Quotation Anthology From My Legacy Site "Apokatastasis"

Quotations

What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses... In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilsim inherent in this development. The sensual... cannot survive the death of the supersensual. Hannah Arendt

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. Einstein

There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating. Denis de Rougemont

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

Anthology of Chesterton Quotations

The problem is not bad politics, but a bad way of life. Wendell Berry

When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied: "I think it would be a good idea."

We know to the extent we love. St. Augustine of Hippo

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word "success" - is our national disease. William James

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . . The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.

Thomas Merton. "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964

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."

"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.

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...

The Christian is one whose life has sprung from a particular spiritual seed: the blood of martyrs, who, without offering forcible resistance, laid down their lives rather than submit to unjust laws... That is to say, the Christian is bound, like the martyrs, to obey God rather than the state whenever the state tries to usurp powers that do not and cannot belong to it.

Thomas Merton Anthology

The present position which we, the educated and well-to-do classes occupy, is that of the Old Man of the Sea, riding on the poor man's back; only, unlike the Old Man of the Sea, we are very sorry for the poor man, very sorry; and we will do almost anything for the poor man's relief. We will not only supply him with food sufficient to keep him on his legs, but we will teach and instruct him and point out to him the beauties of the landscape; we will discourse sweet music to him and give him abundance of good advice. Yes, we will do almost anything for the poor man, anything but get off his back. Tolstoy

“She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.” C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters"

It is true that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable, not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite distinct form that of doing good, but the practice of the one does not at all train a man for practicing the other... It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else...on thirty thousand as on two thousand a year.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The need for financial security was too deeply engrained. That singular fear is probably the greatest obstacle to moral action in today's society. There are arguments that one can live simply on a large salary while using the excess for good works, but we have never seen them lived out.

Janet and Rob Aldridge who quit Lockheed after 25 years. Prior to his resignation, Aldridge was in charge of designing the Maneuvering Re-entry Vehicle (MARV) for the Trident missile.

The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.

There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it. G.K. Chesterton

"There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not.

Nothing was forbidden me." Autobiography: Surprised by Joy - C. S. Lewis

Robert Burns' ... instinctive consideration of men as men came from an ancestry which still cared more for religion than education. The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated... Education ought to be a searchilight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centred entirely on himself...

The only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars.

G. K. Chesterton works on the web

"In helping us to confront, understand, and oppose the global economy, the old political alignments have become virtually useless. (The global economy) persists because ... multinational corporations (have) discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people's economy, you don't need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. In a totalitarian economy, any political liberties that people might retain simply cease to matter." Another Turn of the Crank, by Wendell Berry (Viewed mythically, the "Anti-Christ" is not a person at all, but the aggregate of impersonal socio-economic forces that erode the value and conscious meaning of free persons. If Christ embodies fully-developed human personhood, then The Machine is the anti-Christ, no matter how efficiently The Machine operates. Any God whose nature coheres with the parameters of freedom, would eventually "uproot" any System based on "automatic well-being," even if that well-being were the envy of the material world. Thoughtless surrender to "systems" that "do good" -- while simultaneously eroding one's personal responsibility to engage "the good" -- may be the (paradoxical) method by which "Smiley Face" paves the road to hell. Mere Materialism can not insure the survival of our species. We do not live by bread alone: every attempt to do so is ultimately suicidal. A.A.)

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together. Hannah Arendt

At a time when a large part of humankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worth while to understand clearly why it was originally accepted. It was accepted in order to escape, at last, from the brutality of antiquity. As soon as we discard it licentiousness returns, as is impressively exemplified by life in modern cities. Carl Gustav Jung

1700 years ago Romans packed the Colisseum to cheer while wild animals ate human beings. This casual slaughter was, arguably, the ancient world's most sought-after entertainment. Royalty, nobility, professionals, artisans, laborers and peasants prized "a good seat at the games."

In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem," John Conroy (author of "Ordinary People, Unspeakable Acts") interviews victims of torture as well as the torturers themselves. Conroy observes that the latter have a remarkable ability for rationalization, and describes most of them as cordial, likeable people. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679419187/ref=pd_cp_sr/103-2905432-4740659

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil. Hannah Arendt

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence. Hannah Arendt

"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

It is no easy matter to reduce to obedience a man who does not wish to command. Rousseau

Life is suffering. The Buddha's First Noble Truth

The medical campaign to eliminate pain overlooks the connection between pain and happiness. As we decrease our sensitivity to pain we also decrease our ability to experience the simple joys and pleasures of life. The result is that stronger and stronger stimuli - drugs, violence, horror - are needed to provide people in an anesthetic society with a sense of being alive. Increasingly, pain-killing promises an artificually painless life and turns people into unfeeling spectators of their own decaying selves. The very idea of having pain killed by somebody else, rather than facing it, was alien to traditional cultures because pain was a part of man's participation in a marred universe. Its meaning was cosmic and mythic, not individual and technical. Pain was the experience of the soul's evolution, and the soul was present all over the body. The doctor could not eliminate the need to suffer without doing away the patient. Ivan Illich

The Prince and the two children were standing with their heads hung down, their cheeks flushed, their eyes half closed; the strength all gone from them; the enchantment almost complete. But Puddleglum, desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn't hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human; for his feet (which were bare) were webbed and hard and cold-blooded like a duck's. But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth. And three things happened at once. First, the sweet, heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone's brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes. Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, "What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I'll turn the blood to fire inside your veins." Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic. "One word, Ma'am" he said coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. C. S. Lewis

"Just before I went to America, during the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had such a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read. The setting of the dream was quite simple, and owed something to the fact that not long before my wife had visited the lighthouse here at St. Catherine's to do some bird ringing. I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort?

As I stared down, seeming to see every creature's ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been born, if the struggle ceased for ever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled though them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds."

Rain Upon Godshill, J. B. Priestley

I believe that in actual fact, philosophy ranks before and above the natural sciences.

Thomas Mann

It is characteristic that Einstein and Planck had the greatest admiration for Kant's work, agreeing with his view that philosophy should be the basis of all sciences.

Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, "Reality and Scientific Truth"

We are convinced that theories do not matter... Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, anyone can discuss it... Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist... now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. But there are some people nevertheless - and I am one of them - who think that the most important thing about man is still his view of the universe... We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. G. K. Chesterton

Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox... All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical... The word "heresy" not only means no longer "being wrong"; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right, it practically means being wrong... (This) means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right... The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to insist that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox... General theories are everywhere contemned... We will have no generalizations... We are more and more to discuss art, politics, literature. A man's opinon on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinon on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe, for if he does, he will have a religion and be lost. Everything matters, except everything. G. K. Chesterton

...that process, already so destructive in our fashion-following super-civilization, by which everything is turned into a vogue -- even art which should be the great destroyer of all fashions, not their pimp. Everyone reads James. Then everyone switches to Eliot, to Proust, to Kafka -- to the communists in one decade -- to the homosexuals in another -- until the new writing begins to sound like the advertising patter in the smart magazines which echoes the changing chatter of the chic. It sometimes seems as though only Robert Frost were old enough and cantankerous enough and magnificient enough to be himself and remain himself and thus be disrespectfully and entirely new in this age of stylish novelties. Archibald McLeish

The genius of Christianity is to have proclaimed that the path to the deepest mystery is the path of love. Andre Malraux

The destiny of man is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world ... we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Winston Churchill

Radio broadcast to America

Receiving an honorary degree from the University of Rochester

June 16, 1941

There is a pervasive form of contemporary 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

'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," 10/99

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 their metastatic expansion. Occasionally, "modern work" supplies a real sense of accomplishment. However, the "driven" nature of modern accomplishment creates a neo-caste culture comprised of "the overworked" and "the underemployed." 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 the ecological matrix. 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

I tell you naught for your comfort,

Yea, naught for your desire,

Save the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.

Ballad of the White Horse, Chesterton 1911

La verdad, si no es entera, se convierte en aliada de lo falso. (The truth, if not entire, becomes an ally of falsehood.) Javier Sábada

At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held... But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another, slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"... Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally opposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision no Big Brother is required... As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared is those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one... Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with the equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy... In 1984, Huxley added people who are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Neil Postman "Amusing Ourselves to Death," 1985

In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists. Wendell Berry

If conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy "the needs" it creates among society's members. Ivan Illich paraphrase

The only escape from this destiny of victimization has been to "succeed," that is, to "make it" into the class of exploiters, and then to remain so specialized and so "mobile" as to be unconscious of the effects of one's life or livelihood. Wendell Berry

It seems to me there are very dangerous ambiguities about our democracy in its actual present condition. I wonder to what extent our ideals are now a front for organized selfishness and irresponsibility. If our affluent society ever breaks down and the facade is taken away, what are we going to have left? Thomas Merton

This change (this metanoia) is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves. Merton

The real function of discipline is not to provide us with maps, but to sharpen our own sense of direction so that when we really get going we can travel without maps. Merton

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us. 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. Merton

The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside. What a thing it is

to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligent perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows. Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen. Merton

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... Merton

Gangsters, for their own profit, corner a basic necessity by controlling supplies. Educators and doctors and social workers today...gain legal power to create the need that, by law, they alone will be allowed to serve. Ivan Illich

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven... The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one. Adolf Hitler

The victors will not be asked if they told the truth. Adolf Hitler

Generally, it is states that make war, and larger states make larger and longer war with greater casualites, despite the fact that they sell themselves as offering greater security and peace. Kirkpatrick Sale

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald (the Scottish fantasist) had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin, what as boys we called "tinny." It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books..... The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson --- "Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores." C. S. Lewis

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's "own" or "real" life: the truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending : what one calls one's "real life" is a phantom of one's own imagination. C. S. Lewis

Anthology of quotations by C.S. Lewis

In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. Ivan Illich

The essential contribution Gandhi made to the 20th century thought was his insistence on the need for a lower standard of living... He maintained that the essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation. He preached a higher standard of living and maintained that a lower level of material well-being was a necessary pre-requisite. Ronald Duncan

Beyond the point of satisfying need, redundant capacity becomes a burden and not a gain. Greed, the attempt to fill an empty spirit with possessions, is a great producer of depersonalization. Our preoccupation with labor saving, beyond the elimination of soul-destroying drudgery, is no less counterproductive. To have without doing corrodes the soul: it is precisely in investing life, love and labor that we constitute the world as personal... Generosity of the spirit personalizes as greed depersonalizes. Erazim Kohak

Greed and Gratitude

When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions. Hannah Arendt

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity. Hannah Arendt

Always distinguish between need and want.

William Wellington Archibald and Mildred Mary Noll Archibald

More than you need is never enough. Alan Archibald

The people of the West refused to make the distinction between gluttony and the good life. E. F. Schumacher

It was wants that made man poor. E. F. Schumacher

My greatest skill has been to want but little. Thoreau

Money is the thief of man. Hindu saying

Don't seek consolation. Brother David, St. Leo's Benedictine Monastery, Florida

Give me neither poverty nor wealth. Provide me with the food I need. If I have too much, I shall deny thee and say "Who is Lord?" Proverbs 30:8-9

It is a strange thing to see with what sort of feverish ardor Americans pursue well-being and how they show themselves constantly tormented by a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest route that can lead to it... In addition to the goods that (the American) possesses...he imagines a thousand others that death will prevent him from enjoying if he does not hasten. Alexis de Tocqueville (Even though the population of the United States was only 13 million when 25 year old Tocqueville visited in 1830, he observed that democratic values often encouraged conformity. Tocqueville was especially concerned that the American obsession with individuality would transmute into destructive selfishness: if people thought only of themselves and their families, they could become so disengaged from political practice as to be vulnerable to a kind of "democratic despotism." In Tocqueville's view, American democracy made it possible to devolve into majoritarian tyranny mediated by an enveloping central government which would blanket the populace in a set of complicated rules. Those who mediated these complicated rules would treat citizens like children or blindly industrious animals.)

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

Behind all phenomena and discrete entities in the world, we may observe, intimate or experience existentially in various ways something like a general "order of Being." The essence and meaning of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simply, that we can hear. Alongside the general miracle of Being - both as a part of that miracle and as its protagonist, as a special reiteration of it and a rebellious attempt to know, understand, control and transcend it - stands the miracle of the human spirit, of human existence. Into the infinite silence of the omnipresent order of Being, then, there sounds the impassioned voice of the order of human freedom, of life, of spirit. The subtly structured world of meaningful and hopeful human life, opening new vistas of freedom and carrying man to a deeper experience of Being, the countless remarkable intellectual (mystical, religious, scientific) and moral systems, that special way in which the order of Being both re-creates and, at the same time, lends its own meaning to mythology (in earlier times) and artistic creation (today, i.e., in the historical period), in short the way in which man becomes man in the finest sense of the word - all of this constitutes the "order of life," "the order of the spirit," "the order of human work." Together, it all constitutes an objectivized expression of that "second creation of the world," which is human experience. I would say that this "order of life" is a kind of "legitimate son" of "the order of Being," because it grows out of an indestructible faith in the latter's meaning and a fearless confrontation with its mystery. Over and against this passionate order, which is the work of people created "in God's image," there constantly recurs its evil caricature and misshapen protagonist, "the bastard son of Being," the offspring of indifference to the meaning of Being and vindictive fear of its mystery: the chilling work of man as "the image of the devil": the order of homogenization by violence, perfectly organized impotence and centrally directed desolation and boredom, in which man is conceived as a cybernetic unit without free will, without the power to reason for himself, without a unique life of his own, and where that monstrous ideal, order, is a euphemism for the graveyard. (I refer you to Fromm's excellent analysis of fascism.) Thus against "the order of life," sustained by a longing for meaning and experience of the mystery of Being, there stands this "order of death," a monument to non-sense, an executioner of

mystery, a materialization of nothingness.

Vaclav Havel "Letters to Olga" (from prison)

Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the process reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed), it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs. So is the computer's emphasis on speed and especially its capacity to generate and store unprecedented quantities of information. In specialized contexts, the value of calculation, speed, and voluminous information may go uncontested. But the "message" of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and professional levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. I would argue that this is, on the face of it, nonsense. Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information. If a nuclear catastrophe occurs, it shall not be because of inadequate information... If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen because of inadequate information. Neil Postman

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less "showily". Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences. Anne Sulllivan (Helen Keller's teacher)

School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man's trap. It is supposed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce and school the world out of existence. Jacques Ellul

There are two ways to release energy: the creation of bonds or their destruction. Violence feeds on the easy accessibility of dissociative energy. Alan Archibald

I have come to believe that compulsory government schooling -- while pretending to protect children from child labor -- IS child labor. Furthermore, compulsory government schooling is a form of child labor that eliminates the very childhood which child labor laws were devised to protect. Einstein observed that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Similarly, contemplation is more important than achievement. Without contemplation as the springboard for motivation, inspiration, and activity, achievement is mostly busy work - useful in strictly delineated ways, but ultimately depersonalizing. By keeping young people "on task," compulsory government schooling salts the ground of contemplation, insuring that critical questions concerning context, meaning, matrix and value are never asked. The task in hand isn't so much the determination of "what we need to do," but what we need to undo. Alan Archibald

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 (in terms of) what they could do for themselves. Jimmy Breslin

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

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Almost always, great men are bad men. Lord Acton

"Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country." Acton

"Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will." Acton

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others." Acton

"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion." Acton

"Definition of Liberty: (1) Security for minorities; (2) Reason reigning over reason, not will over will; (3) Duty to God unhindered by man; (4) Reason before will; (5) Right above might." Acton

"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities." Acton

"Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin." Acton

The first thing you do when you want to be elected is to prostitute yourself. You show me a man with courage and conviction and I'll show you a loser.

Ray Kroc, founder of MacDonald's

The secret to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you can do anything. Television executive counselling newcomer Daniel Schorr, 1953

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who want to be somebody, and those who want to do something. Erik Sevareid

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

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important. Henry Kissinger

The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. Chief Seattle to President Pierce

A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Oscar Wilde

Cynics are only happy to make the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves. George Meredith

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. C. G. Jung

I wasn't yet aware that most of the world's population would rather go hungry than deny food to a stranger. Brian M. Schwartz, "A World of Villages"

Perhaps it would be possible for the Negro to become reconciled to his plight if he could be made to believe that his sufferings were for some remote, high sacrificial end; but sharing the culture that condemns him and seeing that a lust for trash is what blinds the nation to his claims, is what sets storms rolling in his soul. Richard Wright

I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me

because they never understand Black love is Black wealth

and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood

and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.

Nikki Giovanni

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. Martin Luther King Jr.

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

The white man seems tone-deaf to the total orchestration of humanity. Malcolm X

You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor man. You are handing over to him what is his. For what has been given ... for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself. St. Ambrose 340 - 397 A.D. Bishop of Milan

He who has more than he needs has stolen it from his brother. St. Francis of Assisi

Las cosas no son del dueno. Son de el que las necesite.

(Things don't belong to their owner. They belong to the person who needs them.)

Conny Pena Vado's version of a Nicaraguan saying

Human law has the true nature of law only insofar as it corresponds to right reason, and therefore is derived from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason, a law is said to be a wicked law; and so, lacking the true nature of law, it is rather a kind of violence. Thomas Aquinas

Here is a startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is a casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischeif; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other. John Erskine, Scot, 1695-1768

To expect truth to emerge from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know. Hannah Arendt

To be truly wise, you must blunt your cleverness. Lao Tzu

It is the fate of humankind to outsmart itself. New York state billboard

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem. Krishnamurti

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Daniel J. Boorstin

Clear prose represents the absence of thought. Marshall McLuhan

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes. Thorton Wilder

With pen and pencil we're learning to say

Nothing, more cleverly, every day. William Allingham

Who knows if Shakespeare might not have thought less if he had read more. Edward Young

Professionals built the Titanic; amateurs the ark.

Of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age. Thornton Wilder

It is amazing how complete the delusion that beauty is goodness. Tolstoy

Suffering is the source of all consciousness. Dostoyevsky

Unearned suffering is redemptive. Martin Luther King Jr.

We always act as if something had an even greater price than life... but what is that something? Antoine de St. Exupery --- More Saint Exupery

Most of our problems arise from the human inability to sit still in a room. Blaise Pascal

You can learn a lot from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room. Dr. Seuss

He will get to the goal first who stands stillest. Thoreau

The profoundest truths are paradoxical. Lao Tzu

Learning makes one fit company for oneself. Thomas Fuller

To be happy at home is the end of all human activity. Samuel Johnson

Sins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than sins of lust. Piers Paul Reid

The truth is we are all caught in an economic system which is heartless.

Woodrow Wilson

Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite. J. K. Galbraith

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. J. K. Galbraith

The greater the wealth, the thicker the dirt. This indubitably describes a tendency of our time. J. K. Galbraith

There's an observable relationship between "the filthy rich" and "the squeaky clean."

Alan Archibald

An immaculate house is the sure sign of a misspent life.

Janet Archibald's refrigerator magnet

His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean. Bob Dylan

Intentional activity is always based on belief. Whether human beings subscribe to animist totems, to squabbling deities atop Mount Olympus, to the transcendental Father God of Judeo-Christianity, the agnosticism of Buddhism, the atheism of Jainism, the Golden Calf of free market capitalism, Hinduism's lingam and yoni or the nouveaux Trinity ("sex, drugs and rock-and-roll"), belief is essentially religious. All core values intend to "re-ligate" the primordial rent in the human spirit. ("re-ligare" = "re-ligion")

Recognizing that Belief is inevitable -- whether one's belief is "sacred" or "secular," "religious" or "political," "philosophical" or "theological" -- obliges us to re-value all cultural phenomena as attempts to ligate this existential breach.

Without this re-valuation -- without recognition that our belief-always attempt to ligate this existential rent - the military-industrial-educational complex becomes the "default value system."

In turn, this System grows increasingly autonomous and arrogates to itself "the terms" of every debate. In consequence, meaningful debate is overwhelmed by the brute force of bureau-institutional fascism predicated on unipolar Materialism. (See Arendt above.)

Simultaneously, Materialism places itself beyond debate while acquisitive citizens prostrate themselves as obsequiously-scripted Consumer Units. Inexorably, the compulsive acquisition of "mere things" results in such deep narcotization that people lose their ability to formulate meaningful criticism.

When the unipolar Materialist trap is definitively sprung, we will all serve - simultaneously - as inmates and wardens.

William Blake observed that "we become what we perceive." Spellbound by the unacknowledged Deity whose intentions we serve but fail to limn, we deify things and reify people. At stake is the "God" in whose image humankind remakes itself.

Alan Archibald

Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment. In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers. Samuel Gompers a founder of the U.S. Labor Movement

"It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to do it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as here assumed... Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.... Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things ought to belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others, without labor, have enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor as nearly as possible is a worthy object of any good government."

Abraham Lincoln

"Those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. And, inasmuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People. We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming an preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.... I do by this proclamation designate and set apart the 30th day of April, 1863 as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer." Abraham Lincoln

Anyone who's not a liberal at 16 has no heart. Anyone who's still a liberal at 60 has no head. Benjamin Disraeli

The sun, with all the planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Galileo Galilei 1564 - 1642

Natural history is the antidote for piety. Gregory Bateson

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves. Betty Friedan

Happy are they who can hear their detractions and put them to mending. Shakespeare

Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up to find that he knows nothing. Plato

I often hear that right and wrong are up to the individual. Of course, that is nonsense. Right and wrong are not up to us. If right and wrong were up to us, that would make Hitler right because he thought he was right. And he was not right. Right and wrong exist. They are invisible realities that we discover. We do not invent them.

Barbara Ward

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

The last temptation and the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. T. S. Eliot

It is not enough to do good. One must do it the right way. John Viscount Morley

The fullest life is impossible without an immovable belief in a Living Law in obedience to which the whole universe moves. Gandhi

We have met the enemy and he is us. Pogo

Failure to understand what is demanded of us is the source of anxiety.

Abraham Heschel

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

Louis Erdrich (B: 1954), Chippewa poet and author

Tell the truth but tell it slant -

The truth must dazzle gradually -

Or every man be blind.

Emily Dickinson

There is nothing as powerful as truth - and often nothing so strange.

Daniel Webster

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Shakespeare

Things happen in life so fantastic that no imagination could have invented them. Isaac Bashevis Singer

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. Joseph Campbell

(America's obsession with the mere protraction of life prevents the transformation that attends the perception of death as an ally rather than a bogey.)

Death is the key that unlocks the door to our true happiness. Mozart

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

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946

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, 1879-1958

Where your heart is, there also will your treasure be. Y'eshua the Nazarene

What I do is live.

How I pray is breathe.

What I wear is pants. Thomas Merton

You have heard that (our forefathers) were told, "Love your neighbour and hate your enemy." But what I tell you is this: Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors; only so can you be children of your heavenly Father, who causes the sun to rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the innocent and the wicked. If you love only those who love you, what reward can you expect? Even the tax-collectors do as much...

Y'eshua the Nazarene

I am awake. Gautama Buddha

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.)

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

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

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

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

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.

Quotations II

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

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.

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.

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 moregenerosity: 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

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

Yes, this Lincoln quote fact checks:

Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 1.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln1/1:92?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

Image result for "fleece the people" 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"

"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

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

https://books.google.com/books?id=ozm8DQAAQBAJ&pg=PT69&lpg=PT69&dq=%22The+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.%22&source=bl&ots=rXlD4w72I8&sig=ACfU3U3KIwygYaocd3LOgFGQFG3JzGyfFA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjc6MrBsdDjAhUjZN8KHWlXCAUQ6AEwB3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22The%20truth%20of%20our%20faith%20becomes%20a%20matter%20of%20ridicule%20among%20the%20infidels%20if%20any%20Catholic%2C%20not%20gifted%20with%20the%20necessary%20scientific%20learning%2C%20presents%20as%20dogma%20what%20scientific%20scrutiny%20shows%20to%20be%20false.%22&f=false

"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