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. Lillian  Hellman     

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.  Dame Rebecca West

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.  Rebecca West     

The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead.  Ann Landers    

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.  Dorothy Canfield Fisher, American author and essayist (1879-1958). 

We don't tell people what to think. We make the pain of decision-making so intense that the only escape is to think." Sign on Fred Friday's office wall. Friday was a journalist who headed CBS briefly in the mid-50s until he quit in a dispute over the direction network television was to take.

In June of 1987, men will begin talking about their feelings; women all over America will be sorry within minutes.  Nicole Hollander

When I encounter individuals in total despair, crushed by misfortune, by the lack of a future, by injustice or loneliness, I must transmit to them the reason I myself have found to hope and to live. In other words, the message is no longer, "Be converted or I will kill you," but rather, "You want to kill yourself; be converted to escape from killing yourself." Jacques Ellul

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.  Anais Nin

What urge will save us now that sex won't?  Jenny Holzer

Instant gratification is not fast enough.  Suzanne Vega

I think you should know I worry a lot. Like the Nobel sperm bank. Something bothers me about the world's greatest geniuses sitting around reading pornography and jerking off. Jane Wagner

To me, the term 'sexual freedom' meant freedom from having to have sex.  Jane Wagner

The apes were all homosexuals, eager to wrap their paws around Johnny's thighs. They were jealous of me, and I loathed them." Maureen O'Sullivan

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself. Annie Dillard

"The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false. Saint Thomas Aquinas

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