Quotation

"There are many perils, both for our nation and for the world, inherent in this situation - and they do not all come from abroad.  We are exasperated by the ironic incongruities of our position.  Having more power than ever before, America ironically enjoys less security than in the days of her weakness.  Convinced of her virtue, she finds that even her allies accuse her of domestic vices invented by her enemies.  The liberated prove ungrateful for their liberation, the reconstructed for their reconstruction, and the late colonial peoples vent their resentment upon our nation - the most innocent, we believe, of the imperial powers.  Driven by these provocations and frustrations, there is the danger that America may be tempted to exert all the terrible power she possesses to compel history to conform to her own illusions.  The extreme, but by no means the only expression, would be the so-called preventive war.  This would be to commit the worst heresy of the Marxists, with whom it is dogma that they can compel history to conform to the pattern of their dreams by the ruthless use of force."
C. Vann Woodward  (The Irony of Southern History) (1953)
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Quotation

"When a man can't piss in his own front yard, he's living too close to town."
                                                    
                                                                                 Edward Abbey
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Quotation For Today

Under the Republicans, man exploits man.  With the Democrats, just the opposite is true.

                                                                       Anonymous Bumper Sticker
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Quotation from Wendell Berry

"And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons."

                                         Wendell Berry,  "The Unsettling of America"
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Quotation

They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What!  did the Hand then of the Potter shake?


                                      -Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat
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Quotation

"Too much that we do is done at the expense of something else, or somebody else. There is some intransigent destructiveness in us. My days, though I think I know better, are filled with a thousand irritations, worries, regrets for what has happened and fears for what may, trivial duties, meaningless torments - as destructive of my life as if I wanted to be dead. Take today for what it is, I counsel myself. Let it be enough...We are in the habit of contention - against the world, against each other, against ourselves."

Another piece of common sense from Wendell Berry.
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Richard Feynman Quotation

I found this quotation of Richard Feynman's on the Internet.  I like his honesty.

"I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing.  I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.  I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean.   I might think about it a little, but if I can't figure it out, then I go to something else.  But I don't have to know an answer.  I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly.  It doesn't frighten me."

from The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of  Richard Feynman
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H L Mencken on Bad Writing

"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered.  It reminds me of a string of wet sponges;  it reminds me of tattered washing on the line;  it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.  It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.  It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh.  It is rumble and bumble.  It is flap and doodle.  It is balder and dash."

Reading this always gives me a chuckle.
The "He..." was a reference to Warren G. Harding.
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Quotation

For Justice Lewis Brandeis, the formation of citizens capable of self-government was an end even higher than distributive justice.    He wrote:

"It's absolutely essential in order that men may develop that they be properly fed and properly housed, and that they have proper opportunities for education and recreation.  We cannot reach our goal without these things.  But we may have these things and be a nation of slaves."
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Quotation

"By no one but the law could I be regarded as dangerous."

Loren Eiseley
from the essay Toads and Men
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Quotation

"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human.  It is always the same words telling the same lies.  And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed."

Albert Camus
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Quotation

"I don't mind if you don't like my manners.  I don't like them myself.  They're pretty bad.  I grieve over them long winter evenings."

Humphrey Bogart
in "The Big Sleep"

Quotation

"Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including 30 million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.  No, I do not wish you success.  I don't even want to talk about it.  I want to talk about failure.
Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure.  You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss.  You will find you're weak when you thought yourself strong.  You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you.  You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all of my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place  To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies."

Ursula K. LeGuin
from a commencement speech at Mills College, May 22, 1983
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Quotation Nabokov

"What he really wanted to do was tear a hole in his world and escape."


Vladimir Nabokov