Say it again, Sam

Smart (or dumb) sayings get stuck in our head... is that the accumulation of wisdom? Sometimes we even come up with them ourselves. Keeping the good stuff and removing the fluff is how we build up our own Weltanschauung. Here are some of the things that have made it through my filter.

• “To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.”
  — Marcus Tullius Cicero


• “But if you understand everything, there is no magic. Fortunately we don’t understand everything.”
  — Andrew Duncan

• “Do not seek to have everything that happens as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it does happen, and your life will be serene.”
  — Epictetus, Encheiridion, 8


• “Take a note of that; his Lordship says he will turn it over in what he is pleased to call his mind.”
  — Richard Bethell, Lord Westbury


• “Three things seem to correlate with code-breaking ability: musical ability, chess, and mathematics.”
  — David Kahn, The Codebreakers


• “Celebrities are people who are famous for acting in their own self-interest, basically... Heroes are people with a cause larger than themselves.”
  — Landon Jones of People magazine, quoted in LA Times, circa 17 Sep 94


• “The rest to some faint meaning make pretence
  But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
  Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
  Strike through and make a lucid interval;
  But Shadwell’s genuine night admits no ray,
  His rising fogs prevail upon the day.”
  — Alexander Pope


• “I think today that a few remarks I might make, we go back to the relationship in this great nation with the people who was the foundation of America, the people that they’ve paid such a price that we might enjoy the blessings of enjoyment that we have, has been spoken this morning.”
  — Evan Mecham, Governor of Arizona


• “I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family — which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be.”
  — J. Danforth Quayle, Vice-President of the United States


• “PATRIOTISM, n. The last resort of a scoundrel.”
  — Dr Samuel Johnson


• “I beg to submit that it [patriotism] is the first.”
  — Ambrose Bierce


• “The intellect of man is forced to choose
  Perfection of the life or of the work.”
  — W. B. Yeats


• “When you hear hoofbeats, suspect horses, not zebras.”
  — Skeptic’s motto


• “The physical world is the most evasive and illusive process there is. It will not be pinned down, and therefore it fulfills all the requirements of spirit.”
  — Alan Watts, Play To Live


• “Actually, the way we think about most of our problems is by simply going through the motions of thinking.”
  — Alan Watts, Play To Live


• “Studying the fingerboard is like bumping into your living room chair every day and wondering ‘Where did that come from?’”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “Los Angeles is the city where everything is an option.”
  —Andrew Duncan


• “Three things are worth living for: American luxury, Japanese women, and Chinese food.”
  — Emil Zatopek


• “Nothing can be farther from the working musician’s mind than counting, nothing farther from the working mathematician’s mind than singing, and yet there is something common to both.”
  — Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician (1973)


• “No single number and no single tone is what it is without the others.”
  — Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician (1973)


• “Newspapers ... are in the business of telling people what happened. ‘The moon was full, and nothing happened’ may be accurate, but it is not a very interesting headline.”
  —Kelly, Rotton, Culver, Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 85-86


• “Journalism is there to tell us Jones is dead, even though it didn’t tell us he was alive.”
  — Lord Chesterton


• “Going sharp is like going East; going flat like going West.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “Parapsychologists claim that a mind can span continents to communicate with other minds; why is it patently unable to jump a few millimeters [the corpus callosum] of uncoupled neural tissue?”
  — Barry L. Beyerstein, referring to split-brain experiments.


• “Marriage is nine-tenths talk.”
  — H. L. Mencken, diaries


• When [Senator] Kyl asserted that Americans currently spend more on pantyhose than on nuclear defenses, Rep. Barbara Boxer (D - Greenbrae) sprang to her feet to denounce the weapon. She argued that the Administration has never clearly defined the mission of ‘Star Wars’. “Believe me,” she said, “pantyhose is affordable; ‘Star Wars’ is not. Pantyhose has a clear function; ‘Star Wars’ does not. Pantyhose gives us 100% support; ‘Star Wars’ does not. Pantyhose has a mission that does not change every day; ‘Star Wars’s mission has changed from a protective shield to military installations defense to accidental launch protection to ‘brilliant pebbles’ to terrorist deterrence. ‘Star Wars’ has changed more times than Imelda Marcos has changed her shoes.”
  — LA Times, July 1989


• “If you discover a New Yorker with an open mind, he has probably just suffered a head wound.”
  — Ellen Clark, LA Times Book Review, 21 June 92


• “In mathematics, you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.”
  — John von Neumann


• C. Everett Koop met a high school girl who asked about recommended reading for a future in medicine. “I told her to read art, literature, music and history. I said forget about reading cardiology. What you should do now is become as broad as you can.”
  — Santa Monica Outlook, circa 28 August 1992


• “In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from one side to the other, thinking they will be more comfortable.”
  — J.W. von Goethe


• “Mathematics stands forth as that which unites, mediates between Man and Nature, inner and outer world, thought and perception, as does no other subject.”
  — Froebel (London, 1893)


• “We have no patience with a philosophy [Plato’s reputed antipathy to practical science] which, like those Roman matrons who swallowed abortives in order to preserve their shapes, takes pains to be barren for fear of being homely.”
  — Lord Macaulay, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, (NY, 1837)


• “It is the man not the method that solves the problem.”
  — H. Maschke, Congress of Arts and Sciences, (NY & Boston, 1905)


• “We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung.”
  — H. D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, (Boston 1893)


• “Without mathematics one cannot fathom the depths of philosophy; without philosophy one cannot fathom the depths of mathematics; without the two one cannot fathom anything.”
  — Bordas-Memoulins, quoted in A. Rebière: Mathématiques et Mathématiciens, (Paris 1898)


• “Though analogy is often misleading, it is the best misleading thing we have.”
  — Samuel Butler


• “Morality or ethics involving large numbers of people is like physics at high speeds or small scales: our intuition fails us.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “Public opinion has the strange power ... to erase from a man’s character the lines formed there by reason and study; and ... impress on those who engage in politics the passions and feelings of the mob.”
  — Plutarch, Life of Cicero


• “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
  — Thomas Jefferson (1787)


• “Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.”
  — Benjamin Franklin, cited in Van Doren’s “Benjamin Franklin”


• “Truth is more likely to emerge from error than from vagueness.”
  — T. H. Huxley


• “People can put up with almost anything if they can see the reason for it.”
  — Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart


• “Primary relationships have replaced religion, clan, and mere survival as the foundations of our lives.”
  — Deborah Tannen, That’s Not What I Meant!


• “Many women feel, ‘After all this time, you should know what I want without my telling you.’ Many men feel, ‘After all this time, we should be able to tell each other what we want.’”
  — Deborah Tannen, That’s Not What I Meant!


• “Above all, I am happy about the contact and friendship of mathematicians that resulted from it all. How playful they can be, these learned ladies and gentlemen!”
  — M. C. Escher


• “Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.”
  — Owen Meredith


• “To look at mathematics without the creative side of it, is to look at a black-and-white photograph of a Cézanne; outlines may be there, but everything that matters is missing.”
  — R. C. Buck, Amer. Math. Monthly, 69:562


• “If logic is the hygeine of the mathematician, it is not his source of food; the great problems furnish the daily bread on which he thrives.”
  — André Weil, Amer. Math. Monthly, 57:297


• “Rigor is to the mathematician what morality is to man. It does not consist in proving everything, but in maintaining a sharp distinction between what is assumed and what is proved, and in endeavoring to assume as little as possible at every stage.”
  — André Weil, Amer. Math. Monthly, 61:35


• “To the passive reader a routine computation and a miracle of ingenuity come with equal ease, but later, when he must depend on himself, he will find that they went as easily as they came.”
  — Paul Halmos, A Hilbert Space Problem Book, VNR, 1967


• “Just as [musical] scales, as the laws of perspective, as the rules of [poetic] metre seem to lack fire, the formal rules of mathematics may appear to be without lustre.”
  — Edward Kasner & James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination, Simon & Schuster, 1940


• “To see a difficult, uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic.”
  — Norbert Weiner, Ex-prodigy, Simon & Schuster, 1953


• “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
  — Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 3, 1788


• “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”
  — Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1, 1776


• “Just as the man on the street is unaware of the difficulties that lie below the surface of his everyday arithmetic, so there are those who are untroubled by the utter incomprehensibility of the content of the traditional catechism.”
  — Mary Coughlin, “Mathematics Rooted in Mystery”, Math. Intell., 5:51


• “Queerly shaped pieces of flat silver, contrived for purposes known only to their designers, have no place on a well appointed table. So if you use one of these implements for a purpose not intended, it cannot be a breach of etiquette, since etiquette is founded on tradition, and has no rules concerning eccentricities.”
  — Emily Post, Etiquette:The Blue Book of Social Usage, NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1927


• “While history may not repeat itself, it is possible that certain human ‘types’ — the cats and dogs among men — do have a continuity that may impress its influence on the times.”
  — Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror, Lippincott 1964


• “Treason is merely a question of dates.”
  — Talleyrand, cited in Loomis


• “So, with Rousseau, whether in the novels or the political treatises, all is solemn, as though heaviness of manner were in some way the same as weight of idea — a naïve and most un-French assumption, which reminds us that Rousseau, after all, was not French but Swiss and from the canton of Calvin at that.”
  — Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror, Lippincott 1964


• “To the end Robespierre indulged himself in the illusion that the People was a virtuous and well-intentioned entity separate from the human beings who comprised it.”
  — Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror , Lippincott 1964


• “Don’t fight forces, use them.”
  — R. Buckminster Fuller, “Shelter”


• “What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can’t! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch... And it’s just at the very moment you make a botch of it that you’re yourself.”
  — Pablo Picasso, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, Dore Ashton


• “To a reader, a book is a humanly controllable way of savoring change. ... In life, not just in fictional plots, we all change and we all die. Whether the change is growth, or the dying a final failure, is up to us.”
  — Janet Asimov, How To Enjoy Writing, Janet and Isaac Asimov, 1987


• “You may have heard the statement: ‘One picture is worth a thousand words.’ Don’t you believe it. ... Consider, for instance, Hamlet’s great soliloquy that begins with ‘To be or not to be,’ the poetic consideration of suicide. It is 260 words long. Can you get across the essence of Hamlet’s thought in a quarter of a picture?”
  — Isaac Asimov, How To Enjoy Writing, Janet and Isaac Asimov, 1987


• “It [Atlas Shrugged] is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand’s equally weighty ‘The Fountainhead.’”
  —Robert Kirsch, LA Times, 1957


• “Rand may not be the worst novelist ever to pick up a pen, but she is without a doubt the worst novelist ever to inspire a cult following and sell zillions of books. Her novels are awe-inspiringly bad, ludicrous on a heroic scale.”
  — Gary Kamiya, L.A. Times, 4 January 1998


• “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
  — Eric Hoffer, The True Believer


• “The tongue is the enemy of the neck.”
  — Arab proverb


• “If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.”
  — Baron de Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes


• “France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.”
  — Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution


• “Even though they have no children, this [sex] is a mark of honor and of affection which a man owes a chaste wife.”
  — Plutarch, Life of Solon


• “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
  — Attributed to Frank Zappa


• “He is onstage now to die, unrepentant to the last, and breathing the belief of all extremists always — that all misfortune comes from compromise and that only unyieldingness can win out.”
  — Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, of Clifford in III Henry VI


• “To me, LR parsing is like trying to reach in your left pocket with your right hand: you can do it, and it returns a correct result, but it’s a terribly wrong-headed approach.”
  — Andrew Duncan, Journal, 5 May 1997


• “An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.”
  — Karl Kraus, Aphorism


• “A woman is, occasionally, quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.”
  — Karl Kraus, Aphorism


• “The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.”
  — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain


• “The three major prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel — may be considered, respectively, the manic, the depressive, and the psychotic articulation of the prophetic message.”
  — Jack Miles, God, A Biography


• “Those on the ground floor [of Landsberg Prison] would actually have been very happy indeed but for the unfortunate tendency of ‘the man on the first floor’ to make interminable speeches. Needless to say, ‘the man on the first floor’ was Adolf Hitler. One day the conspirators downstairs held a council of war to discuss ways and means of protecting themselves from Adolf’s eloquence. Gregor Strasser had the brilliant idea of trying to persuade him to write a book.”
  — Otto Strasser, Hitler and I, 1940 HM


• “Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France


• “I always consider corporate bodies, whether sole or consisting of many, to be much more susceptible of a public direction by the powers of the state, in the use of their property, and in the regulation of modes and habits of life in their members, than private citizens ever can be ...”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France


• “The present [Assembly], by destroying and altering every thing, will leave to their successors apparently nothing popular to do. They will be roused by emulation and example to enterprises the boldest and the most absurd.”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France


• “They [revolutionaries] have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own.”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France


• “For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it.”
  — George W. Bush, Philadelphia PA, 14 May 14 2001


• “Surely if it is general consent that proves the existence of a Creator, then general dissent disproves every other aspect of creation, since no culture believes any creation myth but its own.”
  — Isaac Asimov, The Army of the Night


• “Don’t expect to practice [Zen] hard and not experience the weird. Hard practice that evades the unknown makes for a weak commitment.”
  — Kyong Ho, Korean master


• “In studying Zen, one must have three things: a foundation of great faith, a zealous determination, and a great feeling of doubt. If one is lacking, it is like a tripod with a broken foot.”
  — Sosan Taesa, Handbook for Zen students


• “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
  — Mark Twain


• “When Zen speaks of transparency, it means this clearing away, this thorough wiping of the surface of the mind-mirror. But, in point of fact, the mirror has never been obscured ... because of such notions as identity ... and so on, we are compelled to set up a general sweeping operation.”
  — D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture


• “Zen is prior to logic so called, and its masters are guiding us to an interview with a God who has not yet uttered ‘Let there be light.’”
  — D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture


• “As is so often the case with brazen falsehoods, certain individuals asserted that they had been present when the deed was done and had witnessed it.”
  — Tacitus, Histories 1.35


• “There is a magical thing in language design: power and generality tend to come from the removal of crucial limitations, rather than the addition of new features.”
  — Dwight VandenBerghe


• “When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.”
  — Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare


• “Entrails don’t care for travel,
  Entrails don’t care for stress:
  Entrails are better kept folded inside you
  For outside, they make a mess.”
  — Connie Bensley, Entrails


• “He has to learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and that insolence is not invective.”
  — Benjamin Disraeli, speech, House of Commons, 16 December 1852


• “There have now been many studies of elite performers — concert violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth — and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the amount of deliberate practice they’ve accumulated. K Anders Ericsson ... has found that top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. But, more than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway.”
  — Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, 28 Jan 2002


• “Linguistic changes follow social changes very readily, but it is not always a simple matter to make them precede social changes.”
  — Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics


• “You might as well speak of a rectangle’s having length vs. width.”
  — Peter Richerson of UC Davis, on nature vs. nurture


• “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.”
  — Berthold Brecht


• “When smashing monuments, save the pedestals — they always come in handy.”
  — Stanislaw Lec


• “Some day I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.”
  — Clarence Darrow


• “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”
  — Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, 1928


• ‘What ho!’ I said.
  ‘What ho!’ said Motty.
  ‘What ho! What ho!’
  ‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’
  After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
  — P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, 1919?


• “[A Foreign Secretary is] forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion.”
  — Harold Macmillan, Newsweek 30 April 1956


• “Football’s football. If that weren’t the case, it wouldn’t be the game it is.”
  — Garth Crooks


• “Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.”
  — P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores, 1991


• “A neurosis is a secret you don’t know you’re keeping.”
  — Kenneth Tynan, in Kathleen Tynan, “Life of Kenneth Tynan”, 1987


• “Military action will not last more than a week.”
  — Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, 23 Jan 2003


• “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.”
  — H.L. Mencken, Notebooks, 1956


• “Am in despair about the dark side of human nature prevailing: the US public cited as 2:1 in favor of attacking Iraq, and it looks like days away. Bush will throw away hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands if not millions of lives, for essentially nothing.”
  — Andrew Duncan, Journal 17 March 2003


• “See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.”
  — George W. Bush, Milwaukee WI, 3 Oct 2003


• “After each war there is a little less democracy to save.”
  — Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 7 Jan 1951


• “I think from now on they’re shooting without a script.”
  — George S. Kaufman, on the German invasion of Russia. In Howard Teichmann, “George S. Kaufman”, 1973


• “The First World War had begun — imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.”
  — A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War, 1963


• “The rich are not like us.” — F. Scott. Fitzgerald
  “No, they have more money.” — Ernest Hemingway, attributed response
  “They pay less taxes.” — Peter de Vries, Wash. Post, 30 July 1989


• “Poor Harold [Vanderbilt], he can live on his income all right, but he no longer can live on the income from his income.”
  — George S. Kaufman, in Howard Teichmann, “George S. Kaufman”, 1973


• “To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.”
  — Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts, 1931


• “I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”
  — V.S. Naipaul, Radio Times, 14 March 1979


• “Whence came the intrusive comma on p. 14? It did not fall from the sky.”
  — A.E. Housman to his editor at Richards Press, 3 July 1930


• “Your close friends tend to know each other, but your acquaintances tend to know people you don’t know. They’re much more your windows on the world.”
  — Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in Science News, 16 Aug 2003 (164:7)


• “The losers — untold millions of them — have less incentive to pass on the hard lesson they’ve learned than each new generation of dealers has to perpetuate the con.”
  — Todd Seavey in “Energy, Homeopathy, and Hypnosis in Santa Fe”, Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2003, (27:5)


• “Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers.”
  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms


• “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.”
  — Hermann Ebbinghaus, Summary of Psychology, 1908


• “Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace.”
  — George W. Bush, Washington DC, 25 July 2003


• “Someone who sees himself as a victim will almost never morally evaluate himself or put limits on his own actions.”
  — Thomas L. Friedman, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”


• “People who have never really wielded power always have illusions about how much those who have power can really do.”
  — Thomas L. Friedman, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”


• “The enormous condescension of posterity.”
  — Historian E.P. Thompson, quoted in New Yorker, 29 Sep 2003


• “You know, that might be the answer — to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.”
  — Colonel Korn, in “Catch-22”, by Joseph Heller, 1955


• “Every real leader knew that the occasional outburst of unexplained anger was good for discipline. It set the troops to searching their own conduct for flaws.”
  — Tom Wolfe, “A Man in Full”, 1998


• “An inescapable sadness is part of the life of any reflective person.”
  — Bruno Bettelheim, “Freud and Man’s Soul”


• “Donkeys and camels need hay. That’s economic infrastructure. But human beings need Islam.”
  — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini


• “Islam and divine governments are not like that. [Respecting privacy.] These have commandments for everybody, everywhere, at any place, in any condition.”
  — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini


• “Genius is what you do with the mistakes.”
  — Michael Moriarty


• “When people shout ‘Oh God! Oh God! I’m coming!’ they are not bluffing. Sexual climax is as close as we get to God before our ultimate climax: death.”
  — Phil Marquist


• “The man who is master of his passions is reason’s slave.”
  — Cyril Connolly


• “We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.”
  — Howard Nemerov


• “The body already has a skeleton; the psyche feels the need to construct one: God.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “The reward of age is that you see more beauty in other people.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “Enlightenment is like being on the other side of a mirror: exactly the same except for your perspective.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “Death is like the eye’s blind spot, or the navel: an apparently inert non-organ that actually makes them all possible.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “The use of supernatural or religious explanations for misfortune may be a byproduct of a far more general tendency to see all salient occurrences in terms of social interaction.”
  — Pascal Boyer, “Why Is Religion Natural?” in Skeptical Inquirer Mar/Apr 2004


• “The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling...against character...against practicality...against democracy. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous? Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of a claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”, 1962


• “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, 1963


• “He [the pseudo-conservative] sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its own way in the world...cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”, 1954


• “One strain in Protestant thinking has always looked to economic life not just for its efficacy in producing goods and services but as a vast apparatus of moral discipline, of rewards for virtue and industry and punishments for vice and indolence.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited — 1965”


• “[The far right] believe that their prestige in the community, even indeed their self-esteem, depends on having [their] values honored in public. Status politics seeks not to advance perceived material interests but to express grievances and resentments about such [moral] matters, to press claims upon society to give deference to non-economic values.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited — 1965”


• “Most conservatives are mainly concerned with maintaining a tissue of institutions for whose stability and effectiveness they believe the country’s business and political elites hold responsibility. Goldwater thinks of conservatism as a system of eternal and unchanging ideas and ideals, whose claims upon us must be constantly asserted and honored in full.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”


• “The pseudo-conservative [holds a] conviction that those who place greater stress on negotiation and accomodation are either engaged in treasonable conspiracy (the Birch Society’s view) or are guilty of well-nigh criminal failings in moral and intellectual fiber (Goldwater’s).”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”


• “...those who conceive of history not as a sequence of events but as a moral melodrama...”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”


• “[The far right] moves in the uninhibited mental world of those who neither have nor expect to win responsibility.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”


• “People think that you have these things called ideas and that writing is a matter of imposing them on the subject material, whereas it’s only in the writing that I discover what it is that I think.”
  — Anthony Lane


• “Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.”
  — Daniel Boorstin, cited by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times


• “The more you understand, the less you can do about it.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “You’ve got to get out of your mind to see God — because God is in everything you’ve banished from your mind.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “My job is to, like, think beyond the immediate.”
  — George W. Bush, Washington DC, 21 April 2004


• “Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country.”
  — George W. Bush, interview with Al Arabiya Television, 5 May 2004


• “When the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn’t serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences.”
  — George W. Bush, Meet The Press, 8 Feb 2004


• “The ability of the rich and their acolytes to see social virtue in what serves their interest and convenience and to depict as ridiculous or foolish what does not was never better manifested than in their support of gold and their condemnation of paper money.”
  — John Kenneth Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975


• “If one is pretending to knowledge one does not have, one cannot ask for explanations to support possible objections.”
  — John Kenneth Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975


• “There is reluctance in our time to attribute great consequences to human inadequacy — to what, in a semantically less cautious era, was called stupidity. We wish to believe that deeper social forces control all human action.”
  — John Kenneth Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975


• “As Israel’s own history shows, fighting a stronger opponent will cause a society to unite, but combating a weaker one will cause it to split and disintegrate.”
  — Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld


• “If a man were to leap off the Eiffel Tower, mathematics could predict how long it would take him to hit the ground, but not why he chose to jump in the first place.”
  — Ian Stewart, “Does God Play Dice?”, 1989


• “I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”
  — Isaac Newton


• “The comparative importance of a small number of great corporations in the American economy cannot be denied except by those who have a singular immunity to statistical evidence or a striking capacity to manipulate it.”
  — J. K. Galbraith, “American Capitalism”, 1952


• “The existence of market power creates an incentive to the organization of another position of power that neutralizes it.”
  — J. K. Galbraith, “American Capitalism”, 1952


• “It was not possible to combine a highly productive economy and the resulting affluence with a minimal state. [...] Among numerous conservatives there is still a conviction that the minimal state was deliberately destroyed by socialists, planners, etatists, and other wicked men who did not know what they were about, or knew all too well. Far more of the responsibility lies with [Adam] Smith himself. Along with the corporation, his system created the wealth that made his state impossible.”
  — J. K. Galbraith, “Annals of an Abiding Liberal”, c.1965


• “Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive.”
  — Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan”, 1651


• “No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.”
  — Hesiod, “Works and Days”, c. 700 B.C.


• “Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.”
  — Montaigne, Essays, 1580


• “Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools.”
  — George Chapman, “All Fools”, 1605


• “The Girondins were idealists and it is one of the advantages of idealism that it can be summoned to the support of practically anything.”
  — Stanley Loomis, “The Fatal Friendship”, 1972


• “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
  — Hermann Goering, interview in Nuremburg by Gustave Gilbert, 18 April 1946


• “We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work.”
  — George W. Bush, 60 Minutes II, 5 December 2000


• “People can make significant progress by applying an idea commonplace in one area to a field in which it has less, or no, currency.”
  — Prof. Mark E.J. Newman, UMich Ann Arbor, in Science News 28 Aug 2004


• “Evangelical nihilism [is the belief that] we wouldn’t be so powerful if we weren’t right.”
  — Cornel West, “Democracy Matters”, 2004


• “The logic of winning in Vietnam was inescapably the logic of genocide. We did not lose in Vietnam. We chose not to win. If our entry into the war had something to do with preserving our values, so did our exit from it.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Republic, 29 April 1985


• “Politicians are not essayists; their purpose is not to make themselves clear but to make themselves, and their ideas, acceptable to a fleeting majority.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, 9 September 1996


• “First Baptist [in Dallas] has long been a bastion of political and theological reaction. At its private school, founded a generation ago to promote racial segregation, young minds are unsullied by Darwinism, unless it is social.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Republic, 28 March 1988


• “We have swallowed the myth of activist judges without ever tasting or chewing.”
  — Dahlia Litwick, LA Times, 12 Oct 2004


• “A fanatic does what he thinks the Lord would do if he only knew the facts in the case.”
  — Finley Peter Dunne


• “But in the Nazi scheme of things one concession from a yielding opponent must lead quickly to another.”
  — William Shirer, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, 1959


• “In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret.”
  — Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, NY Times 10 Jan 05


• “I no longer devote too much attention to unimportant details, and consider the expression of a face more important than the cut of its features.”
  — Ferrucio Busoni, Preface to Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, 1914


• “Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.”
  — George Santayana


• “If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.”
  — Lyall Watson


• “Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”
  — Tim Krabbé, “The Rider”, 1978


• “Nothing is better for a firm and solid faith than being in the wrong.”
  — Tim Krabbé, “The Rider”, 1978


• “Times are bad. Children don’t obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.”
  — Cicero, cited everywhere, but I can’t find the specific source.


• “He acted as though youth were in itself a virtue and age a matter of negligence on the part of those who should know better.”
  — Isaac Asimov, “Foundation’s Edge”, 1982


• “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
  — John 12:24


• “When you hunt animals you may succeed or not. But when you open the fridge, you will succeed 100 percent of the time.”
  — Nora Volkow, quoted in Science News 3 Sep 05 vol 168 # 10


• “Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”


• “The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert ... a prolonged war by national armies is likely to be followed by a period of social unrest for victors and vanquished alike.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”


• “They [fanatics] separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”


• “To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy — the present ... [which is] a mere doormat on the threshold of the millenium.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”


• “Newspapers aren’t so much records of what is going on as they are records of what people say is going on.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “Like an unstable chemical radical he hungers to combine with whatever comes within his reach.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”


• “The freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”


• “About the only positive thing you can say for religion is gets the best out of architects.”
  — Ben Tripp, in Counter Punch, 8/9 Nov 2005


• “You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ.”
  — Bob Jones III, to President Bush after the 2004 election.


• “The strange alchemy of time has converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party [while] Republicans are behaving like the radical party, reckless and embittered, dismantling institutions built solidly into our social fabric.”
  — Adlai Stevenson c. 1956


• “What causes the greatest crimes in history? ... I would say two things: sincere love and a sincere devotion to liberty... If you kill out of love or for a perfect utopia, you never stop killing because human nature is always imperfect.”
  — Peter Viereck, lecture at Mt. Holyoke, 1997


• “Has it [his opponent’s argument] not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?”
  — Abraham Lincoln, sixth Lincoln-Douglas debate


• “Break me a fucking give.”
  — Anthony Lane, re Yoda’s syntax, The New Yorker, 2005


• “The filibuster is an affront to commonly understood democratic norms, but then so is the Senate.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, 14 Nov 2005


• “She shunned occasions when she had to comply with the superficial chatter of others by employing a false self to maintain an empty collusion.”
  — R.D. Laing & A. Esterson, “Sanity, Madness, and the Family”, Tavistock 1964


• “All these [secularized Muslim] societies are the same in one respect, that none of them is based on submission to God. [Islam]... considers all these un-Islamic and illegal.”
  — Sayyid Qutb, “Milestones”


• “At the very least, comsats and personalized transceivers will banish forever the exasperation of waiting on a corner for a friend while he mistakenly waits for you on another.”
  — Arthur C. Clarke, “Man and Space”, Life Science Library 1964


• “[Western societies have] established assemblies of men which have absolute power to legislate laws, thus usurping the right which belongs to God alone.”
  — Sayyid Qutb, “Milestones”


• “Thus the humiliation of the common man under communist systems and the exploitation of individuals and nations due to the greed for wealth and imperialism under capitalist systems are but a corollary of rebellion against God’s authority and the denial of the dignity of man given to him by God.”
  — Sayyid Qutb, “Milestones”


• “Nothing can be more absurd than the idea that we can do something to please or displease an infinite Being.”
  — Robert Ingersoll, “On the Accomplishments of Freethought”, 1890


• “To practice justice, to love mercy is not enough. You must believe in some incomprehensible creed. You must say ‘Once one is three, and three times one is one.’”
  — Robert Ingersoll, “Thomas Paine”, 1877


• “The only reason why we wish to exchange thoughts is that we are different. Therefore the commerce that we call conversation.”
  — Robert Ingersoll, “Free Speech and Honest Thought”, 1888


• “In the days of Muslim glory Islam opened itself to the learning of the world. Now fundamentalism provides an intellectual thermostat, set low.”
  — V.S. Naipaul, “Among the Believers”, 1981


• “An unacknowledged part of the [Islamic] fantasy is that the world goes on, runs itself, has only to be inherited.”
  — V.S. Naipaul, “Among the Believers”, 1981


• “I’ve been jailed by the British, the Singaporeans, and the Malaysians. The only people who jailed me in such a way that it was possible to be friendly with them afterwards were the British.”
  — James Puthucheary, quoted in Naipaul, “Among the Believers”, 1981


• “The proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum to their patients who chew gum.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, citing Jon Stewart’s joke, “New Yorker”, 13 March 2006


• “These kinds of people are the ones who cause all the trouble, and the people wouldn’t bother to riot if there was no one who deviated. These kinds of people should not exist.”
  — Ma’ruf Amin, Indonesian Council of Ulemas, on religious dissenters, quoted in LA Times, 20 March 2006


• “If somebody at one point affirms the truth [belief in God] and then rejects it or denies it, it would jeopardize the whole paradigm of truth. This is such a big offense that the penalty can only be death.”
  — Shahnawaz Farooqui, cited in Asia Times, 24 March 2006


• “Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die.”
  — Abdul Raoulf, Afghan Muslim cleric


• “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
  — Aldous Huxley


• “When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.”
  — Matt Groening, “Life in Hell”


• “Everything is a drug; it depends on the dose.”
  — Paracelsus


• “If drugs are so dangerous and so destructive, why do they need to chemically analyze your urine and hair for trace amounts to determine if you use them?”
  — Unknown


• “You can talk about the negatives of 4 to 5 percent market share, but it’s kind of like being in the ocean. We’re on the bottom, so it doesn’t matter what the weather is like up top.”
  — Steve Jobs, quoted online 28 Apr 06


• “I would execute gays only if we catch them indulging in sodomy.”
  — Gary DeMar, in Mother Jones, December 05


• “He [George W. Bush] is compelled to use language less to express than to control.”
  — Justin A. Frank, “Bush on the Couch”, 2004


• “Conservatives know the world is a dark and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements for the worse.”
  — George F. Will, quoted in J. Jost et al, “Political Conservatism as Motivated by Social Cognition”, Psych. Bull. of the Amer. Psych. Assoc. 2002, cited in Frank.


• “Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent.”
  — Anthony Storr, “Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen — A Study of Gurus”, 1996


• “A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things, like existence, that ordinary people take for granted.”
  — Alan Watts


• “Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it’s impossible, it’s like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it’s done.”
  — Lewis Black, in The Onion A.V. Club, June 7 2006


• “At the very moment political theory is coming to terms with the end of foundations, political practice is spinning off into a world driven by foundationalist certainties and the attempt to remake political, cultural, and economic power in accordance with them.”
  — Roxanne L. Euben, “Enemy in the Mirror”, Princeton University Press, 1999


• “Fundamentalism can be understood as part of the larger attempt among various groups and theories to ‘re-enchant’ a world characterized by the experience of disenchantment.”
  — Roxanne L. Euben, “Enemy in the Mirror”, Princeton University Press, 1999


• “Dictators [in Muslim countries] can forbid parties, they can forbid meetings — they cannot forbid public worship, and they can only to a limited extent control sermons. The more oppressive the regime, the more it helps the fundamentalists by giving them a virtual monopoly of opposition.” Bernard Lewis, “The Crisis of Islam”, 2003


• “Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims, and proudly identify themselves as such.”
  — Bernard Lewis, “The Crisis of Islam”, 2003


• “No one has yet asserted that the destruction of the World Trade Center never happened, though with the passage of time, this will not be beyond the capacity of conspiracy theorists.”
  — Bernard Lewis, “The Crisis of Islam”, 2003


• “The problem with evidence is it doesn’t always support your opinion.”
  — Stephen Colbert, interviewing Suskind 13 July 06


• “We were moving forward, and if we didn’t invade someone we would have tripped over our own preparedness.”
  — ibid


• “[Conservative critics] have been using words like ‘whiners’ and ‘spoiled’ to get parents — and educated mothers in particular — to put up or shut up. And the way they most commonly do this is to recast big social problems as the little personal problems of those who ‘complain’ about them.”
  — Judith Warner, NY Times, 16 July 2006


• “Free will is that which consciousness claims.”
  — Andrew Duncan, 17 July 2006


• “Perfectionism is the root of all evil. Or, perfection kills.”
  — Andrew Duncan, 17 July 2006


• Related: “Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis.”
  — cited on the Web


• “Catching W. off-guard, the really weird thing is his sense of victimization. He’s strangely resentful about the actual core of his job.”
  — Maureen Dowd, 19 July 06, NY Times


• “There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.”
  — Stanley Fish, NY Times, 22 July 06


• “Partisans, it turns out, are particularly susceptible to the general human belief that other people are susceptible to propaganda.”
  — Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, 24 July 06, citing research by Lee Ross at Stanford and Richard Perloff at Cleveland State University


• “Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts?”
  — Winston Churchill on Iraq, cited in Time, 30 July 2006


• “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection than in the course which the wind blows.”
  — Charles Darwin, cited in LA Times, 30 July 2006


• “The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; ... instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe....They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. ... they prefer the bright, clear problems of war — as they used to be. For they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what...”
  — C. Wright Mills, “The Causes of World War Three”, 1958, cited by Alexander Cockburn in CounterPoint, 31 July 2006


• “News is something that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret; everything else is advertising.”
  — Lord North, cited online 2006


• “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
  — Bertrand Russell


• “You are now able to judge a man by how often he prays in a day.”
  — Mohammed Rafik Kamalov, imam in Kyrzhikistan, about institution of Islamic law. Cited in LA Times, 12 Aug 2006


• “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
  — Daniel Patrick Moynihan, cited by David Brooks in NY Times, 12 Aug 2006


• “The last temptation is the greatest treason:
  To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
  — T.S. Eliot, “Murder in the Cathedral”


• “For others, the main culprit is Muslim sexism, and the relegation of women to an inferior position in society, thus depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people, and entrusting the crucial early years of the upbringing of the other half to illiterate and downtrodden mothers. The products of such an education, it was said, are likely to grow up either arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society.”
  — Bernard Lewis, “What Went Wrong?”, 2002


• “Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.”
  — Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”, 1911


• “For all the surface glitter of his culture, the one thing of value that modern man has achieved is a rather impressive amount of knowledge and understanding of himself and the world. Much of this knowledge is not yet available to large numbers of men; sadly, it is rejected by many others.”
  — F. Clark Howell, “Early Man”, Life Nature Library, 1963


• “I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage — leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.”
  — Warren Buffett, 1991, cited in NY Times 17 Sep 2006


• “So long as this obscene display [the waltz] was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society ... we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
  — Times of London 1816, cited in NY Times 18 Oct 2006


• “I subscribe to the theory that only a creation that speaks to succeeding generations can truly be labeled art.”
  — Charles Schulz


• “There exists... a whole world of rules which are so generally taken for granted that they are never articulated. The ‘mentally ill’ individual comes to the atttention of his community because he breaks these left-over, residual rules.”
  — Gavin Miller, “R.D. Laing”, Edinburgh Review, 2004


• “Those who suffer from and complain of their own behaviour are usually classified as ‘neurotic:’ those whose behaviour makes others suffer, and about whom others complain, are usually classified as ‘psychotic.’”
  — Thomas Szasz, “The Second Sin”, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974


• “The diagnosed ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ who claims that other people are robots has merely arrived, intuitively, at a conclusion toward which a philosopher must labour in a lengthy treatise... A madman is a philosopher who has the courage of his convictions.”
  — Gavin Miller, “R.D. Laing”, Edinburgh Review, 2004


• “Rational decision-making should not be driven primarily by recovery of past costs. If you can no longer justify it in terms of what it will bring in the future and what its realistic prospects are, that is a warning sign you may have become entrapped.”
  — Scott Plous, in Washington Post 4 Dec 2006


• “It’s like climbing Mt. Everest, only down.”
  — John Hodgman, about running for president, on Daily Show, 4 Dec 2006


• “In all my time in Washington I’ve never seen such smugness, arrogance, or such insufferable moral superiority ... Self-congratulatory. Full of itself. Horrible.”
  — William Bennett, about the Iraq Group Report, on National Review web site


• “The Bush administration, as usual, has it exactly backwards. The danger is not that the ‘terrorists’ we are fighting in Iraq will come here if we pull out there. Rather, American involvement in 4GW in Iraq will create ‘terrorism’ here from among the people we have sent to fight the war there. Well educated in the ways of successful insurgency, they will come home embittered by a lost war, by friends dead and crippled for life to no purpose. Thanks to America’s de-industrialization, they will return to no jobs, or lousy ‘service’ jobs at minimum wage. Angry, frustrated and futureless, some of them will find new identities and loyalties in gangs and criminal enterprises, where they can put their new talents to work.”
  — William S. Lind, “The Boomerang Effect”, CounterPunch, 6 December 2006


• “If you don’t get down, it doesn’t count.”
  — Ed Viesturs, about climbing mountains, on the Daily Show, 7 Dec 2006


• “You don’t outsource the responsibilities of the commander in chief. The whole thing is absurd.”
  — Richard Perle, about the Iraq Group Report, quoted in NY Times 9 Dec 2006


• “The morbidity ... that the psychiatrist has to deal with seems, for the most part, to be not a morbidity of ... organic functions but of experience itself.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Cultural Anthropology and Psychology”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 27, 1932


• “The locus of psychiatry turns out not to be the human organism at all in any fruitful sense of the word but the more intangible, and yet more intelligible, world of human relationships and ideas that such relationships bring forth.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Cultural Anthropology and Psychology”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 27, 1932


• “In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available.”
  — Sam Harris, LA Times, 25 December 2006


• “[New] freedoms are usually interpreted to mean sex, drugs, pornography and alcohol, rather than the more intangible freedoms inherent in democracy.”
  — Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune, 4 Jan 2007, about Afghanistan


• “Freedom is a fairly simple thing to get.”
  — Michael Ledeen, “The Power of Nightmares”, documentary by Adam Curtis, 2005


• “The assumption of a Voltaire that Reason for people other than oneself will prevail over the passions, the assumption of a Rousseau that the human spirit, other than one’s own, is perfectible, can only be made in a climate of civilized disciplines in which manners, if not morals, have come to conceal the rude substructure of things.”
  — Stanley Loomis, “The Fatal Friendship”, Avon 1972


• “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
  — Marie Curie


• “O wad some Power the giftie gie us
  To see oursels as ithers see us!
  It wad frae mony a blunder free us
  An foolish notion”
  — Robert Burns, “To a Louse”, 1786


• “If you held hands with your mother, and she held hands with hers, and she with hers, the line would stretch only from New York to Washington before you were holding hands with the ‘missing link’ — the common ancestor with chimpanzees.”
  — Matt Ridley, “Genome”, 1999


• “Natural selection consumes variation: that is its job.”
  — Matt Ridley, “Genome”, 1999


• “The best defence against designer babies is to find more genes and swamp people in too much knowledge.”
  — Matt Ridley, “Genome”, 1999


• “Some of the most emotionally laden sounds we hear and make are non-speech vocalizations, like moans and groans and oohs and aahs and laughing and crying. If you believe music does not have evolutionary significance you are in a very small minority.”
  — Mark Jude Tramo, Harvard neuroscientist, quoted in Washington Post, 22 Jan 07


• “A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.”
  — Old English proverb, cited by Shippey in “J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century”, Houghton-Mifflin 2000


• “One can never tell for sure, in The Lord of the Rings, whether the danger of the Ring comes from inside, and is sinful, or from outside, and is merely hostile.”
  — Tom Shippey, “J.R.R. Tolkein: Author of the Century”, Houghton-Mifflin, 2000


• “Powerful nations tend to win wars when all they seek is an opponent’s submission, but tend to lose when victory requires an opponent’s cooperation.”
  — Shankar Vedantam, synopsizing Patricia Sullivan in Washington Post 29 Jan 07


• “Much of what [Amory Lovins] recommends sounds just too good to be true, the econometric version of ‘Shed pounds by eating chocolate!’”
  — Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 22 Jan 2007


• “Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”
  — Marshall McCluhan, quoted by Amory Lovins


• “Most Sunni Muslims can’t pray behind a Shiite because if you are praying differently from the way the leader is, then it doesn’t work, it’s not valid.”
  — Ramy Shabana, president of the Muslim Association of U Michigan Dearborn, quoted in NY Times, 4 Feb 07


• “Instead of aiming for the stars, the greatest power on earth is bogged down in poorly navigated conflicts with ancient tribes and brutes in caves.”
  — Maureen Dowd, NY Times 28 Feb 07


• “Growing up in Minnesota in the 1950s, my mother used to tell me to finish my dinner, because people in India and China were starving. I tell my girls, ‘Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your jobs.’ “
  — Tom Friedman, lecture in Santa Barbara, quoted in SB News-Press, 1 March 07


• “Put any two science types in a room together and they’ll find lots to talk about. Whereas if you put them with someone chosen at random from the population, they might struggle with small talk on subjects like sports, TV, shopping, and Hollywood movies.”
  — Anne Lambert, founder of Science Connection, Discover Magazine, Feb 07


• “The British are often accused of living in the past — a charge they may self-congratulatingly accept — but the French in this mode run them very close.”
  — Julian Barnes, New York Review of Books, 29 March 2007


• “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
  — Michael Ledeen, speech at American Enterprise Institute in the early 1990s, as quoted in National Review Online, cited in CounterPunch online


• “The deliberate attempt to impose a culture directly and speedily, no matter how backed by good will, is an affront to the human spirit. When such an attempt is backed, not by good will, but by military ruthlessness, it is the greatest conceivable crime against the human spirit.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious”, American Journal of Sociology, 1924


• “Metaphors are dangerous things that prove nothing.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious”, American Journal of Sociology, 1924


• “A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify making their life a hell in this.”
  — R.D. Tawney, British historian, cited in “Wealth and Democracy”, Kevin Phillips, 2002


• “The only way to match [the film Transformers’] median sound level would be to blow up a trombone factory.”
  — Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 9 & 16 July 2007


• “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments to the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
  — Thomas Jefferson, first inaugural address.


• “Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?”
  — Jules Feiffer


• “Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing the personal one.”
  — Sigmund Freud


• “The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.”
  — Huang Po


• “Instant coffee ... is a well-deserved punishment for being in a hurry to reach the future.”
  — Alan Watts, “Does It Matter?”, Vintage Books, 1968


• “But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.”
  — Gloria Steinem, on Obama vs. Hillary, NY Times 8 Jan 08


• “There seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it.”
  — Steven Pinker, NY Times 13 Jan 08


• “I’ve never seen someone help himself by explaining himself.”
  — Barry Langberg, NY Times 13 Jan 08, on why your lawyer should talk for you


• “The wise man will love; all others will desire.”
  — Afranius


• “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
  — John K. Galbraith


• “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
  — John Stuart Mill


• “News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.”
  — Ex-NBC news president Rubin Frank
  [Sounds a lot like Lord North above.]


• “People who come from traumatic backgrounds gravitate toward the solution of becoming a celebrity.”
  — Dr. Drew Pinsky, LA Times 10 Feb 08


• “Americans end a meal by saying ‘I’m full.’ The French end a meal by saying ‘That was delicious.’”
  — Clotaire Rapaille, The Culture Code, Broadway Books, 2006


• “He’s a crackhead, a celebrity addicted to human lips resting on the crack of his/her rear end.”
  — Jason Whitlock on Roger Clemens, Fox Sports 11 Feb 08


• “That’s like asking me, ‘If people sprout two heads, should they wear two little hats or one big one?’ I can’t get with that assumption.”
  — Leonore Tiefer, on questions whose premises are dubious. — NY Times 13 Mar 08


• “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”
  — John Dewey, “The Public and its Problems”, 1927


• “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”
  — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, comparing the morning paper to morning prayers


• “Watching Bush speak you realize he’s a really dumb person who thinks everyone in the room is even dumber than he is.”
  — Duncan Black, blog 4 May 08


• “The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it... Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.”
  — Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, 2006


• “They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
  — Albert Einstein, on atheists


• “Entropy + topology = karma”
  — Andrew Duncan, 2008


• “Don’t you understand that men need more money to take care of their families?”
  — Cited as one of 10 rudest [I’d say dumbest] questions, re income inequality, in Washington Post 18 June 2008


• “Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things as a meaningful unity.”
  — Albert Einstein


• “In the depths of the malady [depression], getting a stamp on a letter is a day’s work.”
  — Dick Cavett, “Smiling Through”, NY Times, 27 June 2008


• “You don’t get it [depression] until you got it.”
  — Mike Johnson, in response to Cavett


• “Depression is no longer the enemy, but rather an old if bothersome friend, whose advice I no longer take.”
  — Jan McLaughlin, in response to Cavett


• “We must all now trust that this man who can’t hold his liquor will be able to hold near-absolute power without getting drunk on it.”
  — Chris Floyd, 21 September, 2001, about George W. Bush


• “Ideas are the weapons of world conflict now, and violence is the exclamation point.”
  — 129CBRider, online comment about Adam Curtis series “Power of Nightmares”


• “By raising the level of fear around you, your own fear seems more normal and socially acceptable.”
  — Philip Zimbardo, in Newsweek, cited by Bugliosi in “Helter Skelter”


• “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
  — Michael Pollan, “Why Mow?”


• “Republicans lump environmentalists in the same category with abortionists, gays, feminists, food stamp recipients, trade unionists and terrorists. To a Republican, saving America means prevailing over these people.”
  — Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch, 11 Aug 08


• “The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe — those days are gone.”
  — Zalmay Khalilzad, ca. 14 Aug 08 [Note the “in Europe” caveat.]


• “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”
  — George W. Bush, ca. 14 Aug 08


• “As far as [A.L. Tibawi] was concerned, ‘scientific detachment’ could only be achieved by submitting to Islam. ... It must have been difficult for him to harbour so much resentment and still feel that life was worth living.”
  — Robert Irwin, “Dangerous Knowledge”, 2006


• “[Galen’s medicine] was a systematic way of misunderstanding the world.”
  — Robert Irwin, “Dangerous Knowledge”, 2006


• “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”
  — George W. Bush, quoted by Paul Krugman in NY Times 30 Aug 08


• “When you’re certain you cannot be fooled you become easy to fool.”
  — Penn Teller, magician


• “His voice makes the hum of a refrigerator coil sound like Martin Luther King.”
  — Stephen Colbert, of John McCain, 2 Sep 08


• “Joe Lieberman crosses party lines every time he pats himself on the back.”
  — Stephen Colbert, 3 September 08


• “There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money. He did not make his money alone.”
  — George Lakoff, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”, 2004


• “Fear triggers the strict father model.”
  — George Lakoff, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”, 2004


• “Although aspirin is well known for its relief of headache, headache is not caused by a shortage of aspirin in the body.”
  — Irving Gottesman, “Schizophrenia Genesis”, 1991


• “Compulsive personalities don’t usually come for treatment of their habits. Their complaints are about everybody else.”
  — Judith Rapoport, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing”, 1989


• “Nothing seems clearer than that we are responsible for our behavior... so we appeal to willpower in the devout belief that we can think our way to mental health. ... When it comes to mental illness, we are all Christian Scientists.”
  — Edward Dolnick, “Madness on the Couch”, 1998


• “As the psychoanalyst’s joke had it, the person who arrives at a party early is anxious; the one who arrives on time is compulsive; and the one who arrives late is hostile.”
  — Edward Dolnick, “Madness on the Couch”, 1998


• “Viewing the whole span of history, tobacco, though more confined as to region, had nearly twice as long a run as gold... In its developed form, the gold standard was a brief experiment, a matter of a few decades, a half-century at most. It was only the sense that it was the final step, the ultimate money, that made it seem so much older.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975


• “Given inflation, people yearn for stable prices. If there is stability, then high taxation, a sluggish economy, unemployment becomes the greater menace.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975


• “It has been suggested that any organization that has been perfected as to form is already in decline.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975


• “Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime. So change comes not from men and women changing their minds but from the change from one generation to the next.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975


• “It will take time to restore chaos...”
  — George W. Bush, 13 April 2003


• “You have to do violence to human experience to assume there is not an intangible realm.”
  — Rabbi David J. Wolpe, N.Y. Times, 3 Nov 2008


• “They steered by the lights of passing ships rather than the stars.”
  — Carter Eskew, on McCain’s campaign, 6 Nov 2008


• “He doesn’t change his principles or his policies.”
  — Dana Perino, on the presidential transition, 7 Nov 2008
  [So you have either to start out perfect, or be wrong forever.]


• “I trust [my gut] so much it’s where I put all my food.”
  — Stephen Colbert, 11 Feb 2009


• “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”
  — Samuel Johnson


• “At any time in the past, be it 100, 1000, even 10,000 years ago, there was only one woman alive at the time from whom you have inherited your mDNA.”
  — Bryan Sykes, “Saxons, Vikings, and Celts”, 2006


• “You might not be as smart as people think you are.”
  — Mia Duncan, to me, 12 April 2009


• “The Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.”
  — Bob Herbert, NY Times, 24 April 2009


• “When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
  — Sinclair Lewis


• “Art and science are connected by their attention to detail.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.”
  — Henry Adams


• “The role of government is to deal with your acts. The role of religion is to deal with your thoughts.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “If Obama ended world hunger, they’d accuse him of promoting obesity.”
  — Eugene Robinson, NY Times 13 Oct 09


• “In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the law and economics crowd don’t apply. There’s no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rules but by breaking them. They take the business-school view of law: Rules are not designed to guide behavior but laid down to define the limits of unpunished conduct. Once one gets close to the line, stepping over it is easy. A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior.”
  — J.K. Galbraith


• “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
  — Thomas Donnelly, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 2000, from Project for a New American Century


• “Moderates by definition have no principles.”
  — Rush Limbaugh, 2 November 2009


• “When people expect you to lie, the best way in the world to be misunderstood is to tell the truth.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.”
  — Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams


• “To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”
  — Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


• “There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it.”
  — Cicero, De Divinatione


• “There is virtually no opinion an individual can hold that is so outlandish that he will not find other believers on the Web.”
  —Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 2 November 2009


• “If the bankruptcy rate among the top five hundred corporations were as high as the general divorce rate among the thirty-seven million married couples, there would be economic catastrophe on an international scale.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956


• “By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956


• “The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956


• “The entrepreneur, in the classic image, was supposed to have taken a risk, not only with his money but with his very career; but once the founder of a business has taken the big jump he does not usually take serious risks as he comes to enjoy the accumulation of advantages that lead him into great fortune. If there is any risk, someone else is usually taking it. Of late, that someone else... has been the government of the United States. If a middle-class businessman is in debt for $50,000, he may well be in trouble. But if a man manages to get into debt for $2 million, his creditors, if they can, may well find it convenient to produce chances for his making money in order to repay them.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956


• “The chief executives, it is often said, ought really to be allowed to run the government, for if only such men were in charge there would be no waste, no corruption, no infiltration.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956


• “These little bumps? God is polishing me.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “In the last few years, big banks have found many surprising ways to lose billions of dollars... But few can match the odd tale involving Kazakhstan and a little-known bank that many Western financiers wish had remained so to them.”
  — Landon Thomas Jr., NY Times, 28 November 2009


• “You need to have an Other, because all your observations are comparisons. You line up one thing against another.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “There have developed in this standing army... certain gratifications which even men of violence want: the security of a job, but more, the calculable glory of living according to a rigid code of honor.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956


• “[The Fountainhead] is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization. [...] Rand may be, in an aesthetic sense, the most totalitarian novelist ever to have sat down at a desk.”
  — Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker, 9 November 2009


• “Man is a megalomaniac among animals — if he sees mountains he will try to imitate them by pyramids, and if he sees some grand process like evolution, and thinks it would be at all possible for him to be in on that game, he would irreverently have to have his whack at that too.”
  — Hermann J. Muller


• “If thoughts are things then we do have infinite life.”
  — Andrew Duncan, 14 December 2009


• “A one language world would be an unbearable world, in which people would be bored to death.”
  — Claude Hagège, NY Times, 16 December 2009


• “We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over.”
  — Frank Rich, NY Times, 20 December 2009


• “It’s not how fast you type, it’s how mad you hype.”
  — Stephen Colbert, 3 February 2010 [About job-seeking.]


• “Politicians want to pass the ball forward, and if a banker can show them a way to pass a problem to the future, they will fall for it.”
  — Gikas A. Hardouvelis, Greek economist, quoted in NY Times 13 Feb 2010


• “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result is also insane.”
  — Andrew Duncan, 13 February 2010


• “The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic... In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement.”
  — George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn


• “Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.”
  — George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn


• “Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think.”
  — Deborah Loewenbert Ball, professor at Michigan State, quoted in NY Times 2 March 2010


• “The Vice-President of an extremely important corporation in the United States ... said ‘There are two major forces operating in the world today for good or for evil. One is Red China. The other is LSD.’”
  — Alan Watts lecture


• “Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.”
  — Alan Watts


• “To incarnate, to express your inspiration. To bring Heaven down to Earth... But there’s no way of pointing it out unless you do something skillful.”
  — Alan Watts discussing art


• “What is the whole test and canon of sanity in almost any society? A person is sane if he gets the cues as to whether words or action or gesture are intended seriously or intended playfully.”
  — Alan Watts, “The Proscenium Arch”


• “The French Revolution culminated in terror, whereas the Russian one began with it.”
  — Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990


• “Art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself.”
  — Michael Kimmelman, NY Times, 14 April 2010


• “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble [of earthquakes]? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”
  — Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, Iranian cleric, in Associated Press, 19 April 2010


• “Peace is anything but passive.”
  — Santos Rico, in the Santa Barbara Independent, 22 April 2010


• “Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.”
  — Karl Kraus


• “Sexual Repression: The Malady That Considers Itself the Remedy”
  — Christopher Ryan, Psychology Today, 20 April 2010


• “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.”
  — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene


• “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
  — Justice Anthony Kennedy, Planned Parenthood v. Casey


• “They [Tea Party Jacobins] don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules.”
  — Mark Lilla, NY Review of Books, 27 May 2010


• “Only if a man has no friends can he tell the truth all the time. And if he tells the truth all the time he will have no friends.”
  — Andrew Duncan


• “If a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan.”
  — Helen Ukpabio, Unveiling the Mysteries of Witchcraft


• “You know, there really should be a special tag for sarcastic links to make them show up in a different color.”
  — The Macalope, Macworld.com, 22 May 2010


• “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”
  — Janet A. Flammang, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, 2010


• “Once a preference is acquired, most people do not change it, but simply obey it.”
  — Internal memorandum at Frito-Lay, 1979, cited in NY Times, 29 May 2010


• “The reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been ... quite highly civilized, there gradually emerged a people ... who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.”
  — H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, 1952


• “I am speaking here all the time of psychotic patients (i.e. as most people immediately say to themselves, not you or me).”
  — R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, 1960


• “Sterligov, like most plutocrats, immunized himself from criticism and convinced himself that everyone was simply jealous.”
  — David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 1994


• “... there were at least a few persons who seem to think the [Vietnam] war is some kind of presidential prerogative which we must not allow college boys or effeminate professors to infringe.”
  — D.P. Moynihan, Nixon Presidential Library Document, October 1969


• “In America, there has been a tendency to divide foreign policy into two schools of thought. One that identifies foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry and another that treats it as a subdivision of theology.”
  — Henry Kissinger, World Affairs Council, 1999


• “Palin is all cheer and no leader.”
  — Charles M. Blow, NY Times, 16 July 2010


• “It is part of the philosophical dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.”
  — Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice, 1960


• “You can state mini themes that will exist in 3 or exist in 4, and you can play stuff that comes around on the 1 in the most unlikely of ways. It doesn’t take that much work. What you don’t want to do when you’re playing in 7/4 is to wrap up things neatly in 7. You’ve got to state things in at least 14-beat patterns.”
  — Bob Weir, Acoustic Guitar magazine, August 2008


• “War is a beast that needs death, so it doesn’t die itself.”
  — Samuel Maoz, Lebanon (film), 2010


• “... I am utterly convinced that one day the millions who now curse us will salute with us what we have labored so hard to create: the new German Reich in all its greatness, in all its honor, might, glory, and justice! Amen.”
  — Adolf Hitler, ca. Feb 1933, ending his speech with the Hebrew word “Amen” (אָמֵן) which means “So be it”. Seen in “Hitler: A Career” by Joachim Fest & Christian Herrendoerfer


• “As Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple knows, people will say almost anything to an old lady they assume to be stupid.”
  — Ann Jones, Huffington Post, 1 August 2010


• “I want my kids to know when I’m pissed, when I’m happy, and when I’m confounded. Your face tells a story ... and it shouldn’t be a story about your drive to the doctor’s office.”
  — Julia Roberts, Elle magazine, September 2010


• “The new definition of a sports hero is someone whom we don’t yet have enough information on.”
  — Michael Sokolove, NY Times, 7 August 2010


• “We’re pushing aside some of the conservative old bulls. What the conservative movement is, what it stands for, is changing pretty rapidly.”
  — Adam Brandon, quoted in TIME, 27 August 2010. He didn’t say this with any apparent sense of irony.


• “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?”
  — Newt Gingrich, National Review Online, 11 Sep 2010


• “If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.”
  — Louis Brandeis. Check this quote!


• “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.”
  — Condoleezza Rice, 16 May 2002


• “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
  — George W. Bush, 1 September 2005 on ABC’s Good Morning America


• “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”
  — Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, NY Times 6 August 2006


• “I don’t think anybody anticipated this thing [mortgage crisis] getting as bad as it did.”
  — Jim Miller of Citigroup, Chase, and Capital One, NY Times 14 Oct 2010


• “I don’t think anyone anticipated that Hurricane Katrina would do what it did.”
  — Ray Nagin, on The Daily Show, 20 June 2011


• “Japanese government and utility officials have repeatedly said that engineers could never have anticipated the magnitude 9.0 earthquake — by far the largest in Japanese history — that caused the sea bottom to shudder and generated the huge tsunami.”
  — NY Times, 26 March 2011


• “I’ve learned that people lie about themselves, and that they don’t really know what other people are like. They just have incredibly big blind spots.”
  — Christopher K. Travis, interior designer, NY Times 28 Oct 2010


• “Doing nothing is very hard to do — you never know when you’re finished.”
  — Leslie Nielsen, attributed by Steven Zeitchik in LA Times 29 Nov 2010


• “For [George W.] Bush, making decisions is an identity question. Who am I?”
  — George Packer, New Yorker, 29 Nov 2010


• “Its foundations [the Confederate government] are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”
  — Alexander Stephens, VP of the Confederacy, “Cornerstone Speech”, 21 March 1861


• “The representative of the supreme leader at the University of Yazd said that since the skin of one’s elbow is similar to the skin of a man’s testicles, people should refrain from wearing short-sleeved shirts.”
  — Kambiz Hosseini, host of “Parazit”, quoted 31 December 2010, Washington Post


• “The media is like the world’s worst paramedics: they declare people dead when they’re napping.”
  — Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, 3 January 2011


• “The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”
  — Sam Harris, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, 2004, Norton


• “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”
  — Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”, 2006, Houghton Mifflin


• “It’s not easy to take a computer-generated shark that can walk on a beach with octopus legs and make it seem believable.”
  — Roger Corman, NY Times, 14 Jan 2011


• “In our own day, millions fuse the real lives and the screen lives of movie actors, assign the combination an importance greater than any they concede to the real human beings whom they know, and then suffer the melancholy consequences.”
  — Jack Miles, "God A Biography", Vintage, 1995


• “No one can make a claim to the right to a nuptial ceremony.”
  — Pope Benedict XVI, 22 Jan 2011


• “The first impact of a tiger attack does not come from the tiger itself, but from the roar, which ... has the effect of separating you from yourself.”
  — John Vaillant, “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival”, 2011


• “Unconstrained by concrete concerns for what will happen to any population that supports them, deracinated jihadis can seriously consider any manner of attack.”
  — Scott Atran, “Talking to the Enemy”, 2010


• “To kill and die with friends... almost invariably involves deep love of one’s group. Hatred of others may not even be necessary, only a fathomless lack of empathy and concern is.”
  — Scott Atran, “Talking to the Enemy”, 2010


• “Hitler was worse than Stalin was worse than Mao was worse than Hitler.” [A non-transitive relation.]
  — Andrew Duncan, 29 January 2011


• “Do mathematicians see God? Mathematicians are God. Once in a while.”
  — Andrew Duncan, 3 February 2011


• “[The President] proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses.”
  — E.L. Doctorow, Houston Chronicle, 13 August 2005


• “Yea, verily, at that time, it is written in the book of Obadiah. A man shall strike his donkey and his nephew’s donkey and anyone in the vicinity of his nephew or the donkey.”
  — “The Life of Brian”, Scene 16


• “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
  — Charles Darwin, “The Descent of Man”, 1871


• “What does gender matter with regard to a well-composed mind, which experiences insight in the light of the dharma?”
  — Gautama Budda, “Samyutta Nikaya”, c. 500 BC


• “What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
  — Richard Feynman, “The Feynman Lectures on Physics”, 1964


• “We more often need to be reminded than informed.”
  — Samuel Johnson


• “Indonesian activists in the 1990s ... turned their president’s name into a snarky acronym: ‘sudah harus tobat’ (‘should have repented by now’).”
  — Ben Zimmer, NY Times, 12 Feb 2011


• “More or less eight to 10 million people go to such exhibitions [Auschwitz] around the world today, they cry, they ask why people didn’t react more at the time, why there were so few righteous, then they go home, see genocide on television and don’t move a finger. They don’t ask why they are not righteous themselves.”
  — Piotr Cywinski, NY Times, 18 Feb 2011


• “Sitting behind the cello underneath the soundboard of the piano is one of the best places in the world when you are small and portable.”
  — David Lindley, Acoustic Guitar, June 2000, No. 90


• “It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.”
  — V.S. Ramachandran, interview with Errol Morris, 23 June 2010, NY Times


• “It's like the Holocaust of analogies.”
  — Larry Wilmore, on The Daily Show, 9 March 2011


• “Rights emerge by bargaining between the powerful and the relatively powerless; they are not simply ‘granted,’ for if they were, there would be none.”
  — Robert Hughes, “The Fatal Shore”, 1986, Vintage


• “To anyone who has served in Washington there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you’re painted into a corner, then you’re hung out to dry and, finally, you’re framed.”
  — Warren Christopher, 1999, cited in The Telegraph, 20 March 2011


• “Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying.”
  — Judge Alex Kozinski, U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 21 Mar 2011


• “When I hear scientists say ‘The data speak for themselves’ I cringe. Data never speak.”
  — Andrew J. Hoffman, NY Times 9 April 2011


• “Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”
  — Rick Santorum, WEZS radio 29 March 2011


• “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man ... a conspiracy of infamy, so black, that when it is finally exposed, its principals shall forever be deserving of the maledictions of all.”
  — Charles McCarthy, Congressional Record somewhere


• “Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cul- tural entity. They constitute civilizations.”
  — Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?", Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993


• “In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was ‘Which side are you on?’ and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is ‘What are you?’”
  — Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993


• “Airworld [air travel] reduces people’s experience to jump cuts, sudden transpositions of scenes with no establishing shots between.”
  — Will Self, quoted by Roger Cohen in NY Times, 16 May 2011


• “I go into flow playing bridge, but after a long tournament, when I look in the mirror, I worry that I am merely fidgeting until I die.”
  — Martin Seligman, quoted by John Tierney in NY Times, 16 May 2011


• “It is almost as though the English language dare not change so much as to render Shakespeare incomprehensible.”
  — Isaac Asimov, “Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare”, 1970


• “There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”
  — W. Somerset Maugham


• “Actors have to go places deliberately that the rest of us spend our time avoiding if we can.”
  — Nicholas Meyer, LA Times, 12 June 2011


• “More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60 million who visited Walt Disney Co.’s four biggest theme parks last year.”
  — Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ian Sherr, Wall Street Journal, 16 June 2011


• “This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason.”
  — Christopher Hitchens, NY Times, 16 June 2011, reviewing David Mamet’s “The Secret Knowledge”


• “I don’t trust children. They’re here to replace us.”
  — Stephen Colbert, 20 June 2011


• “But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
  — Lionel Trilling, “The Liberal Imagination”, 1950


• “In the very books in which philosophers tell us to despise fame, they inscribe their names.”
  — Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Pro Archia Poetia”, fl. 30 BC


• “Humans are sprung from the earth not as inhabitants but as spectators of things heavenly and celestial that other animals ignore.”
  — Marcus Tullius Cicero, “De Natura Deorum”


• “It is not he who has not, but he who wants more, who is poor.”
  — Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “Epistulae Morales”, fl. AD 40


• “When we go to train museums, they’re absolutely filled with children with autism.”
  — Liz Syed, quoted in NY Times 13 Aug 2011


• “The poor here [U.S.A.] see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
  — John Steinbeck


• “Alcohol is not likely to bring out any impulse that is not already potential in a personality, nor is it likely to cast behavior into patterns for which there is not already significant subsurface predilection. The alcohol merely facilitates expression by narcotizing inhibitory processes... The oil which lubricates the engine of an automobile neither furnishes the energy for its progress nor directs it.”
  — Hervey Cleckley, "The Mask of Sanity", 1988


• “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
  — Steve Jobs, Business Week, 25 May 1998


• “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
  — Steve Jobs, Commencement address, Stanford, 2005


• “[Conservatives] would rather have exhaust and noise and traffic jams, if such things sufficiently annoy liberals. Annoying liberals is a pleasure well worth paying for.”
  — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 12 Sep 2011


• “Language, used properly, is clear on its own.”
  — Bill Lancaster, quoted in NY Times, 23 Oct 2011 [I include this quote because I disagree with it.]


• “Since he [Fritz Todt] regularly responded to opposition by choosing someone more amenable, over the years he assembled around himself a group of associates who more and more surrendered to his arguments and translated them into action more and more unscrupulously.”
  — Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 1970


• “One woman wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt that she had heard that ‘if Governor Smith is elected president, the pope’s son will be his secretary.’ F.D.R. asked, in his reply, how many sons did the lady think the pope had, and what were their occupations?”
  — Robert A. Slayton, NY Times, 10 Dec 2011


• “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
  — Warren Buffett, cited in NY Times