Immigrants to the United States

"America is a country ready to be taken—in fact, longing to be taken—by political leaders ready to restore democracy and trust to the political process."

"The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway."

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife."

"When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling."

"Isn't it really, really offensive that our president is simply not telling us the truth about what's happening in Iraq? For me, that was one of the most offensive things about the entire convention. There was no truth-telling there. It was all a complete masquerade. Both about Iraq and about the domestic economy... The problem is not that the people think the Democratic Party is not sufficiently hawkish; it's the problem that they are not sufficiently bold and sufficiently visionary. They need to go back to Bobby Kennedy and 1968. That was the last time that a Democrat truly inspired red states and blue states and everybody and the millions of people out there."

"Don't forget: our media culture failed to serve the public interest by missing (with a few honourable exceptions) the two biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the Iraq war and the financial melt­down. We've had far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies."

"Two years after launching The Huffington Post I was exhausted, burnt out. The feeling many of us have. I collapsed from exhaustion and on the way down I hit my head on the desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is"

"By conventional definition of success, which means two metrics: money and power, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office"

"We need a third metric of success, which include our health and our being, first of all, because if we sacrifice that, what do we have? And our capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we so often miss, and our capacity to give, and to be kind"

"I’m asking people to realize that whatever our job in the world is, whatever our dreams are, we are bigger than that. If we can find that, who we really are and live from that place, life is truly amazing no matter what the challenges and the obstacles are"

"My mother would constantly say to me: ‘Don’t miss the moment’, because really that is all we have. And so often our minds take us to the future, either worrying about the future or judging our past"

"I started life so self-judgmental. I call the voice in my head the ‘obnoxious roommate’; always putting me down, telling me I’m not good enough. And learning to actually deal with that voice, with a sense of humor – maybe getting it to dance with you – in order to evict it from my head. Then we are much more present"

"The time-famine we are talking about is really what drains us, because it means we are not here. We are somewhere else with our minds"

"I want to look at how we can build a path forward for our lives, which is more sustainable and less fueled by burnouts, sleep deprivation, exhaustion"

"When I am not joyful, I look at what happened. I don’t mean joyful as in there are no challenges, problems etc., I mean when I’m not like ‘Hey this is great, I’m blessed, I’m doing something I love, I’m grateful’ – when I don’t have that feeling, I know that I’m off; I need to course correct"

"Tap into your creativity – even if it isn’t a part of your job. It’s one of the things that our culture has suppressed. Every child is creative; they sing, they draw. But then at some point if we can’t make a living out of our ‘creative love’, we drop it. But in fact it’s great to maintain in some way"

"I think a lot of people who would say they are atheists, when you really scratch the surface, they have a sense of spirituality or mysticism or wonder of the mystery of life, but they don’t believe in a particular creed. For me, really, what matters is to have that sense that there is something amazing and mysterious about life; that we haven’t figured it all out and the journey of exploring it is fascinating"

"Ariana Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision."

"There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents."

"I would say if you have a dream, follow it."

"There are so many people who are arguing or fighting over issues which don't have much relevance. We must all realise it is not worth it."

"Take the time to figure out how to get there. The quickest way may not necessarily be the best. The journey matters as much as the goal."

"The coolest thing for me is the experience of floating and not feeling my weight. And hanging by a window just after sunset and watching the stars in the big black dome of the sky as the earth moves underneath."

"It was starting to get dim outside, so you got to see your own reflection. And there is the Earth, and you can still see the Earth’s surface and the dark sky overhead. And I could then see my reflection in the window and in the retina of my eye the whole earth and the sky could be seen reflected. So I called all the crew members one by one and they saw it, and they said, 'oh wow'."

"YOU ARE YOUR INTELLIGENCE."

"I was suddenly arrested by what seemed to be an awful voice proclaiming the words, "Eternity! Eternity! Eternity!" It reached my very soul — my whole man shook — it brought me like Saul to the ground. The great depravity and sinfulness of my heart were set before me, and the gulf of everlasting destruction to which I was verging. I was made to bitterly cry out, "If there is no God — doubtless there is a hell." I found myself in the midst of it."

"I spent a night of watchfulness unto prayer, like Jacob, wrestling the whole night for the Lord's blessing, and towards morning the light of His countenance did very graciously arise upon me. My trust and confidence are renewed in Him, blessed and praised be His adorable name!"

"I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again."

"If I can anyway contribute to the diversion or improvement of the country in which I live, I shall leave it, when I am summoned out of it, with the satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain."

"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...."

"You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race."

"It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world."

"Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave."

"We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible."

"Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions."

"It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear."

"Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal."

"Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance."

"Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category."

"Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality."

"[T]he epic poet did not judge heroes by the result... their fate depended on totally external forces... Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost."

"Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness-foolishness..."

"I do not dispute that arguments should be simplified to their maximum... but people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind. ...MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify... beyond... requirement. (...I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)"

"[T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news."

"From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction."

"In the early 1990s... I became addicted to the various Monte Carlo engines, which I taught myself to build... The dividend of the computer revolution... did not come in... e-mail messages and... chat rooms; it was in the sudden availability of fast processors capable of generating a million sample paths per minute."

"My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup..."

"I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy."

"A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable..."

"[H]istory cannot lend itself to experimentation. But... is potent enough... to eventually bury the bad guy. Bad trades catch up with you... Mathematicians of probability give that a... name: '. [R]oughly... properties of a very... long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. ...Those unlucky... in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool... would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each ...would revert to his long-term properties."

"[A]ge is beauty. ...[M]y instinct is to value distilled thought over newer thinking, regardless of its apparent sophistication—another reason to accumulate the hoary volumes by my bedside... For an idea to have survived so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. ...[P]rogress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information..."

"There are hordes of thoughtful journalists... [I]t is just that prominent media journalism is a thoughtless process of providing the noise that captures people's attention and there exists no mechanism for separating the two."

"I... found a significant advantage in selecting aged traders, using as a selection criterion their cumulative years of experience rather than their absolute success... [O]lder people have been exposed longer to the rare event and can be, convincingly, more resistant to it."

"Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns. ...[O]ne sees the variance, little else. ...Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. ...I deal with it by having no access to information. ...I prefer to read poetry."

"[N]ews... is full of noise and... history is largely stripped of it."

"A trader's mental construction should direct him to do precisely what other people do not do."

"Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. ...[F]iremen ...who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous..."

"[A]t any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time... the most successful traders are likely to be those fit for the latest cycle."

"[T]hey share the traits of the acute successful randomness fool who, in addition, operates in the most random of environments. ...[T]heir bosses and employers shared the same trait. They, too, are permanently out of the market."

"There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone."

"Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky... free of the evolutionary rare event, the "best" operators in a given business can... One vicious attribute is that the longer these... can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it. ...[S]hould one extend time to infinity, then by , that event will happen with certainty—the species will be wiped out! For evolution means fitness to... only one time series, not the average of all possible environments."

"Why do [people] confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability [vs.] probability times payoff? Mainly because much... schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments... the... bell curve... is entirely symmetric."

"I have organized my career and business in such a way as to... benefit... I am profiting from the rare event, with asymmetric bets."

"In most disciplines... asymmetry does not matter. ...People in most fields ...do not have problems eliminating extreme values from their sample, when the difference in payoff between different outcomes is not significant ...A professor ...removes the ...s, and takes the average of the remaining ones, without ...being ...unsound. A casual weather forecaster does the same ...So people in finance borrow the technique and ignore infrequent events, not knowing that the effect ...can bankrupt a company."

"Many scientists... are... subject to such foolishness... One flagrant example is... global warming... These scientists initially ignored the fact that these [high temperature] spikes, although rare, had the effect of adding disproportionately to the cumulative melting of the ice caps. ...[A]n event, although rare, that brings large consequences cannot be ignored."

"Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature... [e.g.,] Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability... are the most prone to crashes."

"I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data."

"[W]e read too much into shallow recent history... but not from history in general [which] teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. ...outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson."

"[T]here is a category of traders who have inverse rare events, for whom volatility is often the bearer of good news. Those traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. ...crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them."

"Statistics... is all based on... the steady augmentation of the confidence level... [F]or an n times increase in sample size, we increase our knowledge by the square root on n. ...Where statistics ...fails us, is when we have distributions that are not symmetric... If there is a very small probability of finding a red ball in an urn dominated by black ones, then our knowledge about the absence of red balls will increase [even more] slowly. ...On the other hand, our knowledge of the presence of red balls will dramatically improve once one of them is found. This asymmetry in knowledge... is the central philosophical problem for... David Hume and Karl Popper."

"David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the black swan problem by... John Stuart Mill) No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

"Science had shifted, thanks to Bacon, into an emphasis on empirical observation. The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to... stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge... epistemology... Hume is the first modern epistemologist... he was an obsessive skeptic and never believed... that a link between two items could be established as being causal."

"Maximizing the probability of winning does not lead to maximizing the expectation from the game when one's strategy may include , i.e., a small chance of a large loss and a large chance of a small win. If you engaged in a Russian Roulette-type strategy... you are likely to show up as the winner in almost all samples—except in the year when you are dead."

"[W]e like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not enjoy this execution."

"What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in onel's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness."

"I will use statistics and inductive methods to make aggressive bets, but I will not use them to manage my risks and exposure. ...[A]ll the surviving traders I know seem to have done the same. ...[T]hey make sure the cost of being wrong is limited ...they know ...which events would prove their conjecture wrong and allow for it ...They would then terminate their trade. This is called a stop loss ...I find it rarely practiced."

"A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point."

"I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns."

"I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price."

"The major problem with inference... is that those whose profession it is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently... The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For common wisdom... is to base... decision making on the following principle: It is very unlikely for someone to perform... well in a consistent fashion without doing something right. ...[I]f someone performed better... in the past then there is a great[er] chance of performing better than the crowd in the future... But... [a] small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all."

"[B]ecoming more rational, or not feeling the emotions of social slights, is not part of the human race... not with our current biology. There is no solace to be found from reasoning..."

"Optimism, it is said, is predictive of success. ...It can also be predictive of failure. Optimistic people... take more risks as they are overconfident of the about the odds; those who win show up among the rich and famous, others fail and disappear from the analysis."

"Let us use 10,000 fictional investment managers... [O]nce a manager has a single bad year, he is thrown out of the sample. ...[T]oss a coin; heads and the manager will make $10,000 over the year, tails and he will lose $10,000. ...We have, in a fair game, 313 managers who made money five years in a row. ...[I]f we throw one of these ...into the real world we would get ...comments on his remarkable style, his incisive mind... His biographer will dwell on ...a great mind in the making. ...[S]hould he stop performing (...his odds ...have stayed at 50%) they would start ...finding fault with his dissipated lifestyle. They will find something he stopped doing, and attribute his failure... The truth ...he simply ran out of luck."

"The information that a person derived some profit in the past... by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. If the initial population is 10,000 managers, I would ignore the results."

"Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory."

"Even the fathers of statistical science forgot that a random series is bound to exhibit some pattern... Pearson was among the first scholars interested in creating artificial random number generators, tables one could use as inputs for... simulations (precursors of our Monte Carlo simulator). ...[T]hey did not want these tables to exhibit... regularity. Yet real randomness does not look random! ...A single random run is bound to exhibit some pattern ..."

"At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead."

"Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive."

"We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract."

"Wittgenstein's ruler: "Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler." (page 224)"

"[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)"

"[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)"

"[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)"

"I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill."

"If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant."

"It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation."

"History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds."

"Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories."

"But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right."

"We tend to use knowledge as therapy."

"Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!"

"The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable."

"Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties."

"There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing."

"Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish."

"Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average."

"Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making."

"The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death."

"One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers."

"While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information."

"Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause."

"This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity."

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought."

"The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean."

"It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

"Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them."

"Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab."

"Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control)."

"An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."

"In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it."

"Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense."

"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment."

"When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure."

"It’s harder to say no when you really mean it."

"Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry."

"You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative."

"People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse."

"The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane."

"Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules."

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers."

"Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood."

"Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing."

"Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation."

"What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment."

"Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty."

"A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty."

"Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you."

"The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss."

"You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept."

"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur."

"You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting."

"Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life."

"Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse."

"Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed."

"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box."

"The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one."

"You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits."

"Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura."

"What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work."

"Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families."

"A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox."

"Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process."

"A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation."

"The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither."

"You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration."

"The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse."

"Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around."

"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness."

"Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain."

"The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement."

"Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession."

"Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant."

"When conflicted between two choices, take neither."

"For the robust, an error is information."

"It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."

"Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant."

"For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight."

"We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude."

"The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him."

"The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments."

"Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand."

"Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all."

"There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved."

"We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise."

"I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism."

"To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly."

"I want to live happily in a world I don't understand."

"We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience."

"Simplicity is not so simple to attain."

"Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese."

"If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."

"Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it."

"Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation."

"The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much."

"Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for."

"It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself."

"If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one."

"Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it."

"Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort."

"The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country."

"If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead."

"Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury."

"It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits."

"He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once."

"The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one."

"It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement."

"There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ..."

"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ..."

"Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system."

"When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free."

"Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans."

"Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant."

"[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have."

"Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility."

"Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner."

"What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get."

"A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion."

"My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."

"Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems."

"The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses."

"I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are."

"An option hides where we don't want it to hide."

"[I]n academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is."

"[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences."

"In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio."

"[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it."

"You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets."

"The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us."

"Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions."

"Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice."

"Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park."

"Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog."

"What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for."

"People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones."

"If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life."

"Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later."

"Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature."

"Taleb's distorted sense of social science leads him to make absolute absurd claims concerning the value of analytical modeling. For example, I have in my house ...a wall full of books on statistics and the history of statistics, books I never had the fortitude to burn or throw away; though I find them largely useless outside of their academic applications ...I cannot use them in class because I promised myself never to teach trash, even if dying of starvation." This is a completely incorrect assessment of the role of statistics in the social sciences. Statistical reasoning is quite central to all of social theory and the evaluation of evidence for and against particular social science models, including the evaluation of pharmaceuticals, modeling the demographics of disease, testing products for beneficial and harmful effects, and a host of others. Taleb's generalization from the weakness of standard financial economics to the whole of mathematical discipline is quite unwarranted. However, he does not stop there. All of academia is tarred with his brush of hypocrisy and irrelevance. "...almost all academic papers," he claims, "are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students." Note that he claims not simply that academic papers "bore," but that is what they are made for! And he claims that academic papers "are not to be read except by suckers"! Taleb's writing is filled with unsubstantiated and improbable statements of this type."

"Husbands are like fires - they go out when unattended."

"A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished."

"I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back."

"I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house."

"Being jealous of a beautiful woman is not going to make you more beautiful."

"The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser."

"Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making."

"Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations— he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction."

"Hitchens: Let me ask a question to Mr. Heston. Can he tell me, clockwise, what countries have frontiers and borders with Iraq, starting from Kuwait? Charlton Heston: Yes, indeed I can (...). Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Russia ... uh, Iran. Hitchens: Exactly. You don't know where it is, in other words, do you? You have no idea where the country is on the map, and you're in favour of bombing it now rather than later, on the whim of a president. Bob Cain: Mr. Hitchens, if I may interject, I'm not sure [about the relevance] of the instantaneous command of the geography of a region. Hitchens: Oh, I don't know. I think if you're in favour of bombing a country, you might pay it the compliment of knowing where it is."

"...in fact, the war against Iraq is continuing. And it's continuing now by the means which the administration described as contemptible and useless, when they were put forth as an alternative to an actual all-out aerial bombardment. Namely, economic sanctions, which do have the effect of slowly starving and crippling the population of Iraq, while leaving the military caste of Saddam Hussein and his criminal Baath Party in charge. I was asked the other day … why do you think the administration decided to spare Saddam Hussein … and I said I think because they thought they might need him again..."

"For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick."

"If most of those who took part in this one-dimensional debate were honest with themselves, they would admit that they do not in principle believe that the United States can do any good overseas for anyone but the American government, its armed forces, or privileged American elites."

"The next stop on Reagan's European tour after Bitburg was Madrid, where he made a speech in which he said, "I know there's been a lot of controversy about the United States and Spain at that time, indeed some Americans once came here to fight in the civil war." He said, "But the thing is," said Reagan, "they were on the wrong side." In other words a conscious choice, a conscious and deliberate remark showing that the sympathy for fascism, not accidental, not anecdotal, not a slip of the tongue, but something bred-in-the-bone; and, I think, also worth recalling."

"David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."

"I just wanted to say something about (...) my resentment of the identification of this country of Britain with royalty. As if we have nothing else to offer as a culture – the country of my birth. The great contribution, of the English anyway, to the world is literature and language. That language and literature is, in fact, in its tradition quite extensively republican and democratic. I mean our Blake, Milton, our Shelley, many many other great writers, poetry and prose, have been against the idea that Britain is a feudal or monarchic system. One of the great aspects of that tradition is represented by the name Thomas Paine, who is the moral author of your Declaration of Independence. In fact, one of the great accomplishments of the English republican movement, if you like, is the American Declaration of Independence. So it has always struck me as rather bizarre that there is this cult in the United States of English royalism – just the sort of thing I left England to get away from."

"The "line of the day" among administration spokesmen, confronted by masses of destitute and terrified refugees and solid reports of the mass execution of civilians, is to say that "we expected this to happen." They did? (They never told anyone.) If they want to avoid being indicted for war crimes themselves, these "spokesmen" had better promise us that they were lying when they said that."

"I can never quite decide whether the anti-Columbus movement is merely risible or faintly sinister... It is sinister, though, because it is an ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred."

"...those who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery are, it seems to me, hopelessly stuck on this reactionary position. They can think of the Western expansion of the United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and the railway."

"The transformation of part of the northern part of this continent into "America" inaugurated a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they had never been born."

"Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas"

"The British monarchy inculcates unthinking credulity and servility. It forms a heavy layer on the general encrustation of our unreformed political institutions. It is the gilded peg from which our unlovely system of social distinction and hierarchy depends. It is an obstacle to the objective public discussion of our own history. It tribalises politics. It entrenches the absurdity of the hereditary principle. It contributes to what sometimes looks like an enfeeblement of the national intelligence, drawing from our press and even from some of our poets the sort of degrading and abnegating propaganda that would arouse contempt if displayed in Zaire or Romania. It is, in short, neither dignified nor efficient."

"The first False Issue one normally encounters is the claim that it has 'no real power'. One never quite knows what 'real' is intended to mean here, but the conventions of the False Issue lead one to guess that the word is doing duty for 'formal'. Thus is the red herring introduced. A moment later, the same speaker is telling another listener of all the good things that monarchy is a 'force' for. These good things invariably turn out to be connected to power. They are things like 'stability', 'unity', 'national cohesion', 'continuity' and other things for which powerless people would find it difficult to be a force. Edmund Wilson would have had little trouble noticing, furthermore, that all the above good things are keywords for conservative and establishment values."

"Those who say that without the monarchy Britain would be a banana republic are closing their eyes to the banana republic features which the cult of monarchy necessitates. Dazzled by the show, moreover, they may be missing other long-run tendencies towards banana-dom which it is the partial function of monarchy to obscure."

"The United States, for example, has never had a President as bad as George III, but neither has Britain had a king as admirable as George Washington (of whom William Thackeray rightly said that 'his glory will descend to remotest ages' while the memory of the sovereign went the other way). Still, even to concede this obvious argument is to make it plain that a bad monarch is at least as likely as a bad president even given the caprice of random selection by the hereditary principle..."

"We find that the presidency has become too secretive, too powerful, too trammelled, too ceremonial, too impotent or too complicated, depending on the president under discussion or the critic making the analysis. On one thing all are agreed - there is a danger of an 'imperial' or 'monarchical' presidency. An incumbent in Washington knows he is in trouble on the day that cartoonists begin to represent him as a king."

"The evidence is that on 'Commonwealth' questions Her Majesty reserves a certain autonomy when it comes to the expression of an opinion. But you can't have it both ways. Queen Victoria used to browbeat poor Mr Gladstone most dreadfully when it came to overseas or, as they were then called, 'imperial' matters. Either this is proper or it isn't. You either accept the principle of royal intervention or you don't. And if you don't, you always have the choice of an actual 'Commonwealth' - the beautiful and resonant name given by the English revolutionaries to the most forbidden passage of our history after the removal of the Stuarts."

"We know that there are people for whom the country and a certain rather mediocre dynasty are in effect unimaginable without one another. There is no need to doubt or mock the sincerity of the conviction. However, there is no reason in our history or our literature to endorse or underwrite it either. We possess an alternative tradition which is capable of outlasting this royal house as it has already outlasted others."

"In today's Britain, the idea that there could be a Constitution more powerful - and even sacrosanct - than any crowned head or elected politician (thus abolishing the false antithesis between hereditary monarchs and capricious presidents) is thought of as a breathtakingly new and daring idea."

"... I wouldn't have her job'. Those who profess unquenchable love for the sovereign are adamant that she press on in a task that they consider killingly hard."

"Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power."

"Too many crucial things about this country turn out to be highly recommended because they are 'invisible'. There is the 'hidden hand' of the free market, the 'unwritten' Constitution, the 'invisible earnings' of the financial service sector, the 'magic' of monarchy and the 'mystery' of the Church and its claim to the interpretation of revealed truth. When we do get as far as the visible or the palpable, too much of it is deemed secret. How right it is that senior ministers, having kissed hands with the monarch, are sworn to the cult of secrecy by 'The Privy Council Oath'. How right it is that our major foreign alliance - the 'special relationship' with the United States - is codified by no known treaty and regulated by no known Parliamentary instrument."

"Yet those who govern us as if were infants expect us to be grateful that at least we live in 'a family'; a family, moreover, patterned on the ideal by the example of the Windsors. A beaming gran, a dutiful mum, a stern and disciplined father, and children who are ... well, all analogies based upon family break down somewhere. The analogy between family and society, as it happens, breaks down as soon as it is applied. The 'United Kingdom' is not a family and never was one. (Not even Orwell, with his image of poor relations, rich relations and 'the wrong members in control', could make it stick.) It is is a painfully evolved society, at once highly stratified and uniform and very fluid and diverse, which is the site of a multitude of competing interests."

"Other states in the past sought to conceal this truth from themselves by the exercise of projection - customarily onto a dynasty with supposedly extraordinary powers of healing and unification. This did not save them: indeed historians usually attribute part of the magnitude of the eventual smash to the ingrained, faithful, fatalistic fixation. The supplanting of monarchy, in those circumstances, by new forms of despotism was not the negation of monarchy but the replication of it by societies not yet cured of the addiction."

"In their last ditch, the royalists object that this all too bloodless and practical; that people need and want the element of magic and fantasy. Nobody wants life to be charmless. But the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state. When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancour, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols."

"Is this an argument for abolition? Of course it is. But not for an abolition by fiat: for yet another political change that would come as a surprise to the passively governed. It is an invitation to think - are you serious when you say that you cannot imagine life without it? Do you prefer invented tradition, sanitised history, prettified literature, state-sponsored superstition and media-dominated pulses of cheering and jeering?"

"A people that began to think as citizens rather than subjects might transcend underdevelopment on their own. Inalienable human right is unique in that it needs no superhuman guarantee; no 'fount' except itself. Only servility requires the realm (suggestive word) of illusion. Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished. But they can and must be outgrown."

"And where did anyone get the brainless opinion that the super-rich are too wealthy to steal? ...from Ford to Hughes to Iacocca and Trump and the other tycoon redeemers, we have an exact demonstration that nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much.""

"That most risky and volatile of all things—a self-pitying majority."

"It is rather a pity, considered from the standpoint of the professional politician or opinion-taker, that nobody knows exactly what "credibility" is, or how one acquires it. "Credibility" doesn't stand for anything morally straightforward, like meaning what you say or saying what you mean. Nor does it signify anything remotely quantifiable — any correlation between evidence presented and case made. Suggestively, perhaps, it entered the language as a consensus euphemism during the Vietnam War, when "concerned" members of the Eastern Establishment spoke of a "credibility gap" rather than give awful utterance to the thought that the Johnson administration was systematically lying. To restore its "credibility," that administration was urged — not to stop lying, but to improve its public presentation. At some stage in the lesson learned from that injunction, the era of postmodern politics began. It doesn't seem ridiculous now to have "approval ratings" that fluctuate from week to week, because these are based upon the all-important "perception" factor, which has in turn quite lost its own relationship to the word "perceptive.""

"We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being."

"It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological — and sometimes military — pressure to fall into line."

"There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves."

"Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration."

"The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister."

"The conservative aptitude for stressing the "individual responsibility" of all parties except themselves."

"The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process?""

"What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance."

"It is not enough to "have" free speech. People must learn to speak freely. Noam Chomsky remarked in the sixties about the short-life ultra-radicals on campus who thought that Marx should have been burning down the British Museum rather than writing and thinking in it. The less political descendants of that faction have now tried to reduce life to a system of empowerment etiquette, and have wasted a lot of their own time and everyone else's in the process. But the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by the everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics, and not by the awkward handful who imagine themselves revolutionaries."

"If a great city or a great state should fall as the result of an apparent "accident", the there would be a general reason why it required only an accident to make it fall."

"There is a reason for the affected profession of "anarchist sympathies" among Tories and grandees, and of "libertarian principles" by Hobbesian yahoos of the right. Among the former, one sees the upholding of the view that a gentleman's business and property are his own, and none of the government's. Among the latter, a distaste for democracy, for taxation, and for the need to consult others about the planet."

"Rushdie had written a book of nonfiction which offered critical but decided support to the Nicaraguan revolution. He had also been eloquent about the rights of the ever-relegated Palestinians. What more natural, when he was threatened with assassination by contract, than to jubilate about a terrorist-symp who had been caught in his own logic? I counted some ten newspaper and magazine columns from the Podhoretz school, all making this same point in the same words — demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the AIDS crisis as a vengeance as on sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got beyond mere gloating, and will one day help to illustrate the essential distinction between irony and brutish sarcasm."

"Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society."

"The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for "peace through strength" has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog."

""Peace through Strength," surely history's most exploded nostrum."

"The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient."

"The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer."

"Because the man with many monikers in many ways embodies his country and because this election cycle is now so absurd, and so much up for grabs, it is unwise to exclude anything... The best guess has to be that here's a man who hates to be alone, who needs approval and reinforcement, who talks a better game than he plays, who is crude, hyperactive, emotional and optimistic."

"[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things."

"Donald Trump – a ludicrous figure, but at least he’s lived it up a bit in the real world and at least he’s worked out how to cover 90 per cent of his skull with 30 per cent of his hair."

"I don't have to begin, as I would have if I were speaking for the Church, with any apologies. We don't have a lot to apologize for. It wasn't we who framed Galileo, it wasn't we who said that God wanted the , it wasn't we who mounted the , it wasn't we who sponsored , Salazar, Mussolini, Dollfuss, Hitler, Vichy, Franco, and the rest of it; and it wasn't we who preached the Easter sermon saying who was responsible for the death of a mythical figure, and creating ludicrous pain to real people, in the real world. We don't have to begin by proving that our institutions and our beliefs are human, as all human institutions are; that we are only mammals, as his holiness the Pope is only a mammal. We don't make a mystery where none exists. We say that we face the heavens, and we find them empty; and that some of us, at any rate, are not alarmed to find this emptiness; and would be more alarmed to find the heavens full of permanent supervision and invigilation; and that an ethical life may be led by someone with no supernatural means of support, without the fear, if it is a fear, or the hope, if it is a hope, of celestial invigilation."

"America is actually the country to which people came in the most of a hurry, to try and find if that life could really be lived as a society. Some of them came to practice their religion freely. Many came to escape from persecution by other religions. Some came to be free from religion altogether, and that's why the Constitution is godless and doesn't mention the word, but it was not written by atheists. It was written by democratic theists and secularists, and that's why the meeting at Philadelphia, which decided these matters and decides them still for us, was a godless one, if not an atheist one. And that's why I think modern America should be a lot more anti-religious than it is. It should pay less respect, and make much less reverence toward religion, than its mass media... presently do."

"Read one page of Stephen Hawking about the , about the possibility that we will soon know, not where the universe originated, but where it is tended, and the event horizon to which we may all be headed. There is more to inspire awe in one page of Stephen Hawking, than in any of the fantasies of Tertullian, imagining that he could go to the window of heaven, when he was promoted there, and look down, for his consolation, on the torments of the damned. There is much more to be awe-inspired by, in a page of Hawking, than in any number of burning bushes, or other such myths."

"Now it could be... that when religion is attacked in this country, that the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share. I may say, I've probably contributed somewhat to that, and I'm not ashamed of my part in it; but doesn't the Catholic Church make rather large claims for itself. The Catholic Church claims to hold the keys of Peter. The Holy Father claims to have that power and be the vicar of Christ upon earth. It is said that only through this means and this approach can redemption can be achieved. These are large claims for a human, and fallible, and political, and bureaucratic institution to be making for itself in the age of Hawking."

"America is preeminently a country of, if not sexual licenses... a country of sexual tolerance, a country of sexual, I... would settle for pluralism, for now. Well, the Holy Mother Church doesn't settle for that. The Holy Mother Church makes rather strict demands. The Holy Mother Church prohibits, by various edicts,... statutes, and pronouncements, all forms of sex that are not specifically devoted to the outcome of procreating further Catholics, and it enforces this with a celibate hierarchy. Now, that's fine, and it is your choice, and... as Mr. Donohue did say, no one has to join that church, but that church, where it can, does try and impose those standards on non-believers and non-members. And there will always seem, to some people, I think, something absurd in the enforcement of such statutes, especially since we know most Catholics don't observe them, by a celibate oligarchy and hierarchy."

"Isn't it said, and should it not be believed, or at least affirmed, or at any rate not repudiated, that you should expect to suffer for this; that you should expect to be reviled; that you should be proud to be abused; that you will be told that what you believe is absurd; that you should be glad to hear it, for His sake; that those who despitefully use you is to be expected. And isn't that a rather dignified position, a rather honorable position for the Church to take? Something that even an atheist, and humanist, and Marxist like myself can understand and respect. But instead what do we get? An endless whine of self-pity, of "Well why are they picking on us. They wouldn't say that about the Jews!" And an endless play on the ethnic politics and identity politics card. An endless appeal to self-pity. Well you should be proud that you're in a fight for your politics and your Church. And you seem instead to be resentful about it, and perhaps, who knows, a little insecure. However, for the main part of it, you only have to open a paper to see the exaggerated deference paid to every utterance of his Holiness the Pope, wherever he goes, and the extraordinary deference shown to him whenever he visits these shores and decides to grace us with his presence."

"As for the woman styling herself Mother Teresa, I can attest that until I wrote my little pamphlet, she had been the recipient, the beneficiary, of a twenty-five year Niagra of one-hundred percent favorable publicity in every secular, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic, or non-religious outlet of any kind at all in the media. Only by the grace of my intervention [laughter] could it not be said, when she died, that no one had ever said a single word against her; and that no one had ever pointed out that she had fawned on the Duvalier family in Haiti and said that they were the Lord's anointed and beloved of the poor."

"The truth of matter is, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, religion has it very much its own way in this country of ours. It's in the pledge of allegiance, thanks to a stupid intervention of President Eisenhower; it's on the money, it's in the opening of Congress every day, it's at the , it's when the delinquent president summons his advisors and his spiritual team in order to fend off what should have been inevitable, it's when Al Gore can't bring himself to criticize a decision of the Oklahoma school board, and it's high time that that situation was reversed and we developed a proper immunity to it, and made sure that religion can only be self-inflicted."

"Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man."

"The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths."

"All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about."

"That phrase, "loss of innocence," has become stale with overuse and diminishing returns; no other culture is so addicted to this narcissistic impression of itself as having any innocence to lose in the first place."

"I must say that I've always found the generational emphasis on the way that my youth was covered to be very annoying. There were a lot of other people born in April 1949, and I just don't feel like I have anything in common with most of them. I forget who it was who said that generation -- age group, in other words -- is the most debased form of solidarity. The idea of anyone who was born around that time having an automatic ticket to being called "a '60s person," is annoying to me."

"I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view….I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost."

"Their antiwar movement] mantra was: "Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country." Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, "Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one"? "Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women." "Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones." "Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime." I could go on. (I think No. 4 may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the "doves" to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to reread themselves saying things like, "The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.""

""Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age" was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals... But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age."

"No possible future government in Kabul can be worse than the Taliban, and no thinkable future government would allow the level of Al Qaeda gangsterism to recur. So the outcome is proportionate and congruent with international principles of self-defense."

"The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks."

"Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan."

"I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that's beyond my conceit. I therefore have no choice but to find something suspect even in the humblest believer. Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick — Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. I didn't ask for it, and would willingly have foregone it, but there it is: I'm claimed and saved whether I wish it or not. And if I refuse the unsolicited gift? Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude. That is somewhat worse than a Big Brother state, because there could be no hope of its eventually passing away.In any case, I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.Judaism has some advantages over Christianity in that, for example, it does not proselytise — except among Jews — and it does not make the cretinous mistake of saying that the Messiah has already made his appearance. However, along with Islam and Christianity, it does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing."

"Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted."

"Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!"

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

"An old definition of a gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose."

"Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves."

"In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so. It especially annoys me when racists are accused of "discrimination". The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members of one "race" to be the same, the racists precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination."

"An official of the Teamsters' Union, asked by a Senate hearing if his union was really powerful, responded guardedly but elegantly by saying that being powerful was a little like being ladylike: "If you have to say you are, you prob'ly ain't.""

"Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days. - George Konrad"

"Then the big white whale, Clinton. What about someone who is a war criminal, a taker of bribes from foreign dictatorships, almost certainly a rapist (plausibly accused, anyway, by three believable women, of rape), executed a black man (Ricky Ray Rector) who was so mentally retarded that he was unable to plead or to understand the charges — You're against all that, right? But you're for it when it's someone who you think is a "New Democrat"."

"It’s a very vulgar, arithmetical, pragmatic way of arguing anyway. If you do that, then get the facts and figures wrong, well then you’re really fucked. You’re fucked twice."

"Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect."

"Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth"

"I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged."

"If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops... then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, 'Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.' No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words."

"Taking the points in order, it's fairly easy to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy's bad guy. He's not just bad in himself but the cause of badness in others. While he survives not only are the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples compelled to live in misery and fear (the sheerly moral case for regime-change is unimpeachable on its own), but their neighbors are compelled to live in fear as well.However—and here is the clinching and obvious point—Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. It has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Like the Ceausescu edifice in Romania, it is a pyramid balanced on its apex (its powerbase a minority of the Sunni minority), and when it falls, all the consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway. To suggest that these consequences—Sunni-Shi'a rivalry, conflict over the boundaries of Kurdistan, possible meddling from Turkey or Iran, vertiginous fluctuations in oil prices and production, social chaos—are attributable only to intervention is to be completely blind to the impending reality. The choices are two and only two—to experience these consequences with an American or international presence or to watch them unfold as if they were none of our business."

"[Even if the U.S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion."

"Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint."

"Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the philosopher Anacharsis, who mantained that laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand."

"A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory."

"It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true."

"I doubt that even if this evidence could be upgraded to 100 per cent it would persuade the sort of people who go on self-appointed missions of mediation to Baghdad. These people further fail to see that governments now have a further responsibility to their citizens — namely to see that something is done to prevent future assaults on civilisation."

"Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power."

"We know that the enemies of our civilization and of Arab-Muslim civilization have emerged from what is actually a root cause. The root cause is the political slum of client states from Saudi Arabia through Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, that has been allowed to dominate the region under U.S. patronage, and uses people and resources as if they were a gas station with a few flyblown attendants. To the extent that this policy, this mentality, has now changed in the administration, to the extent that their review of that is sincere and the conclusions that they draw from it are sincere, I think that should be welcomed. It's a big improvement to be intervening in Iraq against Saddam Hussein instead of in his favor. I think it makes a nice change. It's a regime change for us too. Now I'll state what I think is gonna happen. I've been in London and Washington a lot lately and all I can tell you is that the spokesmen for Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush walk around with a look of extraordinary confidence on their faces, as if they know something that when disclosed, will dissolve the doubts, the informational doubts at any rate, of people who wonder if there is enough evidence. [Mark Danner: It's amazing they've been able to keep it to themselves for so long.] I simply say, I have two reasons for confidence. I know perfectly well that there are many people who would not be persuaded by this evidence even if it was dumped on their own doorstep, because the same people, many of the same people, didn't believe that it was worth fighting in Afghanistan even though the connection between the Taliban and Al Qaeda was as clear as could possibly be. So I know that. There's a strong faction of the so-called peace movement that is immune to evidence and also incapable of self criticism, of imagining what these countries would be like if the advice of the peaceniks has been followed. I also made some inquiries of my own, and I think I know what some of these disclosures will be. But, as a matter of fact I think we know enough. And what will happen will be this: The President will give an order, there will then occur in Iraq a show of military force like nothing probably the world has ever seen. It will be rapid and accurate and overwhelming enough to deal with an army or a country many times the size of Iraq, even if that country possessed what Iraq does not, armed forces in the command structure willing to obey and be the last to die for the supreme leader. And that will be greeted by the majority of Iraqi people and Kurdish people as a moment of emancipation, which will be a pleasure to see, and then the hard work of the reconstitution of Iraqi society and the repayment of our debt — some part of our debt to them — can begin. And I say, bring it on."

"The best case scenario is a rapid attack by precision-guided weapons, striking Saddam's communications in the first hours and preventing his deranged orders from being obeyed. Then a massive landing will bring food, medicine and laptop computers to a surging crowd of thankful and relieved Iraqis and Kurds. This could, in theory, all happen."

"It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque."

"Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!"

"Mosul is the site of a very famous old Iraqi university. The American forces were refurbishing the place. They were going to tear down some of the outer walls, give this palace to the university. They'd also connected the university to the Internet and to the Web. Helped people contact scholars on the outside world. That was all the job of these very good- humored, very thoughtful officers who were really helping to rebuild the place... I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out."

"Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

"MT [ Mother Teresa ] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

"When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul."

"The realization that American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism and as a punishment for fascism came to me in Sarajevo a year or two later... That was an early quarrel between me and many of my Nation colleagues, and it was also the first time I found myself in the same trench as people like Paul Wolfowitz and Jeane Kirkpatrick: a shock I had to learn to get over."

"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness."

"[Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a "Holocaust denier" or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story."

"It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one."

"Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all of those qualities."

"Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature)...said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched...said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R...professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you"...used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars...used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war...allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling."..sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck...then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too...then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.) One could go on...This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time."

"To describe this film [Fahrenheit 9/11] as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery."

"We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation"...In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003...the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once.That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible...Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer...In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally...Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country...And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war."

"Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything … If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture."

"One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight."

"It‘s [Fahrenheit 9/11] the work of a moral cretin and a political idiot. And it's up to the Democratic National Committee to say, do they want to continue being photographed with this man as we go into a very important election, not just in the United States, I might add, but first Democratic elections to be held in Iraq and in Afghanistan? In a few months, we will know the outcome of all these. In all three cases, Michael Moore says that the enemy is George Bush and Saddam Hussein and Mr. Zarqawi and Mr. Bin Laden are no problem. Indeed, they are—what a wonderful way to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, by the way. Indeed, they are the Minutemen. They‘re the staunch American revolutionaries. Does he tell this to the widows that he goes and exploits?"

"That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested."

"The (Catholic) church, as far as I know, has not endorsed any war as just since it supported General Franco's invasion of Spain to destroy the Spanish republic with a Muslim mercenary army in the thirties, on the side of Hitler."

"There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz."

"The death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped."

"I have noticed in observing and debating him [Moore] that he is an addict of crowd-pleasing and demagogy, and also an addict of "secret financial government" rhetoric. He also affects a certain plebeian and blue-collar style. When he thinks it will work, he will pretend to believe that "American jobs" are migrating to Mexico, or that "American boys" are being duped into war by hidden cabals. This combination of nativism and populism (stirred in with a nauseating dose of sentimentality and an absolutely breath-taking contempt for objective truth) reminds me very much of the dolts who joined the SA. But then, those guys were probably as surprised as their dumb Stalinist counterparts when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed. By the way, that was the only treaty he signed that Stalin didn't break. With much of the remaining Left, I have to say, there is a certain immunity from Moore's gruesome posturing, if only because they don't think it was a good idea to have General Motors, or the city of Flint, Michigan, in the first place. And some of them are genuine pacifists, while Moore is an open supporter of the Islamist death-squads in Iraq."

"My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States … In some awful way, his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs. This is not at all like watching the implosion of an obvious huckster and jerk like Michael Moore, who would have made a perfectly good Brownshirt populist. The collapse of Chomsky feels to me more like tragedy."

"He [Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a "Holocaust denier" or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story. The position he took, comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to an admittedly criminal Clintonian strike on Sudan (and virtually concluding that the latter was worse!) showed the absolute exhaustion of the glib "double standards" school, as I point out extensively in Love, Poverty and War. But his decline and fall is a loss, and you miss the point by denying it."

"There is a widespread view that the war against jihadism and totalitarianism involves only differences of emphasis. In other words, one might object to the intervention in Iraq on the grounds that it drew resources away from Afghanistan - you know the argument. It's important to understand that this apparent agreement does not cover or include everybody. A very large element of the Left and of the isolationist Right is openly sympathetic to the other side in this war, and wants it to win. This was made very plain by the leadership of the "anti-war" movement, and also by Michael Moore when he shamefully compared the Iraqi fascist "insurgency" to the American Founding Fathers. To many of these people, any "anti-globalization" movement is better than none. With the Right-wingers it's easier to diagnose: they are still Lindberghians in essence and they think war is a Jewish-sponsored racket. With the Left, which is supposed to care about secularism and humanism, it's a bit harder to explain an alliance with woman-stoning, gay-burning, Jew-hating medieval theocrats. However, it can be done, once you assume that American imperialism is the main enemy. Even for those who won't go quite that far, the admission that the US Marine Corps might be doing the right thing is a little further than they are prepared to go - because what would then be left of their opposition credentials, which are so dear to them?"

"Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed 'we' did. Well, does that not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?"

"I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information."

"And yet, I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument, to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood."

"Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them."

"Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated."

"They ("Islamo-fascists") gave us no peace and we shouldn’t give them any. We can't live on the same planet as them and I'm glad because I don’t want to. I don’t want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murderers and rapists and torturers and child abusers. It's them or me. I'm very happy about this because I know it will be them. It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure. I don’t regard it as a grim task at all."

"The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes."

"As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist."

"There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad."

"If you examine the record of the so-called the anti-war movement in this country and imagine what would have happened had its counsel been listened to over the last 15 and more years, you would have a world in which the following would be the case:Saddam Hussein would be the owner and occupier of Kuwait, he would have succeeded in the annexation, not merely the invasion, but the abolition of an Arab and Muslim state that was a member of the Arab League and of the United Nations. And with these resources as we now know because he lost that war, he was attempting to equip himself with the most terrifying arsenal that it was possible for him to lay his hands on. That's one consequence of anti-war politics, that's what would have happened.In the meanwhile, Slobodan Milošević would have made Bosnia part of a greater Serbia, and Kosovo would have been ethnically cleansed and also annexed. The Taliban would be still in power in Afghanistan if the anti-war movement had been listened to, and al-Qaeda would still be their guests. And Saddam Hussein, with his crime family, would still be privately holding ownership over a terrorized people in a state that's been most aptly described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave underneath it.Now if I had that record politically, I would be extremely modest, I wouldn't be demanding explanations from those of us who said it's about time that we stop this continual capitulation to dictatorship, to racism, to aggression and to totalitarian ideology. That we will not allow to be appeased in Iraq, the failures in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, and in Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And we take pride in having taken that position, and we take pride in our Iraqi and Kurdish friends who are conducting this struggle, on our behalves I should say."

"One could happily make a case that more random civilians, and fewer fucking lawyers, should be on the court. But the only other thing to say about Miers is that she is a fucking lawyer."

"...the same mistake that disfigured the coverage of the Bosnian war, where every consumer of news was made to understand that there was fighting between Serbs, Croats, and "Muslims." There are two apples and one orange in that basket, as any fool should be able to see. Serbian and Croatian are national differences, which track very closely with the distinction between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic beliefs. Many Muslims are Bosnian, but not all Bosnians are Muslim. And in fact, the Bosnian forces in the late war were those which most repudiated any confessional definition."

"I’m quite convinced in my own mind that those who were arguing that [the need to intervene in Iraq] was a more immediate one than some believed - were I’m sure convinced that they were right on fact, I don’t think they were making it up. So as to lying, I don’t think it has been established that any lies were told."

"I don't think that the figure 2000 is an important milestone, in the first place. And in the second place, I don't think that this can be determined by public opinion. The righteousness of the war was not demonstrated by public support for it in the beginning, nor its wisdom altered by the evident decline in public support for it. I don't pay attention to the opinion polls, or indeed to the casualty figures, because I know that this is an inevitable war, a war that was going to have to happen — and was, in my opinion, both just and necessary."

"Interviewer: It seems to be acknowledged that there're more people out there supporting the aims of Al-Qaeda and groups like them, and are willing to die, as a result of this war, than perhaps there were previously?Hitchens: Well, you could as easily say that the number of people who used to be based in Afghanistan, have, as a result of the intervention there, relocated themselves and spread the virus in that way. Both of these arguments lead to only one terminus, which is: we should surrender to jihadism, and not try to oppose it, in case we make them upset."

"If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka."

"Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely."

"The regular media caricature of Iraqi society is not even a parody. It is very common indeed to find mixed and intermarried families, and these loyalties and allegiances outweigh anything that can be mustered by a Jordanian jailbird who has bet everything on trying to ignite a sectarian war. Second, it means in the not very long run that the so-called insurgency can be politically isolated and militarily defeated. It already operates within a minority of a minority and is largely directed by unpopular outsiders."

"I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge."

"Fine, now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you've told me all I need to know. I'm not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I'm telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There's nothing you wouldn't make an excuse for. You know what? I wouldn't want you on my side. I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say 'That's O.K.' Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I'm telling you what I think are standards and you say, 'What standards? It's fine, he's against the Iraq War.' Fuck. Off. You're MoveOn.org. Any liar will do. He's anti-Bush. Fuck off...Save it sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what mine are, and that's all the difference -- I hope -- in the world."

"(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed."

"They want me to immolate myself, and I sincerely believe that for some of them, when they see bad news from Iraq, the reaction is simply 'This will make Hitchens look bad!' I've been trying to avoid solipsism, but I've come to believe there are such people."

"There is no longer any official froideur. But there's no official - what's the word? - chaleur, either."

"My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass."

"To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor? Isn't it a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what's fit to be passed and what isn't, is the man most likely to become debauched? Did you hear any speaker of the opposition to this motion – eloquent as one of them was – to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? To whom you would give the job of deciding for you? Relieve you from the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone? Hands up, do you know anyone to whom you'd give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?"

"Do I, who've read Freud, know what the Future of an Illusion really is and know that religious belief is ineradicable as long as we remain a stupid, poorly-evolved mammalian species, think that some Canadian law is gonna solve this problem? Please. No, our problem is this: our pre-frontal lobes are too small, and our adrenalin glands are too big, and our thumb-finger opposition isn't all that it might be, and we're afraid of the dark, and we're afraid to die, and we believe in the truths of holy books that are so stupid and so fabricated that a child can - and all children do, as you can tell by their questions - actually see through them. And I think it should be (religion) treated with ridicule and hatred and contempt. And I claim that right."

"Not all monotheisms are exactly the same, at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion, they're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of wahhabism and salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally, it's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman – in the Arabian Peninsula – three times through an archangel, and that the resulted material, which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old...and The New Testament, is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right – as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read, had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says "no, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams – this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now – "Behead those who cartoon Islam". Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you why you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left. This is really serious. ... Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred, is also the main caller for censorship."

"The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics."

"You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal President successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so."

"Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had? (“And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.” Peaceful?)"

"If there is a sectarian war in Iraq today, or perhaps several sectarian wars, we have to understand that this was latent in the country, and in the state, and in the society all along. It was not the only possible outcome, because it had to be willed and organized, but it was certainly high on the list of probabilities."

"A double problem arises: There is first the difficulty of, if not the impossibility of demonstrating the existence of any creator or designer at all. I think I say something uncontroversial when I say that no theologian has ever conclusively demonstrated that such a designer can or does or ever has existed. The most you can do, by way of the argument from design, is to infer him or her or it from an apparent harmony in the arrangements - and this was at a time when that was the very best that, so to speak, could be done. But religion goes a little further than this already rather impossible task, and expects us to believe as follows: that the speaker not only can prove the existence of a said entity, but can claim to know this entity's mind - in fact, can claim to know it quite intimately; can claim to know his or her personal wishes; can, in turn, tell you what you may do, in his name - a quite large arrogation of power, you will suddenly notice, is being granted to the speaker here. The speaker can tell you that he knows - he cannot tell you how - but he can tell you that he knows, for example, that heaven hates ham, that god doesn't want you to eat pork products; he can tell you that god has a very very strong view about with whom you may have sexual relations, indeed, how you may have sexual relations with others; he can indicate, perhaps a little less convincingly but no less firmly, that there are certain books or courses of study that you might want to avoid or treat with great suspicion.”"

"Most of our British Muslim population is Pakistani. If that population was Indonesian or Tunisian the situation would not be the same. Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas."

"We can be as sure as we could probably need be that neither this enormous explosion that set the universe in motion, which is still moving away from us at a great rate, nor this amazingly complex billion year period of evolution, we can be pretty certain it was not designed so that you and I could be meeting in this room. We are not the objects of either of these plans. These plans don’t know we’re here. I’m sorry to say, wouldn’t know or care if we stopped being here. We have to face this alone with the equipment, intellectual and moral, that we’ve been given, or that we've acquired, or that is innate to us."

"It is said that Louis Farrakhan’s racist crackpot Nation of Islam and its sectarian gang gets young men off drugs. For all I know it does, it may, but that does not recommend it, to me, nor does it prove anything of its theology. Whereas I can tell you that of the suicide bombing population one hundred percent is faith-based. And I don’t think that in itself disapproves faith, but I think it should make you skeptical of that kind of random sampling. Of the genital mutilation community the same can be said."

"If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings I'm still waiting to hear what your point is."

"My challenge is really to say, 'Can you name me a moral action or a statement that has been made by a believer that couldn't have been made by a non-believer?'"

"On our integrity, our basic integrity, knowing right from wrong and being able to choose a right action over a wrong one, I think one must repudiate the claim that one doesn't have this moral discrimination innately, that, no, it must come only from the agency of a celestial dictatorship which one must love and simultaneously fear. What is it like to lie to children and tell them that they have an authority, that they must love and be terrified of it at the same time. What's that like? I want to know. And that we don't have an innate sense of right and wrong, children don't have an innate sense of fairness and decency, which of course they do. What is it like?”"

"Yes, Dr. McGrath, you're right, there is something about us as a species that is problematic, it isn't just explained by religion. Something about us that tempts us to do wrong. It's pretty easily explained, I think. We are primates, high primates, but primates. We're half a chromosome away from chimpanzees and it shows. It especially shows in the number of religions we invent to console ourselves or to give us things to quarrel with other primates about. If anything demonstrates that God is man-made, not man God-made, surely it is the religions erected by this quasi-chimpanzee species and the harm that they're willing to inflict on that basis."

"If you want to avoid upsetting these people (Muslim fundamentalists) you have to let Indonesia commit genocide in East Timor, otherwise they'll be upset with you. You'll have made an enemy. If you tell them they can't throw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Karachi they will be annoyed with you. If you say we insist, we think that cartoonists in Copenhagen can print satire on the Prophet Muhammed you've just made an enemy. You've brought it on. You're encouraging it to happen. So unless you're willing to commit suicide for yourself and for this culture, get used to the compromises you'll have to make and the eventual capitulation that will come to you, but bloody well don't do that in my name..."

"Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God’s on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic."

"Is there anything that is forbidden to anybody who says they have God on their side? Who says they have God with them? Is there any evil that they forbid themselves to do?"

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."

"I'm not afraid of death myself, because I'm not gonna know I'm dead. I'm awed a bit by the idea, but I'm perfectly reconciled to it. Certainly I am, as everyone is, reconciled to everyone else's death but their own. They think an exception can be made in their own case."

"I say I'm an anti-theist because I think it would be rather awful if it was true. If there was a permanent, total, around-the-clock, divine supervision...an invigilation of everything you did...you would never have a waking or sleeping moment where you weren't being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity, from the moment of conception til...well not even to your death, because it's only after death that the real fun begins, isn't it? It would be like living in North Korea."

"You give me the awful impression, I hate to have say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position ever."

"I don't see how you can be saying this. Look. You want to take...you want your god to take responsibility for the huge number of collapsing stars and imploding galaxies and destroyed universes and failed solar systems that have left us in this tiny corner on the one planet in this petty solar system that can support life some of the time on some of its surface. And you want a creator who filled this earth with species, since life began 99% of which are now extinct already...and this is some design, isn't it?"

"Hannity: I am a believer. I believe in a creator."

"Hitchens: And that's where it stops, or you think this creator cares about you too?"

"No, no...that is what our minds demand. We look for patterns"

"Hannity: You seem to be angry with religion, angry with God. Am I wrong in my perception?"

"Hitchens: Not with God, obviously, that would be absurd."

"My book expresses, I rather say, contempt and hostility to this constant religious intimidation and clerical bullying to which we're being subjected. My book is part of an attempt to arrange and organize a push back against this...whether it's the parties of god destroying Iraqi civil society or bigots in America trying to have pseudo science taught in our schools or a pope who says that AIDS may be bad...and limbo by the way may have been a mistake, but let's talk about hell in any way... AIDS isn't as bad as condoms."

"We had enough of people who think like you, that they know what God wants and that they've got god on their side. That they can tell us what to do or what to think in this way."

"[Religion] is innately irrational."

"Well if you reduce religion to social work, so does USAID produce...do all that. Actually, a secular organization, actually rather more convincingly. Most of the great philanthropist of the united states have been atheists...doesn't prove that atheism is correct."

"The progress that's made … in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation. That's a dialectical fact. People say "oh let's have less heat and more light," fatuously. There's only one source of light. It happens to be heat."

"Beware of solipsism. Don't ever think you are the centre of the world. Be very careful of assuming that you are the object of a divine design. That there's something special just about being you. That that's all you have to prove - that, why wouldn't a person such as yourself have God on their side; Why wouldn't it be - 'of course God would care who I slept with, what I ate, what holy day I observed, why would He not? Surely that's why the heavens are arranged in the starry beauty and array in the form they take.' -- You are forced to wonder, if maybe - even though it's a less beautiful thought - it could be that the galaxies are not arranged with you in mind."

"It's in human nature to mention any personal connection when offering solidarity, so I shall just briefly say that on my first visit to India, in 1980, I stayed at the Taj Mahal in Bombay, visited the "Gateway of India" and took a boat to Elephanta Island, toured the magnificent railway station, had my first diwali festival at Juhu beach, and paced the amazing corniche that was still known by some—after its dazzling string of lights—as "Queen Victoria's necklace." Wonderful though some of the 19th-century British architecture can be, Bombay is quintessentially an Indian achievement, and an achievement of all its peoples from the Portuguese-speaking Catholic Goans to the Zoroastrian Parsis."

"An impressive thing about India is the way in which it has almost as many Muslim citizens, who live with greater prospects of peace and prosperity, as does Pakistan. This comity and integration is one of the many targets of the suicide killers, and it is another reason why firm, warm solidarity with India is the most pressing need of the present hour."

"There's no such word, though there should be, as "adeism" or as being an "adeist", but if there was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism - except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order."

"Religion is the outcome of unresolved contradictions in the material world. If you make the assumption that it's man-made then very few things are mysterious to you: It would be obvious to you why there are so many religions; You will understand why it is that religion has been such a disappointment to our species - that despite innumerable revivals, innumerable attempts again to preach the truth, innumerable attempts to convert the heathen, innumerable attempts to send missionaries all around the world - that the same problems remain with us. That nothing is resolved by this. If all religions died out, or were admitted to be false, all of our problems would be exactly what they are now: How do we live with one another? Where, indeed, do morals and ethics come from? What are our duties to one another? How shall we build the just city? How shall we practice love? All these questions would remain exactly the same. Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you've taken the first step to becoming free."

"I used to find in arguments about Iraq that I knew right away when someone didn’t know what they were talking about. The dead giveaway would always be when they would say, "Alright, I agree, Saddam Hussein is a bad guy." I said, "That means you don’t know anything about him, if that’s what you think. You don’t know what it would be like to be sitting at home wondering where your daughter was and finding out because the police came round and, banging on the door, handed you a video, while they stood there, of her being raped by their colleagues, just to show you who was boss." The word evil … I think does need a bit of justification. Many people think that to even use the word evil is sort of naïve, or morally too judgmental, or … too simplistic. And yet it’s somehow a word without which we cannot do. Hannah Arendt, in her study of totalitarianism, borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that’s so evil that in the end it destroys itself. It’s so committed to evil, it’s so committed to hatred and cruelty, that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that’s generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power. You’ve already made your point. You’ve done everything you need to do to make people realize that you’re in power, but you somehow can’t stop. There has to be a special appetite. There must be special prisons for rape. There must be special graves, mass graves, just for children. There must be the desire to see how far you can go. And even if you know this will, in the end, bring retribution, it’s worth it, in some sense, for its own sake. Maybe that’s the only redeeming thing about it. Maybe the irrationality is the one saving grace of it, but at any rate, it’s not a word, it seems, that we can abolish from our vocabulary."

"It Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture."

"If this was the plan - was it made by someone who likes us? And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? And part of what plan was that?; If it is a plan or a design, the planner must be either very capricious - really toying with his creation; and/or very clumsy, very tinkering and fantastically wasteful - throw away 99.9% of what you've made; or very cruel and very callous; or just perhaps very indifferent; or some combination of all the above. And so it's no good saying that He moves in mysterious ways, or that He has purposes that are opaque to us, because even that kind of evasion has to make itself predicate on the assumption that the person saying this knows more than I do about the supernatural, and I haven't yet met anyone who does have a private line to the creator, of the sort that would be required even to speculate about it. In other words, I haven't met anyone, in holy orders or out of it, who isn't also a primate. And neither have you."

"We are not occupying Afghanistan, we are there as guests of a government, at their request."

"Inanity is pretending that Afghanistan will go away if we leave."

"I ask myself why do these worshipers of this God want to convict him of being such a crummy designer - most of his creations die off, the rest suffer miserably; of being cruel and capricious and bungling and incompetent and callous as a father? [www.youtube.com/watch?v=THHapkLeSGo?t=24m23s]"

"At the moment, it’s very clear to me the most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form… The whole idea of wanting to end up with Sharia with a religion-governed state — a state of religious law — and the best means of getting there is Jihad, Holy War, that Muslims have a special right to feel aggrieved enough to demand this is absolute obscene wickedness and I think their religion is nonsense, in its entirety."

"The idea that God speaks to some illiterate merchant warlord in Arabia, and he’s able to write this down perfectly and it contains the answers to all — don’t waste my time with that bulls**t. Also, the archangel Gabriel speaks only Arabic, it seems? Crap."

"All this could be part of a plan. But it’s some plan, isn’t it?; With mass destruction, pitiless extermination and annihilation going on all the time."

"This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be “phobic.” A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational."

"To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?"

"The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization."

"The metaphor of the watch was very much used by the deists. And of course, watches run down, and break down, and it was believed by many of them that if an intelligence had begun the universe, begun the process, he'd took no further interest in it - didn't intervene in human affairs, didn't mind who won the war, didn't mind which country was the leading one, watched with relative—well, or didn't watch—with indifference, plague, famine, war and so forth. That's a very hard position to oppose, by the way. It's impossible, actually, to disprove - one can only the evidence for it isn't quite strong enough to be persuasive. To be a theist, to be a member of a monotheistic religion, that believes that truth has been revealed, that god has intervened in human affairs, that he has a plan for us - each of as individually and as a species, and that it shows - is a very much more difficult undertaking. I'm gonna show why I think it's more or less impossible."

"What preoccupies most scientists now is not how much they know compared to 50 years ago, though that is enormous as a difference, but how little they know compared to what they're finding out [...] For a few milliseconds really of cosmic time our species has lived on one very very small rock, in a very small solar system that's a part of a fantastically unimportant suburb, in one of an uncountable number of galaxies [...] Every single second since the big bang a star the size of our sun has blown up, gone to nothing [...] And indeed physicists now exist who can tell you the date on which our sun will follow suit [...] We know when it's [the world] coming to an end and we know how it will be, but we know something even more extraordinary which is the rate of expansion of this explosion we're looming through is actually speeding up. Our universe is flying apart further and faster than we thought it was [...] Everyone who studies it professionally finds it impossible to reconcile this extraordinarily destructive, chaotic, self-destructive process, to find in it the finger of god, to find in that the idea of a design. And it's not just because we know so little about it, it's because what we know about it that's essential doesn't seem as if it's the intended result brought about by a divine-benign creator who loves every single one of us living as we do on this tiny rock in this negligible suburb of the cosmos."

"It's a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride."

"I don't think it's healthy for people to want there to be a permanent, unalterable, irremovable authority over them. I don't like the idea of a father who never goes away, the idea of a king who cannot be deposed, the idea of a judge who doesn't allow a lawyer or a jury or an appeal. This is an appeal to absolutism. It's the part of ourselves that's not so nice; that wants security, that wants certainty, that wants to be taken care of. For hundreds and hundreds of years, the human struggle for freedom was against the worst kind of dictatorship of all: the theocracy, the one that claims it has God on its side. I believe that totalitarian temptation has to be resisted. What I'm inviting you to do is to consider emancipating yourselves from the idea that you, selfishly, are the sole object of all the wonders of the cosmos and of nature - because that's not a humble idea at all, it's a very arrogant one and there's no evidence for it. And then, again, the second emancipation - to think of yourselves as free citizens who are not enthralled to any supernatural-eternal authority; which you will always find is interpreted for you by other mammals who claim to have access to this authority - that gives them special power over you. Don't allow yourselves to have your lives run like that."

"When Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations and his blasphemy for challenging the Gods of the city and he accepted his death. He did say "well, if we're lucky perhaps I'll be able to hold a conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too", in other words that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble and what is pure and what is true can always go on. Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that is the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don't know, but I do know that it is the conversation I want to have while I am still alive. Which means that for me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I urge you to look at those of you that tell you (at your age) that that you are dead until you believe as they do. (What a terrible thing to be telling to children.) And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside no matter how tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way."

"The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of—now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say."

"Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority."

"I'll grant you that it would possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary who's mentioned about three times in the Bible and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I can say— I don't say that's impossible. Parthenogenesis is not completely unthinkable. It does not prove that his paternity is divine and it wouldn't prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true, especially given the commonplace nature of resurrection at that time and place. After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it. The was raised, didn't say a thing about what she'd been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet people. So it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. So I'll give you all the miracles and you'll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack."

"Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner, rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite."

"The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall."

"Our common speech contains numberless verbs with which to describe the infliction of violence or cruelty or brutality on others. It only really contains one common verb that describes the effect of violence or cruelty or brutality on those who, rather than suffering from it, inflict it. That verb is the verb to brutalize. A slaveholder visits servitude on his slaves, lashes them, degrades them, exploits them, and maltreats them. In the process, he himself becomes brutalized. This is a simple distinction to understand and an easy one to observe. In the recent past, idle usage has threatened to erode it. Last week was an especially bad one for those who think the difference worth preserving...Col. Muammar Qaddafi's conduct [killing his protesters] is far worse than merely brutal—it is homicidal and sadistic...and even if a headline can't convey all that, it can at least try to capture some of it. Observe, then, what happens when the term is misapplied. The error first robs the language of a useful expression and then ends up by gravely understating the revolting reality it seeks to describe...Far from being brutalized by four decades of domination by a theatrical madman, the Libyan people appear fairly determined not to sink to his level and to be done with him and his horrible kin. They also seem, at the time of writing, to want this achievement to represent their own unaided effort. Admirable as this is, it doesn't excuse us from responsibility. The wealth that Qaddafi is squandering is the by-product of decades of collusion with foreign contractors. The weapons that he is employing against civilians were not made in Libya; they were sold to him by sophisticated nations."

"Doing nothing is not the absence of a policy; it is, in fact, the adoption of one. "Neutrality" favors the side with the biggest arsenal. "Nonintervention" is a form of interference. If you will the end—and President Barack Obama has finally said that Qaddafi should indeed go—then to that extent you will the means...The immediate task is therefore to limit the amount of damage Qaddafi can do and sharply minimize the number of people he can murder. Whatever the character of the successor system turns out to be, it can hardly be worsened if we show it positive signs of friendship and solidarity...I am sure I am not alone in feeling rather queasy about being forced to watch the fires in Tripoli and Benghazi as if I were an impotent spectator. Indifference of this kind to the lives of others can have a coarsening effect. It can lower one's threshold of sympathy. If protracted unduly, it might even become brutalizing."

"The stand of the "realist" school, and its objections to further or faster involvement in the Libya crisis, can be fairly summarized...The actual evidence, however, is that Qaddafi senior has reached his Ceausescu moment: a full-dress (in the literal sense) meltdown into paranoia, megalomania, and delusion. His recent speeches and appearances have shown him stinking with madness and hysteria. His age and condition, at any rate, set a very sharp limit to the duration of his regime. If that regime implodes while he is still "in place," then all the grim consequences foreseen by the realists will be incurred in any case. Weapons will get into the wrong hands; divide-and-rule tactics (already a stock in trade) will intensify; religious and tribal passions will be deliberately inflamed. The main difference will be that we merely watched this happen."

"It might bear remembering that when, in 1989, Ceausescu did try to go to war with his own population, Secretary of State James Baker made the unprecedented public statement that the United States would not object to a Russian intervention to spare further chaos and misery in Romania. Are the Russians and the Chinese so wedded to the legal niceties, or so proud of their association with Qaddafi, that they would repudiate a speech from President Barack Obama in which he asked for reciprocation? We cannot know this if such a speech is never made or even contemplated...There are a number of other low-cost tactics that could affect the odds, such as jamming Qaddafi's airwaves. But what principally strikes the eye is not the absence of resources—or, indeed, options—but the absence of preparedness...If the other side in this argument is correct, or even to the extent that it is correct, then we are being warned that a maimed and traumatized Libya is in our future, no matter what. That being the case, a piecemeal and improvised policy is the least pragmatic one. Even if Qaddafi temporarily turns the tide, as seems thinkable, and covers us all with shame for doing so, we will still have it all to do again. Let us at least hope that certain excuses will not be available next time."

"There are several pleasant little towns like Abbottabad in Pakistan, strung out along the roads that lead toward the mountains from Rawalpindi...The colonial British—like Maj. James Abbott, who gave his name to this one—called them "hill stations," designed for the rest and recreation of commissioned officers. The charming idea, like the location itself, survives among the Pakistani officer corps. If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It's the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath."

"In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?...Ten years ago, I remind you, he had a gigantic influence in one rogue and failed state—Afghanistan—and was exerting an increasing force over its Pakistani neighbor. Taliban and al-Qaida sympathizers were in senior positions in the Pakistani army and nuclear program and had not yet been detected as such. Huge financial subventions flowed his way, often through official channels, from Saudi Arabia and other gulf states.... Then, not only did he run away from Afghanistan, leaving his deluded followers to be killed in very large numbers, but he chose to remain a furtive and shady figure, on whom the odds of a successful covert "hit," or bought-and-paid-for betrayal, were bound to lengthen every day...It seems thinkable that he truly believed his own mad propaganda, often adumbrated on tapes and videos, especially after the American scuttle from Somalia. The West, he maintained, was rotten with corruption and run by cabals of Jews and homosexuals. It had no will to resist. It had become feminized and cowardly. One devastating psychological blow and the rest of the edifice would gradually follow the Twin Towers in a shower of dust. Well, he and his fellow psychopaths did succeed in killing thousands in North America and Western Europe, but in the past few years, their main military triumphs have been against such targets as Afghan schoolgirls, Shiite Muslim civilians, and defenseless synagogues in Tunisia and Turkey. Has there ever been a more contemptible leader from behind, or a commander who authorized more blanket death sentences on bystanders?"

"Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism...professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon...Nothing serious," as Chomsky puts it, "has been provided since."..So is one to assume that he [Chomsky] has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?"

"It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' "...In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade."

"The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee."

"Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock."

"In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist."

"I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light."

"As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be "me." (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)"

"My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends."

"...those who say I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker."

"If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does."

"Many of Kissinger's most extreme acts have been undertaken, at least ostensibly, in the name of anti-Communism."

"The diplomatic commonplace term “tilt”—signifying that mixture of signals and nuances and codes that describe a foreign policy preference that is often too embarrassing to be openly avowed—actually originates in this dire episode."

"In this altered climate, the United States faces an interesting dilemma. At any moment, one of its most famous citizens may be found liable for terrorist actions under the Alien Tort Claims Act, or may be subject to an international request for extradition, or may be arrested if he travels to a foreign country, or may be cited for crimes against humanity by a court in an allied nation. The non-adherence by the United States to certain treaties and its reluctance to extradite make it improbable that American authorities would cooperate with such actions, though this would gravely undermine the righteousness with which Washington addresses other nations on the subject of human rights. There is also the option of bringing Kissinger to justice in an American court with an American prosecutor. Again the contingency seems a fantastically remote one, but, again, the failure to do so would expose the country to a much more obvious charge of double standards than would have been apparent even two years ago. The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame."

"I would smile quietly while these young men cheered him on and hear-hear’d. Just wait, I’d think, knowing the moment would arrive when the ideological fiddler would have to be paid, when the host would change the topic and the earnest and happy young men would be reduced to looking at their shoes and muttering Oh, well, yes, I suppose. I like to think of this as the Mother Teresa Moment, named for Hitch’s most incendiary cultural dissent but applicable to any subject that might startle the Christian soldiers of the Bush administration into remembering that, apart from Saddam Hussein, Hitch remained entirely his unreconstructed secular and socialist self."

"This small book is part of a big career devoted to pulverizing cant, deflating oppression, and maximizing human liberty. Not a day went by that Hitch didn’t enter the lists against some iniquity."

"The picture, and its context, announce Mother Teresa as what she is: a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly, secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anybody to believe her. It is past time that she was duly honored, and taken at her word."

"The pleasant surprise that awaits the visitor to Calcutta is this: it is poor and crowded and dirty, in ways which are hard to exaggerate, but it is anything but abject. Its people are neither inert nor cringing. They work and they struggle, and as a general rule (especially as compared with ostensibly richer cities such as Bombay) they do not beg. This is the city of Tagore, of Ray and Bose and Mrinal Sen, and of a great flowering of culture and nationalism. There are films, theaters, university departments and magazines, all of a high quality. The photographs of Raghubir Singh are a testament to the vitality of the people, as well as to the beauty and variety of the architecture. Secular-leftist politics predominate, with a very strong internationalist temper: hardly unwelcome in a region so poisoned by brute religion. When I paid my own visit to the city some years ago, I immediately felt rather cheated by the anti-Calcutta propaganda put out by the Muggeridges of the world."

"But, just as Mother Teresa rather spoiled her own best moment for me by implying that her life’s work was a mere exercise in propaganda for the Vatican’s population policy, she cheapens her own example by telling us, as above, that humanism and altruism are “dangers” to be sedulously avoided. Mother Teresa has never pretended that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign. And in the excerpt above we have it on her own authority that “the poorest of the poor” are the instruments of this; an occasion for piety."

"Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection."

"The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale. As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. They are in no position to complain, and their passivity and abjection is considered a sterling trait. It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers."

"The Catholic Church is a limitless source of fascination, to believers as well as to doubters and unbelievers, because of its attitude toward sex and procreation. Its official dogmas, derived in the main from St. Paul but elaborated down the centuries, forbid clergy from being married and prohibit women from being clergy. Homosexual acts are condemned, as in a way are homosexual persons. Heterosexual acts taking place outside the bond of lawful matrimony are condemned, whether premarital or extramarital. The sexual act within marriage is frowned upon unless it has reproduction as its object. Solitary sex is taboo. The preaching of such a range of prohibitions, and its enforcement by male and female celibates, has been the fertile soil for innumerable reflections, autobiographies and polemics from the Confessions of St. Augustine to Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood."

"In all of these debates, the most consistently reactionary figure has been Mother Teresa. The fundamentalist faction within the Vatican has found her useful in two ways—first as an advertisement for the good works of the Church to non-Catholics; and second as a potent instrument of moral suasion within the ranks of the existing faithful. She has missed no opportunity to restate elementary dogmas (much as she once told an interviewer that, if faced with a choice between Galileo and the authority of the Inquisition, she would have sided with the Church authorities). She has inveighed against abortion, against contraception and against the idea that there should be any limit whatsoever to the growth of world population."

"When Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, few people had the poor taste to ask what she had ever done, or even claimed to do, for the cause of peace. Her address to the ceremony of investiture did little to resolve any doubt on this score and much to increase it."

"But for those who lived in non-Christian lands, it was decreed that the work of conversion was an imperative. It is, in a sense, a pity that this work will always be remembered for its association either with conquest, with religious fratricide or with imperialism."

"In later epochs, both Catholic and Protestant missionaries penetrated the interiors of China and Japan and the remotest parts of Africa and South America, but their presence was indissoluble from that of the trading post and the garrison. In the course of a profitable partnership with slavery, colonialism and forced labor, the Christian “civilizing mission” often came up against strongly entrenched local religions. Where it did not adapt to these, or eliminate their believers, it made little headway. In India, which was disputed as a prize between four principal European powers before passing under British suzerainty, the effect of Christianity has been relatively slight. The Indian authorities, who are suspicious to this day of the link between proselytization and foreign interference, have generally discouraged missionary activity. They have left Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity largely alone, however, in deference to the worldwide reputation of their founder. The Mother Teresa establishment in Calcutta, therefore, possesses elements of pathos and nostalgia: it is the chief and lonely relic of what was once a vast enterprise of conquest and crusading."

"I possess a film of “Mother Teresa” making her homage to “Mother Albania”—as well as to its patron, the pitiless thug Enver Hoxha—and it invites the same question as does the infamous embrace in Haiti: What is a woman of unworldly innocence and charity doing dans cette galère?"

"Intervention, whether moral or political, is always and everywhere a matter of the most exquisite timing. The choice of time and the selection of place can be most eloquent. So indeed may be the moments when nothing is said or done. Mother Teresa is fond of claiming to be not so much above politics as actually beyond them, operating in a manner that is transcendental. All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all claims made by those who affect a merely “spiritual” influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naïveté and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious antimaterialism."

"It is also doubtful whether a fortune-cookie maxim of such cretinous condescension would have been chosen even by Ann Landers unless it bore the imprimatur of Mother Teresa, one of the few untouchables in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous."

"Intellectual snobbery? Only if the task of intellectuals is to urge Mr. and Mrs. Average to settle for little, or for less. Time and again, since I began the project of judging Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation, I have been rebuked and admonished for ridiculing the household gods of the simple folk; for sneering at a woman who, to employ an old citation, “gives those in the gutter a glimpse of the stars.” But is it not here that authentic intellectual snobbery exposes itself?"

"As Mother Teresa has shown in her moments with John-Roger and Michèle Duvalier, and as her Church has shown in its alliance with mullahs and ayatollahs, there exists a sort of reverse ecumenicism which unites all versions of the “faithful” against any version of the dreaded “secular humanist” Enlightenment."

"Agnes Bojaxhiu knows perfectly well that she is conscripted by people like Ralph Reed, that she is a fund-raising icon for clerical nationalists in the Balkans, that she has furnished PR-type cover for all manner of cultists and shady businessmen (who are often the same thing), that her face is on vast highway billboards urging the state to take on the responsibility of safeguarding the womb. By no word or gesture has she ever repudiated any of these connections or alliances. Nor has she ever deigned to respond to questions about her friendship with despots. She merely desires to be taken at her own valuation and to be addressed universally as “Mother Teresa.” Her success is not, therefore, a triumph of humility and simplicity. It is another chapter in a millennial story which stretches back to the superstitious childhood of our species, and which depends on the exploitation of the simple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded."

"As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were “considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Mother Teresa descends from each element in this grisly triptych. She has herself purposely blurred the supposed distinction between the sacred and the profane, to say nothing of the line that separates the sublime from the ridiculous. It is past time that she was subjected to the rational critique that she has evaded so arrogantly and for so long."

"... Mother Teresa at the airport in Madrid. She has flown in to lend her support to the clerical forces who are contesting the post-Franco legislation enabling divorce, abortion and birth control. The crowd at the terminal is composed of the highly traditional Spanish Right, with here and there a blue shirt, and a right arm flung skyward. This is one of the first political votes to decide whether or not Spain will evolve into a secular society. Mother Teresa has taken her stand in this debate, and she has taken it unequivocally on the conservative side—all the while claiming to remain above politics. Any exertion of this privilege is really an abuse, just as it was in Knock."

"I once heard Susan Sontag, in conversation with Umberto Eco, define the polymath as one “who is interested in everything, and in nothing else.”"

"In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it; it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy."

"Friends, we represent a minority, but Literature is on our side. With so many fine books to be read, so much to be studied and known, there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish."

"One test of un homme sérieux is that it is possible to learn from him even when one radically disagrees with him."

"But gallows humor is inseparable from dentistry: at one point I heard the good doctor say, as he plowed through the layers of plaque and tartar, “Good news. I’ve found some of your teeth.”"

"Thus we learn again that what people set down day to day is of greater value than what they try to synthesize retrospectively into a grand sweep or theory."

"Schlesinger had written the Kennedy campaign’s anti-biography of Nixon for the election of 1960, and had come to the view that he was “the greatest shit in 20th century American politics (the “20th century” bit is pure scholarly caution; I cannot at the moment think of anyone in the 19th century quite meeting Nixon’s combination of sanctimoniousness and squalor).”"

"Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty."

"But it can be almost as objectionable to be made to take part in something as to be forbidden to do so."

"I once tried to write an article, perhaps rather straining for effect, describing the experience as too much like living for four weeks in the atmosphere of a one-party state. “Come on,” I hear you say. But by how much would I be exaggerating? The same songs and music played everywhere, all the time. The same uniform slogans and exhortations, endlessly displayed and repeated. The same sentimental stress on the sheer joy of having a Dear Leader to adore. As I pressed on I began almost to persuade myself. The serried ranks of beaming schoolchildren, chanting the same uplifting mush. The cowed parents, in terror of being unmasked by their offspring for insufficient participation in the glorious events. . . . “Come on,” yourself. How wrong am I?"

"Compulsory bad taste isn’t a good cultural sign either."

"Yet despite his Edwardian and near-Victorian provenance he remains more contemporary and relevant to us than many authors of a much later date."

"He could see events being mutated into propaganda before his very eyes, even in the information headquarters of an ostensible democracy."

"We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends."

"And, permanently tempted though he was by cynicism and despair, Orwell also believed in the latent possession of these faculties by those we sometimes have the nerve to call “ordinary people.” Here, then, is some of the unpromising bedrock—hardscrabble soil in Scotland, gritty coal mines in Yorkshire, desert landscapes in Africa, soulless slums and bureaucratic offices—combined with the richer soil and loam of ever-renewing nature, and that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion. Out of the endless attrition between them can come such hope as we may reasonably claim to possess."

"Patriotic and tribal feelings belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence. They are particularly unattractive when evinced by a superpower."

"In my country of birth the great new fictional practitioners have in their front rank names like Rushdie, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Mo. This attainment on their part makes me oddly proud to be whatever I am, and convinces me that internationalism is the highest form of patriotism."

"In an interview with Alex O'Connor at about 59 minutes the discussion turned to deathbed conversions where Richard Dawkins said, "Religious apologists are so eager to get deathbed conversions that you have to watch it. Well actually, Christopher I think himself said that, 'if anybody claims to that I had a deathbed conversion you can be absolutely sure that I wasn't in my right mind when its happened'.""

"Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons."

"BUSH IS NOT GREAT (HE'S MARVELLOUS!)"

"Many stupid people refuse to believe in a supreme power. I felt like that once but then I had a moment of revelation when I realised that everyone was talking nonsense and that there was an all-powerful benign intelligence that controlled our destinies. The ignorant and uneducated blamed Him for allowing wars in which thousands died or floods in which people's homes were swept away while He merely looked on. "Why does He allow evil to happen?" they asked, as if this was a sensible question. But it isn't. The fact remains that George Bush does exist. Although He moves in mysterious ways and His sayings are sometimes difficult to comprehend, if we have faith in George Bush all will be revealed and our lives will be transformed. We could not wish for more."

"Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of those attempting to see something suspect, or even less than laudable, in Dick Cheney’s entirely justified, indeed, necessary, shooting of Harry Whittington. According to no less an authority than the so-called ‘Daily’ Kos, Mr Whittington apparently had a ‘right’ (granted by whom?) to wander, uncalled for and unmarked, directly into the sites of the man who was praised for his shooting by no less an authority than Lee ‘Harvey’ Oswald, back in the days when the Democratic Party still fought against totalitarianism, before the Jihadist wing of the extremist party of the Michael Moore faction staged their grisly coup ‘d’etat’ (a French word meaning, originally ‘Islamo-jihadist of the Left’ [...] but no less an authority than an old friend of mine who works and fights high up in the upper echelons of the so called state ‘department’ a man entirely untouched by the vagaries and conspiracies of the thuggish authoritarianism of the so called ‘C’ IA which ran through the cobbled streets of the State like a veritable whirlwind of Reaganite self-certainty, disenobling the watery flow of power from that much vaunted fountain of secularism best known as the white ‘house’ to those too ignorant to realise its true role as the ‘house’ of the illuminati: as this man, to repeat, told me, myself, and, indeed, I (or as it were, we) this Mr Whittington was on his way, even as Dick unleashed his mighty cannon, to buy uranium from Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, who are, as we speak, meeting on the so called ‘far’ side of the moon in order to unveil a proto-’ji’ hadist empire of neo-caliphatinism a word that, were it to be real, would be no less real than the threat of apres-jihadist terror that my good friend ‘dick’ had the temerity, indeed, the accuracy, to stop."

"Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language."

"It was from him that I first learned, often with the force of revelation, many of the main ideas of the Marxist tradition."

"Since Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously, there is no reason for anyone else to do so. The fair and sensible reaction is to treat all of this as some aberration, and to await the return of the author to the important work that he has often done in the past."

"The precise reason for Hitchens' theft and publication of my private mail is that I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel’s Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people. But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks."

"Eloquent, witty, literate, intelligent, knowledgeable, brave, erudite, hard-working, honest (who could forget his clean-through skewering of Mother Teresa's hypocrisy?), arguably the most formidable debater alive today yet at the same time the most gentlemanly, Christopher Hitchens is a giant of the mind and a model of courage."

"So only atheists are in a comfortable position to cast the first stone, and Christopher Hitchens, in "God Is Not Great," relishes the role. He has the credentials, as both a combative journalist and a surprisingly erudite literary scholar, and he wants to break the diplomacy barrier and expose the preposterous presumptions and ignoble machinations that stain the history of all religions, bringing discredit that tends to get magnified over the years by a persistent pattern of coverup, veils of illusion, and denial of one design or another. These efforts at obfuscation are quite transparent under Hitchens' s merciless scrutiny, and the results are often quite comical."

"Hitchens is also a militant atheist, or as he prefers to term it "anti-theist." I wish it were not so, because I'd love to have Hitchens' rapier wit and bohemian elegance on our side."

"The man can write. He has lived a life. He has seen for himself, making it a point to travel regularly to dangerous and wretched nations. He has been a man of political passion, beginning first as a Trotskyite and becoming in recent years a supporter of the Neocon war in Iraq. … He exists as that most daring of writers, a freelance intellectual. He's a good speaker, can be funny, has bad teeth, is passably good-looking, and is at no pains to be a charmer."

"A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens....Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful too...."

"The question is whether there can be any progress of the mind in a secular world. That is to say, if we turn away from the ethical teachings of Christ, or for that matter Muhammad, what is left to guide us? What incentive do we have to be good if there is no afterlife? The problem that militant atheists confront, including recent popularisers of atheism like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, is that there isn’t really a very good answer to that."

"Hitchens maintains that that "there is a close fit between the democratically minded and the pro-American" in the Middle East - like "President for Life" Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan...that [referring to 9/11] "Washington finally grasped that "there were `root causes behind the murder-attacks" [emphasis in original] (but didn't Hitchens ridicule any allusion to "root causes" as totalitarian apologetics?)...that "racism" is "anti-American as nearly as possible by definition"...that "evil" can be defined as "the surplus value of the psychopath"...is there a Bartlett's for worst quotations?"

"Two altogether opposed political stances can each draw an audience's attention. One is to be politically consistent, but nonetheless original in one's insights; the other, an inchoate form of apostasy, is to bank on the shock value of an occasional, wildly inconsistent outburst. The former approach, which Chomsky exemplifies, requires hard work, whereas the latter is a lazy substitute for it. … The master at this pose of maverick unpredictability used to be Christopher Hitchens. Amidst a fairly typical leftist politics, he would suddenly ambush unsuspecting readers with his opposition to abortion, admiration of the misogynist and juvenile lyrics of Two Live Crew ("I think that's very funny"), or support for Columbus's extermination of Native Americans ("deserving to be celebrated with great vim and gusto"). Immediately the talk of the town became, "Did you read Hitchens this week?" Although a tacit assumption equates unpredictability with independence of mind, it might just as well signal lack of principle."

"Mr Hitchens's policy has succeeded in making 10,000 new Bin Ladens."

"What you have witnessed since Christopher Hitchens’s opposition to the 1991 invasion of Iraq is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly into a slug."

"My friend Christopher Hitchens is a writer of truly incandescent prose … one of the best writers to ever draw breath."

"For Hitchens, it's about a performance, and that was true when he was on the left. He hasn't changed. It's all about him. It's all about being a contrarian. He reminds me of Ann Coulter, he's that kind of a figure. He's witty, and he's funny and insulting. You know I debated him, and in the middle of the debate he starts shouting, "Shame on you for defending suicide bombers!" Of course, unlike him, I've actually stood at the edge of a suicide bombing attack. That kind of stuff is just ... it's the epistemology of television. They make a lot of money off it, but it's gross and disgusting and anti-intellectual and not at all about real discussion."

"Christopher Hitchens is a remarkable commentator. He jousts with fraudulence of every stripe and always wins. I regret he has only one life, one mind, and one reputation to put at the service of my country."

"Hitchens is a witty thinker, but never a frivolous one."

"Nothing about Christopher Hitchens disagreeing with me depresses me. It means I'm probably wrong, I got a lot more thinking to do, but it never seems to me that he is disingenuous, it never seems to me that he is lying or scamming me and it never seems to me that he's fucking crazy, we just disagree. In my idea of utopia, that's how I want to feel about everyone I disagree with."

"Long ago he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish. Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for his anti-Zionist sympathies.) In the 1990s, Hitchens was virulently, and somewhat inexplicably, hostile to President Bill Clinton. Interesting!!! You would have thought that Clinton’s decadence — the thing that bothered other liberals and leftists the most — would have positively appealed to Hitchens. Finally and recently, he became the most (possibly the only) intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of George W. Bush’s Iraq war. Interesting!!!! … Well, ladies and gentlemen, Hitchens is either playing the contrarian at a very high level or possibly he is even sincere."

"I don't think there is anyone in the world who when I see the byline, I want to read the article more. He makes us think differently about things, I don't know of a higher praise I can say to an author."

"If Hitchens didn't exist, we wouldn't be able to invent him."

"I had an old rule that I would never debate Hitchens about anything—he is one of the great intellects and wits of the age—since there was no chance I would ever win."

"Hitchens is a cynic and he knows nothing about religion"

"A couple of months after the invasion of Iraq, I was in Los Angeles and some drunk accosted me, saying, "George Bush was right about everything he said about Iraq!" - weapons of mass destruction, the al-Qaeda connection and more. It was Christopher Hitchens, "debating" me, and furious. His confusing our President's assertions with reality was a verbal pie he threw in the air and caught on his face."

"That such a dynamic speaker, writer and thinker has devolved into a sputtering death-loving crank is certainly sad, especially for us who knew him back in the day."

"Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant man, and there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading."

"In person, as on the page, Hitchens is in masterly possession of what he calls saeva indignatio, that "combination of cheek and anger to point out how the world falls short of its pretensions". He is a skilled orator, working, as far as I could see, without a text or notes. He chooses his weapons carefully, and is efficient either as a sniper or as a bombardier unloading the full arsenal of his invective. But he is also a barnum, of the type so congenial to that quintessentially American tradition of cracker-barrel salesmanship. When an elderly woman rises to challenge Hitchens, he quips: "Mother, I told you not to do this." Thus her question is deflected, amid the general laughter of an audience who are now behaving as so many valets to this lofty wit."

"He inspired love in so many for one reason. He was true to himself, and he loved the world. And what was so truly moving about his final years – especially in his campaign against religion – was how much, how overwhelmingly, so many who never even met him loved him, and I mean loved him, back."

"Hitchens identified himself for many years as the heir to me … unfortunately, for him, I didn't die."

"Well-travelled, hyper-educated, pissed-off, always funny, Christopher Hitchens has no equal in American journalism."

"In creating Christopher Hitchens, God took special care and did a hell of a job. A writer touched by greatness, following his own broken compass all over the map, servile to no one, insulter of many, drinker and smoker nonpareil. A man of consequence. A writer. Thank you, God."

"[I]n so many things, from tea-drinking to composing filthy limericks, he remained defiantly English, even after three decades in New York and Washington. Staying at his apartment once, I played "Abide With Me" on the piano – and looked up to see tears rolling down his cheeks. The jokes he most enjoyed depended on a set of references understood by Englishmen of his class and upbringing – hymns ancient and modern, P G Wodehouse, U and non-U, absurd nicknames, Gilbert and Sullivan, sexual incompetence, over-boiled cabbage and rain-sodden holidays in West Wittering."

"Now he took the music of like Mandrill, like "Fencewalk", certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like The Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with "Apache" and he just kept that beat going. It might be that certain part of the record that everybody waits for ]]— they just let their inner self go and get wild. The next thing you know the singer comes back in and you'd be mad."

"Herc really slipped up. With the monstrous power he had he couldn't mix too well. He was playing little breaks but it would sound so sloppy. I noticed that the mixer he was using was a GLI 3800. It was a very popular mixer at that time. It's a scarcity today but it's still one of the best mixers GLI ever made. At the time he wasn't using no queueing. In other words, the hole was there for a headphone to go in but I remember he never had headphones over his ears. All of a sudden, Herc had headphones but I guess he was so used to dropping the needle down by eyesight and trying to mix it that from the audio part of it he couldn't get into it too well."

"Routine is the death to heroism."

"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them."

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.' (quoting John Greenleaf Whittier)"

""Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary," murmured Psmith. (Earlier usage of the precise words "Elementary, my dear Watson" has been found in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)"

"Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it."

"So was victory turned into defeat, and Billy's jaw became squarer and his eye more full of the light of battle than ever."

"His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live for ever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live for ever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented a human being can be in this century of alarms and excursions."

"The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress has failed to touch... The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the natives palaeozoic."

"In English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers to blaming the government."

"At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter of fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack."

"‘As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn’t detect a bass-drum in a telephone-booth.’"

"Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble."

"There are some things a chappie's mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing 'Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay' is one of them."

"He wore the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between women, and only a wet cat in a strange backyard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect."

"And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need."

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun."

"A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour."

"At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies."

"Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious."

"Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good."

"He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control."

"It was one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes--the kind that makes you reach up to see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as I were some sort of unnecessary product which Cuthbert the Cat had brought in after a ramble among the local ash-cans."

"It was a cold, disapproving gaze, such as a fastidious luncher who was not fond of caterpillars might have directed at one which he had discovered in his portion of salad..."

"Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did."

"Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love."

"He was not a man who prattled readily, especially in a foreign tongue. He gave the impression that each word was excavated from his interior by some up-to-date process of mining."

"... "someone tried to assasinate Lenin with a revolver. That is our (Russia's) great national sport, you see.""

"... Vladimir Brusiloff proceeded to sum up. "No novelists any good except me. Sovietski--yah! Nastikoff--bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.""

"What I want to know is what a fellow does when he plays golf. Tell me in as few words as you can just what it's all about." --"You hit a ball with a stick until it falls into a hole."

"[Millionaire-financier Vincent Jopp said:] "Go out and buy me a set of clubs, a red jacket, a cloth cap, a pair of spiked shoes, and a ball." --"One ball?" "Certainly. What need is there of more?" --"It sometimes happens," I explained, "that a player who is learning the game fails to hit the ball straight, and then he often loses it in the rough at the side of the fairway." "Absurd!" said Vincent Jopp. "If I set out to drive my ball straight, I shall drive it straight.""

"When I was but a babe, my eldest sister was bribed with sixpence an hour by my nurse to keep an eye on me and see that I did not raise Cain. At the end of the first day she struck for a shilling, and got it."

"I like to be surrounded by joy and life, and I know nothing more joyless and deader than a dead fish. Multiply that dead fish by a million, and you have an environment which only a Dante could contemplate with equanimity."

"“...These trousers may sit well, but, if they do, it is because the pockets are empty.”"

"As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that."

"It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought."

"I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back."

"Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad."

"I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast."

"Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language."

"‘Alf Todd,’ said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, ‘has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild-cat’s ear with a red-hot needle.’"

"Whenever I meet Ukridge’s Aunt Julia I have the same curious illusion of having just committed some particularly unsavoury crime and—what is more—of having done it with swollen hands, enlarged feet, and trousers bagging at the knee on a morning when I had omitted to shave."

"He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin."

"He committed mayhem upon his person. He did everything to him that a man can do who is hampered with boxing gloves."

"The principle on which chairmen at these meetings are selected is perhaps too familiar to require recording here at length, but in case some of my readers are not acquainted with the workings of political machines, I may say that no one under the age of eighty-five is eligible and the preference is given to those with adenoids. For Boko Lawlor the authorities had extended themselves and picked a champion of his class. In addition to adenoids, the Right Hon. the Marquess of Cricklewood had — or seemed to have — a potato of the maximum size and hotness in his mouth, and he had learned his elocution in one of those correspondence schools which teach it by mail. I caught his first sentence — that he would only detain us a moment — but for fifteen minutes after that he baffled me completely. That he was still speaking I could tell by the way his Adam’s apple wiggled, but what he was saying I could not even guess."

"'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend."

"Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover."

"The light from the big window fell right on the picture. I took a good look at it. Then I shifted a bit nearer and took another look. Then I went back to where I had been at first, because it hadn't seemed quite so bad from there."

"Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time."

"While they were content to peck cautiously at the ball, he never spared himself in his efforts to do it a violent injury."

"Blizzard was of the fine old school of butlers. His appearance suggested that for fifteen years he had not let a day pass without its pint of port. He radiated port and pop-eyed dignity. He had splay feet and three chins, and when he walked his curving waistcoat preceded him like the advance guard of some royal procession."

"Bradbury Fisher shuddered from head to foot, and his legs wobbled like asparagus stalks."

"[of a character in "The Man Who Gave Up Smoking" who is suffering from a hangover] ... the noise of the cat stamping about in the passage outside caused him exquisite discomfort."

"A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy. (From preface)"

"At this moment, the laurel bush, which had hitherto not spoken, said "Psst!""

"This done, he felt a little—not much, but a little—better. Before, he would have gladly murdered Beach and James and danced on their graves. Now, he would have been satisfied with straight murder."

"When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon."

"The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say `When!'"

"My Aunt Dahlia has a carrying voice... If all other sources of income failed, she could make a good living calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee."

"She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season."

"Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove."

"In one second, without any previous training or upbringing, he had become the wettest man in Worcestershire."

"'The modern young man,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'is a congenital idiot and wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.'"

"One of the first lessons life teaches us is that on these occasions of back-chat between the delicately-nurtured a man should retire into the offing, curl up in a ball, and imitate the prudent tactics of the opossum, which, when danger is in the air, pretends to be dead, frequently going to the length of hanging out crêpe and instructing its friends to stand round and say what a pity it all is."

"I can't stand Paris. I hate the place. Full of people talking French, which is a thing I bar. It always seems to me so affected."

"He groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch."

"The real objection to the great majority of cats is their insufferable air of superiority. Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods. This makes them too prone to set themselves up as critics and censors of the frail and erring human beings whose lot they share."

"Oh, yes, he thinks a lot of you. I remember his very words. 'Mr Wooster, miss,' he said, 'is, perhaps, mentally somewhat negligible but he has a heart of gold.'"

"You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower."

"Scarcely had I entered the sitting-room when I found ... what appeared at first sight to be the Devil, A closer scrutiny informed me that it was Gussie Fink-Nottle, dressed as Mephistopheles."

"We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight."

"Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror."

"The female in question was a sloppy pest"

"There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots."

"A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation point."

"I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the most blithering and futile. It won't work. Not a chance."

"And a moment later there was a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and the relative had crossed the threshold at fifty m.p.h. under her own steam."

"My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all."

"She cried in a voice that hit me between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my head."

"I goggled. Her words did not appear to make sense. They seemed the mere aimless vapouring of an aunt who has been sitting out in the sun without a hat."

"He had been looking like a dead fish. He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year's, cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides."

"It's only about once in a lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it does, you don't want people taking all the colour out of it. I remember at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the girl what a hell of a time he'd been having among the cannibals and what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had described some particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for the awestruck "Oh-h! Not really?", she had said that the whole thing had no doubt been greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably really been a prominent local vegetarian."

"And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned."

"In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake."

"The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram."

"I don't want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of voice production, Jeeves," I said, "but I must inform you that that 'Well, sir' of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your 'Indeed, sir?' Like the latter, it seems to be tinged with a definite scepticism. It suggests a lack of faith in my vision. The impression I retain after hearing you shoot it at me a couple of times is that you consider me to be talking through the back of my neck, and that only a feudal sense of what is fitting restrains you from substituting for it the words 'Says you!'"

"And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight."

"He uttered a coarse expression which I wouldn't have thought he would have known. It just shows that you can bury yourself in the country and still somehow acquire a vocabulary. No doubt one picks up things from the neighbours — the vicar, the local doctor, the man who brings the milk, and so on."

"I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something — a sculptor he would have been, no doubt — who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course."

""Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit."

"When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy queen." Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the point."

"Though never for an instant faltering in my opinion that Augustus Fink-Nottle was Nature's final word in cloth-headed guffins, I liked the man, wished him well."

"Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution."

"Contenting myself, accordingly, with a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room. Whether she did or did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on the table beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the impression that some blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork, but I was feeling too pre-occupied to note and observe."

"Jeeves," I said, and I am free to admit that in my emotion I bleated like a lamb drawing itself to the attention of the parent sheep, "what the dickens is all this?"

"I wouldn't have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours."

"If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me."

"Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum."

"Besides, isn't there something in the book of rules about a man may not marry his cousin? Or am I thinking of grandmothers?"

"I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven't the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke and himself torn limb from limb."

"He expressed the opinion that the world was in a deplorable state. I said, 'Don't talk rot, old Tom Travers.' 'I am not accustomed to talk rot,' he said. 'Then, for a beginner,' I said, 'you do it dashed well.' And I think you will admit, boys and ladies and gentlemen, that that was telling him.""

"[Anatole, the French chef, is angry.] He spoke, in part, as follows: "Hot dog! You ask me what is it? Listen. Make some attention a little. Me, I have hit the hay, but I do not sleep so good, and presently I wake and up I look, and there is one who make faces against me through the dashed window. Is that a pretty affair? Is that convenient? If you think I like it, you jolly well mistake yourself. I am so mad as a wet hen. And why not? I am somebody, isn't it? This is a bedroom, what-what, not a house for some apes? Then for what do blighters sit on my window so cool as a few cucumbers, making some faces?" "Quite," I said. Dashed reasonable, was my verdict. He threw another look up at Gussie, and did Exercise 2—the one where you clutch the moustache, give it a tug and then start catching flies. "Wait yet a little. I am not finish. I say I see this type on my window, making a few faces. But what then? Does he buzz off when I shout a cry, and leave me peaceable? Not on your life. He remain planted there, not giving any damns, and sit regarding me like a cat watching a duck. He make faces against me and again he make faces against me, and the more I command that he should get to hell out of here, the more he do not get to hell out of here. He cry something towards me, and I demand what is his desire, but he do not explain. Oh, no, that arrives never. He does but shrug his head. What damn silliness! Is this amusing for me? You think I like it? I am not content with such folly. I think the poor mutt's loony. Je me fiche de ce type infect. C'est idiot de faire comme ça l'oiseau.... Allez-vous-en, louffier.... Tell the boob to go away. He is mad as some March hatters." I must say I thought he was making out a jolly good case, and evidently Aunt Dahlia felt the same. She laid a quivering hand on his shoulder. "I will, Monsieur Anatole, I will," she said, and I couldn't have believed that robust voice capable of sinking to such an absolute coo. More like a turtle dove calling to its mate than anything else. "It's quite all right." She had said the wrong thing. He did Exercise 3. "All right? Nom d'un nom d'un nom! The hell you say it's all right! Of what use to pull stuff like that? Wait one half-moment. Not yet quite so quick, my old sport. It is by no means all right. See yet again a little. It is some very different dishes of fish. I can take a few smooths with a rough, it is true, but I do not find it agreeable when one play larks against me on my windows. That cannot do. A nice thing, no. I am a serious man. I do not wish a few larks on my windows. I enjoy larks on my windows worse as any. It is very little all right. If such rannygazoo is to arrive, I do not remain any longer in this house no more. I buzz off and do not stay planted.""

"The fellow with a face rather like a walnut."

"Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman."

"She loves this newt-nuzzling blister."

""I hadn't heard the door open, but the man was on the spot once more. My private belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn't have to open doors. He's like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about — the chaps, I mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he's not there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas."

"It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them."

"Even at normal times Aunt Dahlia's map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression."

"If the prophet Job were to walk into the room at this moment, I could sit swapping hard-luck stories with him till bedtime.""

"I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not — being, in point of fact, Jeeves."

"There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air."

"It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine."

"A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant."

"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said: ‘Er, garçon.’ ‘M’sieur?’ ‘Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une piece de papier—note papier, vous savez—et une envelope et une plume.’ The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue. ‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added ‘to the sweetest girl on earth’, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings. ‘V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir,’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk—pin—pipper—enveloppe—and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’ ‘Oh, merci,’ said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. ‘Thanks. Right-ho.’ ‘Right-ho, m’sieur,’ said the waiter."

"He had never acted in his life, and couldn't play the pin in Pinafore."

"A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard."

"'Didn't Frankenstein get married?' 'Did he?' said Eggy. 'I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.'"

"If Eggy wanted to get spliced, let him, was the way I looked at it. Marriage might improve him. It was difficult to think of anything that wouldn’t."

"I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves."

"It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill."

"‘Do you know,’ said a thoughtful Bean, ‘I’ll bet that if all the girls Freddie Widgeon has loved were placed end to end—not that I suppose one could do it—they would reach half-way down Piccadilly.’ ‘Further than that,’ said the Egg. ‘Some of them were pretty tall.’"

"’You must remember, Father,’ said Mavis, in a voice which would have had an Eskimo slapping his ribs and calling for the steam-heat, ‘that this girl was probably very pretty. So many of these New York girls are. That would, of course, explain Frederick's behaviour.’"

"He then gave a hideous laugh and added that, if anybody was interested in his plans, he was going to join the Foreign Legion, that cohort of the damned in which broken men may toil and die and dying, forget. ‘Beau Widgeon?’ said the Egg, impressed. ‘What ho!’"

"‘Oh Brancepeth,’ said the girl, her voice trembling, ‘why haven’t you any money? If only you had the merest pittance - enough for a flat in Mayfair and a little weekend place in the country somewhere and a couple of good cars and a villa in the South of France and a bit of trout fishing on some decent river, I would risk all for love.’"

"I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."

"Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin."

"[of Spode] He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment."

"It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof."

"'Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?' 'No.' 'Revolting. It alters one's whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.'"

"Prismatic is the only word for those frightful tweeds and, oddly enough, the spectacle of them had the effect of steadying my nerves. They gave me the feeling that nothing mattered."

"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

"'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, "Do trousers matter?"' ‘The mood will pass, sir.’"

"Stiffy was one of those girls who enjoy in equal quantities the gall of an army mule and the calm insouciance of a fish on a slab of ice."

"There came from without the hoof-beats of a galloping relative and Aunt Dahlia whizzed in."

"'You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.' 'No, sir.' 'One or the other. Not both.' 'Precisely, sir.'"

"’You know your Shelley, Bertie!’ ‘Oh, am I?’"

"I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I have found in life is that from time to time, as you jog along, there occur moments which you are able to recognize immediately with the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they are going to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the memory and will come back to you at intervals down the years, as you are dropping off to sleep, banishing that drowsy feeling and causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon."

"'I want to know what the devil you mean by keeping coming into my private apartment, taking up space which I require for other purposes and interrupting me when I am chatting with my personal friends. Really one gets about as much privacy in this house as a strip-tease dancer.'"

"...his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look around after a thunderstorm."

"I don’t suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartare sauce."

"She snorted with a sudden violence which twenty-four hours earlier would have unmanned me completely. Even in my present tolerably robust condition, it affected me like one of those gas explosions which slay six."

"Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag."

"Directing an austere look at Tubby’s receding back, she spoke in a cold crisp voice which sounded in the drowsy stillness like ice tinkling in a pitcher."

"Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks."

"there entered a young man of great height but lacking the width of shoulder and ruggedness of limb which make height impressive. Nature, stretching Horace Davenport out, had forgotten to stretch him sideways, and one could have pictured Euclid, had they met, nudging a friend and saying:‘Don't look now, but this chap coming along illustrates exactly what I was telling you about a straight line having length without breadth"

"'Don't blame me, Pongo,' said Lord Ickenham, 'if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you. God bless my soul, though, you can't compare the lorgnettes of to-day with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.'"

"It began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke’s better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he might not have any."

"The cosy glow which had been enveloping the Duke became shot through by a sudden chill. It was as if he had been luxuriating in a warm shower-bath, and some hidden hand had turned on the cold tap."

"The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide."

"He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg."

"Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind."

"His whole aspect was that of a man who has unexpectedly been struck by lightning."

"Mere abuse is no criticism."

"[Hemmingway] seemed disposed to conversation. "A lot of wasps there are about this summer," he said. "One sang right past my ear just then." --"I wish it had bitten you," said Poskitt. "Wasps," replied Hemmingway, who had dabbled in natural history, "do not bite. They sting. You are thinking of snakes." --"Your society would make anyone think of snakes." "Gentlemen," I said. "Gentlemen!""

"Aunt Agatha is like an elephant—not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets."

"His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see he loved like a thousand bricks."

"I suppose this was really the moment for embarking upon an impassioned defence of Boko, stressing his admirable qualities. Not being able to think of any, however, I remained silent."

"On his good mornings, I don't suppose there are more than a handful of men in the W. 1 postal district of London swifter to spot oompus-boompus than Bertram Wooster, and this was one of my particularly good mornings. I saw the whole hideous plot."

"I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I like it the way it is.’"

"He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud."

"However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck."

"She laughed - a solo effort. Nothing in the prevailing circumstances made me feel like turning it into a duet."

"There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action."

"We exchanged a meaning glance. Or, rather, two meaning glances, I giving him one and he giving me the other."

"When news had reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha for many years a widow, or derelict, as I believed it is called, was about to take another pop at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her - she, as you are aware, being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon."

"Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again."

"It seemed to me, thinking quick, that the only way of solving the am-parce [impasse] was to sacrifice Shorty. Like Russian peasants with their children, you know, when they are pursued by wolves and it becomes imperative to lighten the sledge."

"The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass."

"On the cue 'five aunts' I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage that one brings to them, I pulled myself together."

"As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention."

"For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked."

"The junior partner of Caine and Cooper, though a man of blameless life, had one of those dark, saturnine faces which suggest a taste for the more sinister forms of crime, and on one cheek of that dark, saturnine face was a long scar. Actually it had been caused by the bursting of a gingerbeer bottle at a Y.M.C.A. picnic, but it gave the impression of being the outcome of battles with knives in the cellars of the underworld."

"Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes."

"For some moments after silence had come like a poultice to heal the blows of sound, all that occupied his mind was the thought of what pests the gentler sex were when they got hold of a telephone. The instrument seemed to go to their heads like a drug. Connie Keeble, for instance. Nice sensible woman when you talked to her face to face, never tried to collar the conversation and all that, but the moment she got on the telephone, it was gab, gab, gab, and all about nothing."

"It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't."

"I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous."

"As plainly as if it had been the top line on the oculist’s chart I could see what the future held for Bertram."

"Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock."

"And as he, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat, we stood for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other at the dog races."

"Oh, Bertie, if I ever called you a brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some lunatic asylum, I take back the words."

"I don't know if you have ever seen a tiger of the jungle drawing a deep breath preparatory to doing a swan dive and landing with both the feet on the backbone of one of the minor fauna. Probably not, nor, as a matter of fact, have I."

"Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion in her appearance of a private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play the title role in Charley’s Aunt, was one of those doggedly faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families like barnacles to the hulls of ships...She was as much a fixture as the stone lions or the funny smell in the attic."

"He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked."

"Never put anything on paper, my boy, and never trust a man with a small black moustache."

"It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo."

"Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings."

"Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan."

"...I mean to say, when a girl, offered a good man’s heart, laughs like a bursting paper bag and tells him not to be a silly ass, the good man is entitled, I think, to assume that the whole thing is off."

"Whenever there is a job to be taken on of a kind calculated to make Humanity shudder, the cry goes up, ‘Let Wooster do it.’"

"‘Are you sure?’ I said that sure was just what I wasn’t anything but."

"She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity."

"‘Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.’ ‘I couldn’t be, I’m never up so early.’"

"‘When I say “mind,”’ said the blood relation, ‘I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well.’"

"I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me."

"I’d always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn’t even put her in the oven."

""Wellbeloved," she said, ... "I have been making inquiries about you in Market Blandings, and everyone to whom I have mentioned your name tells me that you are thoroughly untrustworthy, a man without scruples of any sort, who sticks at nothing and will do anything for money. ... At the Emsworth Arms, for instance, I was informed that you would sell your grandmother for twopence." George Cyril said that he did not have a grandmother, and seemed a good deal outraged by the suggestion that, if that relative had not long since gone to reside with the morning stars, he would have parted with her at such bargain-basement rates. A good grandmother should fetch at least a couple of bob."

"‘Don't you like this hat?‘ ‘No, sir.‘ ‘Well, I do,‘ I replied rather cleverly, and went out with it tilted just that merest shade over the left eye which makes all the difference."

"He’s engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a fellow has had plug-uglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on his face Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all."

"‘Stinko, is he?’ 'Not perhaps stinko, but certainly effervescent.’"

"'I hate you, I hate you!' cried Madeline, a thing I didn't know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy."

"...as I felt my way along the wall I collided with what turned out to be a grandfather clock, for the existence of which I had not budgeted, and it toppled over with a sound like the delivery of several tons of coal through the roof of a conservatory. Glass crashed, pulleys and things parted from their moorings, and as I stood trying to separate my heart from the front teeth in which it had become entangled, the lights flashed on and I beheld Sir Watkyn Bassett."

"I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn’t. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they’re fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes."

"‘And shove him into a dungeon with dripping walls and see to it that he is well gnawed by rats.’"

"I started back to the house, and in the drive I met Jeeves. He was at the wheel of Stiffy's car. Beside him, looking like a Scotch elder rebuking sin, was the dog Bartholomew."

"I've seen him a couple of times in the arena, and was profoundly impressed by his virtuosity. Rugby football is more or less a sealed book to me, I never having gone in for it, but even I could see he was good. The lissomness with which he moved hither and thither was most impressive, as was his homicidal ardour when doing what I believe is called tackling. Like the Canadian Mounted Police he always got his man, and when he did so the air was vibrant with the excited cries of the morticians in the audience making bids for the body."

"As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men about him who were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht."

"A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard winters."

"To say that his conscience was clear would be inaccurate, for he did not have a conscience, but he had what was much better, an alibi..."

"His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle."

"‘You’re one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It’s a great gift.’"

"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."

"My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard: whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a dame in a Christmas pantomime."

"I had not failed to interpret the significance of that dark frown, that bitten lip and those flashing eyes, nor the way the willowy figure had quivered, indicating, unless she had caught a chill, that she was as sore as a sunburned neck."

"She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo."

"It just showed once again that half the world doesn’t know how the other three quarters live."

"There are girls, few perhaps but to be found if one searches carefully, who when their advice is ignored and disaster ensues, do not say "I told you so". Mavis was not of their number."

"Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase."

"I don't condone murder but your charming use of Latin and ballyhoo has left me nostalgic for the whimsical class divisions of P. G. Wodehouse, and I've forgotten your homicidal idiosyncrasies already!."

"Wodehouse revived light English prose. He was the only Englishman who saw how the American vernacular revitalized the English language. Wodehouse's metaphors and similes replaced the epigram... Adoring public school life he remained the irrepressible fifth-former to the end of time to whom high-brows, Freud, aunts, magnates, club-bores and the Right Hon. "who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'When!'" were God-given targets for ragging."

"Wodehouse irritated earnest progressives, who saw him as a buffoon pandering to nostalgia and romanticizing the most effete elements in the upper classes."

"Now in the course of this broadcast I gave as the best writer of English now alive, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse... Now the end of writing is the production in the reader's mind of a certain image and a certain emotion. And the means towards that end are the use of words in any particular language; and the complete use of that medium is the choosing of the right words and the putting of them into the right order. It is this which Mr. Wodehouse does better, in the English language, than anyone else alive; or at any rate than anyone else whom I have read for many years past."

"His object is comedy in the most modern sense of that word: that is, his object is to present the laughable, and he does this with such mastery and skill that he nearly always approaches, and often reaches, perfection."

"A novelist has now, therefore, to choose between these alternatives: either to deal in stereotyped humour (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the works of P. G. Wodehouse are examples of ingenious variations on a laugh in one place—cf. humour of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which communicated a whole comic attitude)."

"Wodehouse is caught between the two poles of the modern age – mischievous but not vulgar, inoffensive but not anodyne. His gifts cannot be captured by the screen, the ultimate medium of the modern age, either. That's not to say he's outdated. His genius has been obscured, not promoted, by television exposure. Read him; don’t watch him. He is still timelessly funny."

"It is amusing to read the various wails about the villainy of Wodehouse. The harm done to England's cause and to England's dignity is not the poor man's babble in Berlin, but the acceptance of him by a childish part of the people and the academic government of Oxford, dead from the chin up, as a person of any importance whatsoever in English humorous literature, or any literature at all. It is an ironic twist of retribution on those who banished Joyce and honoured Wodehouse. If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea. If Berlin thinks the poor fish great, so much the better for us."

"The idiosyncrasy is in the false concord of phrases, the syntax of stately with vernacular, a Bible quotation collapsing into Fourth Form slang, the great Amen on the organ followed by a few notes of piffling piccolo voluntary. If you analyse the feeble mind that Wodehouse has given Bertie Wooster, you find that its feebleness, to our joy, is Bertie's inability to connect his teeming tags and images prosaically. The result is an English unofficial prose fluent with mad alienations, most savoury similes, but innocent, vulnerable and often wonderfully vivid."

"[T]he University [of Oxford] in conferring an honorary degree on Mr P. G. Wodehouse has suddenly exerted its failing strength in an action worthy of its tradition. It is speaking, as one of its most splendid functions to speak, for the educated class of the country, in recognizing Mr Wodehouse's place in literature, not perhaps, as Mr Agate claims, as "a little below Shakespeare's and any distance you like above anybody else's", but certainly as the equal among his contemporaries, as Sir Max Beerbohm and Mgr Knox, and high in the historic succession of the master-craftsmen of his trade."

"In a hundred years' time "the kind of man who reads P. G. Wodehouse for pleasure" may become synonymous with an extravagantly fastidious taste. And that is indeed as it should be. What can be more enviable than to enjoy the rewards of limitless contemporary popularity with the confidence, in the distant years, when copyrights have lapsed and royalties lost their importance, of a serene ascent into a rarer atmosphere, a little above the clouds, away from the crush where only the keen and the noble can follow?"

"For Mr Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man; no "aboriginal calamity". His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

"The breadth of Wodehouse's appeal is also exceptional; down through the years, his hard-core fans have ranged from Bertrand Russell to Bix Beiderbecke, the great jazz cornettist, who could quote page after page from his stories. Herbert Asquith, during the difficult weeks that followed his defeat in 1918, found solace in reading Wodehouse, and two other British Prime Ministers, Arthur Balfour and Stanley Baldwin, were also ardent Wodehousians."

"In view of the pain it gives most writers to say a good word about other writers, perhaps the most eloquent testimonials to Wodehouse's talent are the warm compliments that have been paid him by colleagues, among them Rudyard Kipling, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter Quennell, Ogden Nash, and Evelyn Waugh."

"The hero [of a narrative] must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female....The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter.""

"He once told a reporter he wanted his obituary to be short - "just make it born in Russia, first lesson at 3, debut at 7, debut in America in 1917"."

"My two favorite dishes. I never get enough. Of course, both must be the best."

"I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."

"If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it."

"There is no top. There are always further heights to reach."

"I have discovered three things which know no geographical borders - classical music, American jazz, and applause as the sign of the public's favor."

"Can you appreciate music without playing it? Yes, you can. You can appreciate baseball without playing it. Many people attend a football game merely for the crowd, the excitement, the color."

"No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."

"Criticism does not disturb me, for I am my own severest critic. Always in my playing I strive to surpass myself, and it is this constant struggle that makes music fascinating to me."

"For almost a century, Jascha Heifetz was the performer all others wished to emulate, a genius whose technique and musicianship earned him accolades as "the perfect violinist"."

"Note: This is one of Maharaji's first published addresses. He was 4 years of age at that time."

"Listen to satsang. It is a very good thing. God created day and night. After that He created excellent things to eat, and then he landed us in this world. Isn't this human body beautiful? There is a nose to breathe with. Tell me, could we have survived without it? See what a good job of seeing these eyes do. Look how beautiful are the hands and the feet. If no seva is done, then these hands are of no use. These two ears have been given, if we don’t listen to satsang with them, aren’t they useless? If you do not go to satsang walking with these feet, they are also worthless. God has created all the parts of this body quite well, but if we don't use them properly, it is our fault, not the Creator's. The river flowing over there is the Ganga, but it is not flowing for its own use. It is we who drink its water, wash our clothes in it, and irrigate our fields with it. By bathing in it only the dirt of this body is washed, but by bathing in the Ganga of satsang, all the evils are removed. What I am telling you is also written in the Gita. But Gita cannot make you understand. Only the satguru can make you understand the satnam (true name), so do practice Knowledge. Look at Lord Shiva sitting with eyes closed [pointing towards a fountain with a statue of Shiva]. He always stays in the contemplation of Guru Maharaj. Whenever I see him he doesn’t do any other work. I don’t know whether he doesn’t like doing any other work or what. Therefore, you too should also practice Knowledge like this."

"One has to fill up the heart with Knowledge. The Knowledge has a form that’s called 'upadesh' (nt: sub–country; also teaching, instruction). There are many countries such as England, Germany, and India, but Knowledge is not this kind of country. This country is something different. Knowledge is the thing that when it is realized, a person becomes free."

"O my brothers, this is not a day of merry-making because the night of the 19th, at three o'clock, Guru Maharaj Ji [nt: Maharaji's father Hans Ji Maharaj] left his body. But I feel that Guru Maharaj Ji is alive and always will remain alive. So many times, Guru Maharaj Ji has come to this world. There have been many, many Perfect Masters and each one has revealed the very same Knowledge. You have not understood. Each Divine Incarnation has gone away and still you have not realized the Knowledge He brought. Now, if you want to know the Truth, then get that Supreme Knowledge soon, because this body will be destroyed one day. You have got to get Knowledge as soon as possible, otherwise the shop will be closed."

"Today I will speak about love. What is love? How can one get love? Why should one get it? There are two kinds of love. One is the worldly connection. The other is attained through Knowledge. In this human body exists the love we have to discover. You should love one another and behave lovingly because when love comes, everything comes. You should speak to one another with love and humility. Love is the essence."

"Note: In November 1970, when he made the following declaration, Maharaji was 12 years of age and had yet to leave India."

"The great leaders think that I have come to rule and yes, they are right! I will rule the world, and just watch how I will do it. Even the lion and sheep will embrace each other. Has there been such a king before? Krishna was not such a king. Rama was not such a king. There were lesser powers in Ram, there were lesser powers in Krishna, but I have come to the world with full powers."

"The time has come for restlessness to be destroyed and the Kingdom of Peace to be established. Whether you take it as my prophecy or anything else, the Kingdom of Peace will be established soon.[...] You must understand and have faith in my words. All I ask is your love, all I ask is your trust, and what I can give you is such a peace as will never die. I only need the opportunity[...] I declare that I will establish peace in the world. Just give me the reins and let me rule, and I will rule in such a way that even Rama, Harichandra, Krishna, and other kings could not have ruled like that! That day is fast approaching. So arise, awake, open the ears of each man, and tell him the time has come! Do not tell him that there was a festival. No! Make them understand he has come to reveal the Knowledge, that he has come to show us the true path. And if you truly give me the reins of your life, I swear by Guru Maharaj Ji, I swear by the one who has given me birth, that I will give you peace."

""receive this Knowledge and know God within yourself. That pure energy, God, is within your own heart"."

"That peace which is within us, we must experience it. And if we are searching for peace outside we will never find the peace within."

"If you want external happiness, it can be an elusive desire. Internal happiness needs only to be revealed. It is not elusive because it is within you. It is your treasure. If you take someone else's desire, it is stealing, but if you turn to your own, it is not. Happiness is your own treasure because it lies within you."

"Isaac Newton only discovered the law of gravity. He didn’t invent it, did he? In the same way, the Knowledge is within you. I can reveal it. I cannot give it to you from somewhere else. … If somebody comes to me I am sure I can give him the Knowledge and he will be satisfied."

"But there is a nature which dwells inside also. Just enjoy that also. There are beautiful hills, beautiful sceneries, and beautiful things created for you by God, but there is a scenery, beautiful mountains, beautiful air, beautiful sound, beautiful light inside also created for you."

"You know the word master, teacher? When you go to schools, you say, Master, I have got this, this, and this question. Master, can you solve this problem for me? In India, instead of saying Master, we say Guru. Same thing. Master teaches you something. Master takes off your ignorance and puts some knowledge into your mind. Same way, a true Guru does that. He takes off all the ignorance, egos, from our mind and puts Knowledge. And peace he gives."

"Q: So God cannot teach anything, except through a Master?"

"Today people want love. I can truly and sincerely tell you this Knowledge is over-brimmed with love. This Knowledge is, you know, I can't explain how much love it contains. There is so much love that if you take the water of the whole seas around and on one side we put this love and on the other side we put the whole sea, the sea will be small, the love will still be more. If we take every human man's weight, add it, then we add the love of his love, this Knowledge will be still much bigger than any man's weight. And this Knowledge is love. This is it. This is the love. A thief cannot take if from you, this love is so much. Nobody can cut this love. You can experience it whenever you like."

"People think God is a man. People think God has got ears, nose, teeth and he rises daily in the morning, brushes his teeth and washes his mouth. And he is an old man and he has a beard. All these things people think. But no, God is energy. God is perfect and pure energy."

"Who is Guru? The highest manifestation of God is Guru. So when Guru is here, God is here, to whom will you give your devotion? I want that the general should sign some papers. I need not go to his office when he is sitting in my home. Is it necessary to go in his office when his is sitting in my home? When God has come here, then what is the need to give devotion to God there?"

"God made the mind but He never made a stoplight. And when He saw that 'There is no stop in this mind which I have made,' He was very sorry. He had to take a form. The form of Guru is nobody but Himself, the whole that you want to see. The whole power is now in the form of a body. That is the body which is the 'Supremest' of all, and its duties, works are not like those of humanity."

"So remember, we have to find God, that person who is perfect; He is ours and we are His, and we have to find Him … So remember: we are part of Him who has manifested Himself as a Guru and who has come into this earth, and now we have to be one with Him. We have to completely merge and make our souls one with Him because He is perfect, and once we merge with Him we will also be perfect … So if you go to Him, ask. Ask and it shall be given, knock and it shall be opened unto you."

"Question: Is life as difficult as it sometimes seems to be?"

"They say, 'Why are you telling us that this Knowledge has to be taken from me?' But I don't say that this Knowledge has to be taken from me. I want that you should take this Knowledge, that's only I want to tell you. I don't say take it from me. Take it. If you want to take it from me, go ahead. I'll give you. You can get it from someone else, go to someone he will give you. But the problem is you have to take it. That is the main thing. That doesn't mean you take from me. Go around the world, search for the spiritual master. If you cannot get this Knowledge, and you cannot receive this true Knowledge, then please come to me and I will give you this Knowledge."

"I don't contain a self-personality, that I might stand up and say, Do this for me. Kings might say that, Bring me jewels, and so on, but I don't say that. Because when I see the growth of a human being and I see that his love and affection are really growing, then I feel happy. That is what pleases me."

"Believe it or not, the fact is that God is supreme and pure; people are lying on a bed of ignorance and dreams and doubts. They expect God Himself to come, they pray for it, they ask for it, they announce about it, but when He comes they fail to recognize Him. And not recognizing Him in His physical form, they cannot recognize Him within themselves. People have forgotten their Creator."

"People ask, “Do you say that you are God?” I say, “No, I am not God. I don't want to be God.” But what I do want to be is a humble servant of God so that I can teach people this Knowledge, so that I can give people this gospel of peace, love and Truth. That’s all I want to do. So all these lectures, all these speeches that I am giving are just for this purpose."

"It's for you, not for me. You don't do anything for me. You do meditation, you do it for yourself. You get helped by that. There is no pay, nothing I am getting out of it. It's for you. If it's your privilege, if it's your convenience, you do it. It's for you, not for me. Go ahead, do meditation and you will see and you'll really, really observe how beautiful this Knowledge is."

"Reporter: I was told that probably the best question to ask you, out of sincerity, is: who are you?"

": Maharaj Ji: … really I can't say who I am. But, though, there is a very basic thing, what I feel about myself. And that is that people have been claiming me as God or as Jesus or so on, and ah, many television people have been asking this question, and this is an interesting question of course. I thought maybe you will interested in the answer. I am not Jesus and I am not God or so on, but I am just a humble servant of God, and I am preaching this Knowledge, and it's ideal of humanity. I don't want to form a small sect or a religion. It's open thing to all. It's for all casts, all creeds, all colors. And man is human, and it's OK he can receive it. And it's something that is internal, something that does not interfere with any religion. And this is the highest thing that I am teaching, about the people of this time, today. I don't claim myself to be God. I don't claim myself to be something like that, but I can claim I can show you God."

"Why I do things? Because I get great happiness, and happiness is the thing which makes the love flow, which makes me love. I want to be happy. And that is why I consider myself as one of the most happiest men in the world, because I do these things. I give this Knowledge to people free of charge. And people when they get this Knowledge feel great happiness. That makes me happy, too."

"The greatest problem all around the world today, whether in America, Japan, China, Russia, India or anywhere else in the world, is that people are not in peace. People want peace. Today, if two people fight, the government is supposed to settle them down. But when governments fight, who is going to settle them down? The only one who can settle the governments down is the Perfect Master, the incarnation of God Himself, who comes to Earth to save mankind."

"I am just an ordinary human being, with two legs, two eyes, and I work, and I voluntary put myself here so that I can reveal this Knowledge to people, I think because people need it. People have forgotten what this Knowledge is. And I am just teaching them perfectness, and that’s why they called me Perfect Master. And as a matter of fact, I am Perfect Master because I can reveal them this peace. Not saying that I am bodily perfect. I’m not saying I am perfect because of this reason or that reason, but simply one reason: because I can reveal them this Knowledge, which is perfect."

"When I was born, God existed. But I never knew Him. I just never knew Him until Guru Maharaj Ji came into my life, till Guru Maharaj Ji came in my way, and showed me and revealed me that secret. And the day he did that, there it was, I knew God."

"Question: Do you think that there is only one Perfect Master?"

"Question: Guru Maharaji Ji, are you God? – Answer: No. My Knowledge is God"

"Question: Guru Maharaji Ji, what do you mean about the mind being evil? Answer: This mind is jiggling around trying to find out that perfectness. It is inquiring, trying to investigate the perfectness, which is impossible. To the mind, God is a perfect criminal. He has done such a perfect crime by creating this world that mind cannot trace how He did it. That is why the mind always freaks out about God."

"There are three ways to understand things. If somebody tells you something, who you respect, you'll say, Okay, since you are saying it, I'll believe it. Second way is that, This is what my concept is, so I'll believe it. But the third way is a very independent way, which is called, seeing is believing. That you see, that you feel, you realize practically, without anybody's concept, but actually be able to realize it completely, completely independently. And then feel it. And this is what I beg of every premie to do. Instead of to follow a bunch of concepts down the line, see this Knowledge, believe this Knowledge -— by yourself, independent of any concepts, any thoughts, any ideas."

"So how are you going to recognise God if He comes on earth? Are you going to ask to see His identity card or passport? See if it says, 'Name … God; Occupation … Generator, Operator, Destroyer'? That's foolish! Or are you going to recognise Him only if He fits your mental picture of Him -- what you have picked up from scriptures and other impressions, what you imagine Jesus or Krishna looked like? But even two Christians will have different impressions of what Jesus will look like. So what will be recognised by one will not be recognised by the other. But the test of the Perfect Master is that which is undeniable to everybody and that is the experience of Himself, which He can give, and that is the True Knowledge."

"In this world, the question has already been asked. The world has already started to face the problems, the problems which are vital for the human race. There is no need to discuss the problems, but I would like to present my opinion. In the midst of all this, I still sincerely think that this Knowledge, the Knowledge of God, the Knowledge of our Creator, is our solution. Many people might not think so, and carry a completely different opinion, but my opinion is that since man came on this planet earth, he has always been taking from it. Remember, this planet Earth is not infinite, it is finite, and though it has a lot to give, it is limited. Maybe now we can somehow manage to stagger along, cutting our standards of living, cutting gas, reducing the speed limit more, but the next very terrifying question is What about the future? I think this Knowledge which I have to offer this world, free of charge, is the answer. For if everybody can understand that everybody is a brother and sister, and this world is a gift, not a human-owned planet, and have the true understanding of such, we'll definitely bring peace, tranquillity, love and Grace, which we need so badly. I urge this world to try. I do not claim to be God, but do claim I can establish peace on this Earth by our Lord's Grace, and everyone's joint effort."

"You go to the doctor to be cured. And the Perfect Master, Guru Maharaj Ji, because he is a doctor of this mind, can cure this mind. That's why he doesn't just come to you and say, Well, you have got a mental problem, or You have got a problem with your mind. No. He also offers you a medicine, a solution. And the solution is this Knowledge, which eventually - and not really eventually but instantaneously - starts affecting you."

"When I say, ‘Give me love, and I'll give you peace’, what do you think I do with that love? You think I make subji (nt: vegetable dish) out of it, or dessert out of it? No. I channel it back. Back to you so that you can grow more, so it can all really happen."

"Surrender to what is ultimate. Surrender to what you really are! Besides being John, Gary, anything you are named. What are you is what you have to understand. And serve that purpose. Serve that motive. Because what you are is far more greater than what you think you are. And because you think what you are, that… What it is inside of you, what is far more greater than you think you are, supercedes. Because that is what you are always thinking. “Oh I am -- I’m just not good.” And, “I’m just, I’m just a bum,” or, “I’m just crazy,” or, “I’ve just had it.” No. There’s something within inside of you that is really beautiful. And this is what the Knowledge reveals."

"This life that has been given to us as a gift, as such a precious gift. To really try to understand it, really try to recognize it, is to me the greatest meditation. Through the media of this Knowledge we can tap into our inner sources that are so beautiful."

"Knowledge brings that tranquility, brings that harmony, to all human beings of every type, of every age. And it doesn't matter what their background is. It doesn't matter what they are up to. It just brings them all together because of that harmony inside, because of that understanding inside, because of that love inside."

"Really surrender yourself. Really let yourself flow so that all this can pour into you, all this can help you. Because you know what satsang really does? It just makes us stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. So if you want to get strong, here is your vitamins. You know? And you just got to take them. And take them as prescribed. And take the right vitamins and you’ll get strong. And you are getting stronger. So just let yourself flow in this beautiful, beautiful river of satsang, and just experience what’s really happening."

"To be here as individuals, and yet to be able to be next to the person who is everything; in which everything is, and he is in everything. Guru Maharaji. The Lord. All powerful."

"Just remember that it’s your effort that’s going to really bring it together for you…. You will be happy because you will have then realized and fulfilled the destiny. That little speck, then will have become everything because it will have merged with infinity. It will have merged with the most incredible, most indescribable thing there is!"

"Have faith in the beauty of satsang, service, and meditation—not because somebody is telling you that there is an experience that exists, but to experience for yourself the experience that exists, and then have faith in it. Then you start going, and you keep on going. The effort you personally have to make is to do satsang, service, and meditation. And there’s an experience behind it. You’re not just doing it blindly, but there is an experience behind it."

"And so what remains in our lives? What remains in this whole, entire world to do? And like I was saying, where does Mr. Mind take you and put you every time? Where does that mind place you? It places you every time at a place that has nothing to do with the outrageous that has nothing, has nothing to do with the beautiful, has nothing to do with the incredible, has nothing to with anything except darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness. And this is where the mind puts you."

"We forget to even see that there is something more than just us, that “we,” or “I,” an individual, is not the only thing in this whole universe. Your goodness, your badness, your deeds, what’s right for you and what’s wrong for you, and what’s beautiful and what’s not beautiful, what’s happy, what’s sad, and all these ideas--that’s not all. We forget that there is an incredible creation that surrounds us. And we have to open up to that creation. Obviously we want peace in our life. That’s what we’re trying to pursue. But there is this door and this door is locked. Without a key it will not open up. Beyond this door lies Knowledge. Beyond this door lies Love."

"Dear premies, I guess this is the last night of this festival, of this Guru Puja and really, what have we understood? Really, in one way, what can we understand? What is there to understand? And it's just like sometimes you just feel, Understand? When I use the word understand … But there is nothing to understand! And if there is something to understand, there is only one thing to understand, and that is to surrender!"

"You can be a doctor and I’ll still help you. You can be an engineer and I can help you. You can be a scientist and I’ll help you, whoever you are because I am not helping anything else. I am helping you! Peace on this Earth doesn’t begin by great ideas. Peace on Earth begins with you."

"Life has a meaning, a motive. There is nothing greater than life itself. Yet what is the purpose of life? What do we actually do with it? What have we understood? When we accomplish and realize who we are—not in theory, but in reality—it is gorgeous. Concepts stop. Our expressions are accurate. The love is real. It is as though the whole rose blooms-—not one petal, not two petals—but the whole rose opens up. All of a sudden, in the darkness there is light."

"Even when the Earth phases out, sun the diminishes, and everything goes wherever it goes to, the experience of your Knowledge cannot diminish. It is from where even, you might say, eternity starts. It is the source of all sources. It is. It is the experience which is beyond death, beyond creation, beyond anything in this world."

"We are all individuals. I can’t eat for you and you can’t eat for me. I can’t sleep for you and you can't sleep for me. We are absolutely all individuals. When our purpose is fulfilled, it feels beautiful. That is, to me, the feeling of fulfillment."

"That feeling of surrender is there, has to be there. We all want that. We all want to let go. And in that feeling alone… Maybe you call it peace. Maybe you call it satisfaction. Maybe you call it anything. But it’s a feeling of “let go,” when the whole world becomes that tranquil world that’s liveable."

"Where does Guru Maharaj Ji fit in? Guru Maharaj Ji doesn't fit in anywhere. Guru Maharaj Ji is Knowledge. It is Guru Maharaj Ji's Knowledge. … Who are you going to do service to, for? Guru Maharaj Ji. What are you going to meditate on? The Holy Name, which is Guru Maharaj Ji."

"Today, people’s mood is very much like that: if the coffee is bitter they’re going to have a bad mood all day long. You could be having a perfect day and all of a sudden you get fired. And that’s it. there goes your beautiful day. Maybe they’ve had a beautiful life all life long, and then something will happen that will completely devastate them. But, you can go beyond all that to have something that’s permanent, to have something that is a true experience, to have an experience of yourself, to have an experience of what makes you alive."

"Here I am, a human being who came in this world just like anybody else did. A lot of things happen in our lives. Some traumatic experiences happen, some happy experiences happen. And we all live. We all survive. And there is the one thing that’s so simple and so profound within inside of us, which is completely uncontaminated by everything that happens, everything that occurs all around us"

"Some people may think that okay, when we say Perfect Master,we’re talking about God, or we’re talking about prophet, or we’re talking about something like that. But really, in laymen’s term, to explain it, is that if somebody is a flight instructor, you would call them a flight instructor, or a flight teacher, or one who teaches about airplanes. If one was a professor of maths, he had mastered it, then you would call him teacher in maths, or instructor in maths [. . .] the definition of a Perfect Master is the one who can give us the perfectness, one who can teach us the perfectness."

"Every human being has to find their own peace. Peace is within you and me. When you and I can experience who we really are, what life is, and what we are doing here, that’s the day peace will begin in this world."

"I have something to offer, and through which you can realize something, realize the essence of this life. Even if you are a billionaire, you have to have one thing going for you, and that’s life. That is a key ingredient. You don’t have life going for you, you can have everything else going for you, and it won't make any difference."

"There is something so beautiful inside you that if you knew it, you would fall in love with it. It is irresistible. You can truly experience that."

"There is an unparalleled beauty inside. When you are in that place, you realize that you are never alone. When the whole world gives up on you, you can turn inside. When you are ready to give up on the whole world, you can turn inside. When you want to be with the whole world, you can still go inside and experience this beauty. Nothing ever changes in there."

"What I am really here to talk about is the central thing, the core, the nucleus—life itself. I’m not here to talk about what we should do in life. There are many options as far that is concerned and, of course, you can pick one, whatever suits you. But I’m talking about life itself without which nothing is wrong and nothing is right. Unbiased life. Maybe one day everything is going the right way for you and you’re incredibly happy. And you’re still breathing and you’re still alive. Then one day you’re really sad, and everything is terrible. And you’re still breathing; you’re still alive. That thing is never affected by what the outer circumstances are."

"Yesterday a woman asked me, “Should I love my child more or less?” What I said was, “The love for your child is there. All you’ve got to do is let it come out. It’s not a question of more or less. It’s there. It’s prevalent. However much it is, you can’t control. The only thing you can control is how much of it you let it out. All you are is a vehicle. That’s true because that’s what we are. We are vehicles through which we can experience."

"There is an aspiration we all have which needs to be fulfilled. That’s what I’m talking about. There is something that I can offer that fulfills that place, that fulfills that vacuum. It replaces that vacuum with a reality, with an experience of your own self. Because what you are is very beautiful. We need to learn to live with ourselves. When we can’t learn to live with ourselves, we can’t live with anybody. The world is too small."

"What I can offer you is no different than a shovel. You’ve got the gold mine, and all I’m offering you is the shovel. What does a shovel do? It allows you to dig for the gold. It allows you an access. There are very particular techniques that I am talking about, and from there, you can have an experience is beautiful, an experience that is soothing. That’s all."

"Nobody can tell you that you are content until you feel it in your own heart. When a heart is okay, then it’s a heartfelt feeling and you know it. Not by the virtue of somebody having to tell you this, somebody having to explain you this, but it comes from the feeling of the inside. Knowledge works from the inside out, not from the outside in. Your own experience is the only thing that’ll satisfy that thirst."

"First of all, I’m not here to present myself as a know-it-all. What I’m here for is to answer those questions that are related to that experience and related to the tool: Knowledge which can bring us the experience. Above all, we have the choice to say I don’t like it or I like it. I am not here to try and convince anybody of anything. Rather, I’m here to offer something."

"We have been given a gift that is really, really precious. It’s simple. It isn’t going to get us anything. It isn’t there to augment anything. It’s there for us to be able to experience something that is within ourselves. It is not there to change our religions, our practices, our daily lives. But it is only there for one reason, for one reason alone. Simple happiness. Simple joy."

"You’re the captain. Get over the helm and start steering. Take control. There’s something going on here you can he a part of. You don’t have to see this thing run up on coral reefs, one time after another after another after another. This one is all yours. You’ve got it. And the clock is running. And it’s going to stop, invariably. But right now, you’re alive. Enjoy. Enjoy this existence. Enjoy this love. It is the deed of incredible compassion that you are here on the face of this earth. You have invested in many things. Maybe won, maybe lost. Maybe it’s time to invest in life because what you invest here will always he yours."

"I need my anchor because without the anchor, the boat will drift away. I need stability in my life. I need that one place that I can call home. In that home, it feels good. I can rest. I can take off my shoes. I can rest my weary body. We all also have a home within that feels good, where we can rest. For those few minutes, we can close the door and we can say to the world, 'Stand by.' For those few minutes, we can be where we want to be and love that feeling. And in those few minutes, we can look at our Creator and say, 'Thank you for this life. Thank you for what you have given me.' And feel the thankfulness fill us."

"Live. Breathe. It is not fear that we need to live by, but joy, hope. Inside you, in your ocean, maybe it seems barren; maybe it feels as if there is no hope, no kindness, no reason for happiness. But deep within you, undeniably, something rumbles, cries out, wants to be born. Allow the joy to come forward. Allow the hope to exist."

"In the heart of the sphere of everything that keeps changing, there one thing that never changes—life. Life is the one thing that stays with me until the very end. Today, people may like me. Tomorrow, they may not. But my life is still there. It is not subject to good and bad. Human beings are the thinkers—homo sapiens—the ones with the brains. We can think about things, and in our thoughts, everything keeps changing. In our moods, everything keeps changing. Yet, in our beings, there is the heart, and the heart does not change because it is consistent with only one thing. Our needs on the outside change all the time, but the heart's need never changes. It is consistently the same, and always will be."

"Listen to what the heart has to say. It is not going to run your life. The heart's message is so simple. It's not going to tell you that you should buy this color jacket, and this color car and this color house. Heart only has one thing to say to you, 'Be fulfilled.' This is all it ever has wanted, and this is the only demand the heart has for you. What have we done with ourselves? We have made ourselves slaves of the past and the future. Take away the future, which doesn't yet exist, and the past that has disappeared. Be fulfilled now, in this moment."

"Happiness has to be felt like water. Joy has to be felt like food. What good is it to have a picture of the sun at night? What will it light up? Can you imagine somebody carrying a picture of the sun and holding it out in the dark? In the same way, you have to experience this experience within for yourself. Nothing else will do. This is a living experience for living people."

"People say, I am afraid of changes. But who is asking you to change? Knowledge is not a change. When you see yourself in the mirror, the first thing you will realize is that beauty that you have always looked for is right there. That's the first thing you will realize. That, to me, is the magic of this Knowledge."

"What is this thing called the existence? Is it all the things that we perceive it to be? Or is it something else? It's a gift. One of my favorite examples is the bird in the cage. You may think that you own the bird inside the cage, but you're wrong. You only own the cage. People think that they need to have a very fancy cage, that the more incredible the cage, the more incredible the bird will look. But the cage and the bird are really two different things. When the bird is gone, all that will be left is the cage."

"What has a student to become? A student has to become a receptacle. What has a devotee to become? A devotee also has to become a receptacle. And what has a disciple to become? A disciple too has to become a receptacle. Whatever you name him...."

"So many people are waiting for their happiness to come. It's not here yet, but they are waiting. It's like standing in a line waiting for your bus. One day, people say, my ship will come. One day, I'll make it. One day, I'll be happy. Ships come and go, and they wait for theirs. They think about jumping on other people's ships. They think everything. Yet, incredibly enough, there has always been someone who has pointed out the simple fact that what we are looking for is inside."

"As has been said…'A devotee does not worry about anything, except the experience of Knowledge.'...'When the perfect Master is there to take care of you, you have nothing to worry about. All the powers of prosperity and success are ready to serve you and you are free from all bondages.'.."

"Through your thoughts, you create your own games, and you win your own games because perhaps you have forgotten how to play the real game. What is the real game? It is the game in which the heart is entertained, the game in which you are entertained. It is the game that you will win."

"People try to define life. You know, all the 900 different things that people have wedged in there. But in reality, life is simply the time between birth and death. That's life. To us, it is a lifetime. But somewhere out in space, it may just be a blink of an eye, that's all. Because of the earth's gravitational pull, time is being slowed down and TA-DA, you have a lifetime. But somewhere out there, it's just this blink of an eye. And in this blink of an eye, you have created complexities that rival the complexities of the universe itself. In a sense, you have outdone the stars, you have outdone the motions of planets. You have outdone the whole principle of how light travels. In your little world, you have created absolutely amazing complexities. You have taken God and you have made God mysterious. But if you could just see the beauty around you and realize the goodness that it means to be able to breathe, to be able to exist, and for somebody to be able to facilitate that for you, then God is not mysterious, God is kind and beautiful."

"Ask yourself for a moment what is really important to you – not by anyone else's definition, but your own. Peel away all the roles that you act out every day, and you will find a being. A being that, amazingly enough, cannot be put in a box. A being that isn't good or bad—just a being. A being that wants to exist, that wants to learn, that wants to appreciate. A being that just wants to be."

"For all of us who are alive, life is the real issue. Yet so often we judge our existence by the things that happen to us—by whether things are going our way or not. Sometimes we feel strong—strong enough to dictate our future. Sometimes we feel that we can make things happen. Then there are times when we feel totally helpless. But through all the dramas and bumps, there is life. There is the very powerful, very existence of every single human being."

"Ask yourself for a moment what is really important to you—not by anyone else's definition but your own."

"We talk about world peace. Peace needs to be in the heart of every human being because that is where it belongs. The world would not have half its problems if we understood what we need to understand within us. I come with no solution to the world's problems. I come with nothing new to tell you. Instead, I come to tell you one of the things you have known for the longest time. That which you are looking for, that which you love and admire, is within you."

"My journey began with me. I was the one who came into this world, and learned how to walk, and how to fall. I was the one who had to live with me every single day of my life. The world told me, 'There is something out there for you. Go look for it.' But somebody who was very kind and very generous said to me, 'For the answer, look within. Within you is where your journey begins and ends.'"

"Knowledge is not spiritual, nor is it a religion. Knowledge belongs in neither of those two categories. Knowledge says there is a consciousness inside of you, that you are complete."

"To live this life, my friends, you have to have a genuine passion. Nothing artificial. To live this life, to love this life, you have to have a genuine passion. People think Kabir was so wonderful because he was uneducated and yet he said all these wonderful things. Do you think it would have been different had Kabir gone to Yale and Oxford? If so, you missed the point. The point isn't whether he was educated or not, because, in the truest sense, he was very educated. More educated than most people. The point is that passion. Maybe you won't be able to write like Kabir, but you can feel the same passion. Passion is the point. That love is the point. That feeling is the point. That is achievable by everyone sitting in this hall, and in the city of London, and on this planet Earth. That passion. That love. That awakening. That joy."

"It is not in the resolution of problems that you will find happiness. If you want to find that happiness, if you want to find that joy, then find that one thing that is within inside of you. That is you, that is your reality, that is your core that can bring you that joy. This disparity has existed and existed and existed, yet people keep saying, 'No, these people don't know what they're talking about.'"

"fear or freedom choose freedom choose freedom -- being free is not an idea it is a feeling it emanates from within"

"I have to acknowledge what I need in my life. If I want peace, I have to acknowledge it. I have to say to myself, in the simplest of words, 'Yes. I feel the thirst for peace.' I can use fancy words to impress other people, but I cannot use fancy words to impress me. If I want to impress me, I have to speak the truth. Maybe to the world, truth is a scary word, but truth is what the heart wants to hear. That thirst needs to be quenched. Peace is what the heart needs to feel."

"With all our differences, we're not that different. Our quests are similar. The need for peace is not created by a document. It is created by a fundamental desire innate to all human beings, regardless of whether they are rich or poor, successful or unsuccessful. It is that innate desire that has, throughout history, pushed us again and again to find peace. The want, the concept, the idea of peace did not start this year or last year or the year before."

"This peace is not the absence of anything. Real peace is the presence of something beautiful. Both peace and the thirst for it have been in the heart of every human being in every century and every civilization."

"Peace is inside you. Wherever you go, peace goes with you. When you climb on a bus, peace goes with you. When you are fighting, peace goes with you. When you are asleep, peace is within you. When you are frustrated beyond imagination, peace is in you. No matter what you do, there is no place you can go where peace will not come with you. Because it's within you. Through technology, we want to improve our lives. What I am saying is that the real improvement begins with you. I am not saying to sacrifice technology or to sacrifice your responsibilities. Accept your responsibilities, and while accepting those responsibilities, find peace, find joy in your life."

"Q: What would you say to Bin Laden and George Bush? A: I have to look at them as human beings. What one person had done for the world, is terrible, but for my perspective … if it was morning I would say "good morning" and if it was afternoon I would say, "good afternoon" Q:That's all? A: That's all. It is not my place to judge them. Q: Thank you very much, Maharaji."

"Good, bad, right, wrong, this is not what your life is composed of. There’s a lot more. If you have only seen two colours, there’s a lot more colours to this rainbow than you realise. There’s a lot more to every moment of your life."

""Well, his predominant activity is playing. He plays all the time. One of his favorite things Is to ride around and around on his motorcycle. He likes to tie things on the back of the motorcycle, and drag them around behind him. Or sometimes he'll tie things on the back of the motorcycle and let us sit on them and drag us behind him. Or sometimes he will give people a ride on the motorcycle."

"He's either the most incredible fraud ever run on this planet or he is god on earth."

"The timing of Guru Maharaj Ji's arrival in this world is very far out. Even he admits that he came at the last possible moment. When people finally discover who Guru Maharaj Ji is, they'll feel a nice smile inside thinking about how he slipped in the back door just in the nick of time. But I want to talk to the people who don't know who he is. Because the idea of a fifteen-year-old Indian dressed in a business suit coming to America as the savior of the world must seem like a bad joke. Some people really get angry when you try to tell them who Guru Maharaj Ji is. I remember last spring when I traveled around the country announcing to old friends the joyous news. Many of them thought I had lost my mind or was secretly working for the CIA. I spoke in Berkeley and New York and said "the Creator has come to help us pull the world back together again," and tomatoes and cherry pies were hurled at me. When you tell someone that Guru Maharaj Ji is the power of creation, they may punch you in the face instead of shake your hand. I go on the radio and say that Guru Maharaj Ji is revealing the same Knowledge of life that Jesus taught and the most devoted Christians call the station sounding like they'd rather crucify him instead of rejoice."

"When a devotee makes the outrageous statement that Guru Maharaj Ji is the Lord of the Universe, it's cause enough for a chuckle. But it also happens to be true. Guru Maharaj Ji is the Lord of the Universe and anyone can find out who sincerely wants to know"."

"He is here to change the world and bring peace"

"[T]here is now a practical way to fulfill all the dreams of the movement of the early sixties and seventies. There's a practical practical method to end poverty, racism, sexism, imperialsim. … I would cross the planet on my hands and knees to touch his toes."

"I am impressed by his message. His message is a message of peace. A peace that can be found within every person. Someone has said it’s difficult to find peace inside, but it’s impossible anywhere outside. In a recent address at the United Nations Conference in Bangkok, he said that it is people that need to be at peace. And that when people are at peace, there will be peace in the world. He offers inspiration and guidance to those interested in making inner peace a reality in their lives. Many people speak of peace, and yet there is more to Sri Prem Rawat’s message than just words. I had the good fortune of meeting Prem Rawat in person a couple of weeks ago. He was kind enough to take time from his schedule so that we could have a substantial and enjoyable conversation. I found him to be a warm and delightful person and found his insights to be most helpful."

"I am impressed by what I read, by the depth of his ideas, of his message. He speaks about peace from a very original and unique perspective. We are used to hearing speeches about peace. We usually tend to leave peace in the hands of governments or political organizations. Prem Rawat speaks about peace from a different perspective—more precise, more human—and he stresses the significance of each human being in the pursuit of world peace. I find great merit in his message."

"Peace within is vital for leading a life fulfilled. Prem Rawat brings a message of hope and peace. Such a message is very much needed in this world today. Each of us as individuals can benefit from it. His message can help us lead more fulfilled lives, whatever our circumstances might be."

"I have found his message to be so simple and from the heart. We seek to find the best thing in life, to find peace, joy, fulfillness, regardless of the circumstances. Maharaji tells us that what we are looking, for all the life, for already that is within us, and that is, it can be easily found. Please join me to thank him for offering the message of hope and for taking the time to be with us."

"I read some articles about him, his message and his work. I was deeply impressed by the extent of the recognition that he has received as he travels around the world. Millions of people have come to him throughout the years looking for inspiration and guidance. He has received honors from many cities around the world and has been invited to speak in some of the most prestigious forums. He is a true globalizer. More than that, what has struck me is—how much he has touched the lives of countless individuals, rich and poor alike, regardless of their beliefs or condition—in all positions in society. The need to find peace is a most pressing one. And it is a privilege and honor to welcome someone who claims that peace is possible and who offers to show a practical way to find peace within. He brings a message of hope and peace that is simple and from the heart. A message that is relevant for each and every individual."

"Prem Rawat has received widespread recognition for providing inspiration and guidance to audiences around the world on tonight's topic for peace. Proclamations and resolutions that honor his work: keys to the City, letters of appreciation, invitations from government officials, and these are among the many ways that he's been welcomed throughout the years. We're used to hearing about peace as the absence of war. We normally put the responsibility of peace on governments and on political organizations. We seldom talk about peace from a human—from our own—perspective. We seldom highlight the important role of each human being, each one of us, in bringing peace to the world. Tonight, we hear Prem Rawat's fresh and innovative views on peace."

"Prem Rawat's message is extremely simple. Extremely easy to learn and one wonders why we don't learn it when we're extremely small and keep it going that way. The secret of civil society seems to be no secret. We've heard sof rom Prem Rawat."

"Many people in this world speak of peace from different angles. Some speak of peace as a result of good socio-economic policies, or as a result of a sound distribution of wealth. Prem speaks of peace from a perspective that is both original and intriguing. Rather than to look only to institutions or to policies for creating peace, he speaks of a peace that, he says, each person is personally responsible for finding. Despite ever-growing audiences, his message remains directed at each individual who comes to hear him and the people who enjoy his message come from all walks of life.”"

"As public servants, we all seek, each in our own way, to make this place a better place to live. We seek to bring peace, harmony. We use to the best of our abilities the means at our disposal through our position in society: we set better policies, try to make society more equal, we seek to alleviate injustices, and to give everyone a chance to enjoy conditions in their life that are conducive to leading a life fulfilled. There is one thing however we cannot do, and that is to enable people to feel happy, to feel at peace, content, for themselves. What intrigued me in Prem Rawat’s message is that he speaks of the possibility for every person of finding within themselves a peace, a happiness, that is not dependent on circumstances. Peace, he says, is within, and can be felt; we just have forgotten how to get in touch with it. What I also find interesting is that he sees peace not just as the absence of war, but rather as a feeling within to get connected with, to cultivate for oneself. I see his message pointing to us that everyone must find peace for themselves first to help bring peace in the world—as sorely needed and I am glad he is with us today”"

"“Prem Rawat brings a message of peace. Peace, more than ever, is on everyone’s mind. And peace, more than ever, is sorely missing. For centuries, governmental and private organizations have tried to envision how to make peace a reality. Extensive studies have been conducted to identify the conditions for bringing about lasting peace. Many initiatives have been launched to help create conditions where people could live in peace."

"I observe that [Prem Rawat] brings a message that it is every individual’s birthright to experience peace in this lifetime. He asserts that, in addition to fulfilling our obligations to society, we need to fulfill our ultimate obligation, which is to ourselves and to finding fulfillment in this lifetime. This message is remarkable in that it does not put the responsibility for peace on institutions or on others, but on each individual. He has been providing inspiration and guidance on this topic for decades and has received much acclaim.”"

"While many programs are special, some are essential. Words of Peace, which presents Prem Rawat's message, is one of these unique programs. This program is receiving this distinction because of its important contribution toward building a culture of peace in Brazil. The feeling of peace that Prem Rawat introduces people to is very important for everyone. It is essential to spread this feeling within to everyone in Brazil. This program is a great contribution toward the triumph of inner peace. Prem Rawat's message has the potential to unite all Brazilians in inner contentment. I know that peace is really possible in Brazil."

"Prem Rawat does not speak from prepared notes. He speaks from his heart. And he speaks to that part of us which understands and recognizes truth as something that it has already always known. As a writer and lecturer, I travel in the realm of ideas. As a result of listening to Prem Rawat's expressions, I now know that wherever I travel—in thought or in geography—that there is a home within me. A home that, instead of the complexity of thought, the simplicity of peace resides. I credit Harvard for opening the doors of my mind, and I credit Prem Rawat for opening the door to my heart of hearts. In a very practical way he has allowed me to access the deepest feelings of peace, of fulfillment, of freedom. Free of any external catalyst. And for me, as Robert Frost put it simply, this has made all the difference.”"

"The Governor of the State of New Mexico, having learned of the outstanding achievement and exceptional accomplishments of Maharaji, does hereby extend congratulations and acknowledgement and further does herein direct that this official expression of pride be forthwith sent on behalf of the people of the State of New Mexico."

"Resolved that I, Jennifer H. Granholm, offer this certificate of tribute to Prem Rawat in honor of his exemplary career, life accomplishments, and many contributions to our citizens."

"As Mayor of the City of Los Angeles and on behalf of its residents, I commend you for your tireless, lifelong efforts to bring to people in the Los Angeles area and around the world a message of hope, and for providing them inspiration and guidance to find peace within and live fulfilling lives. I am pleased to join with members of the community in recognizing your remarkable achievements and accomplishments throughout the years. With best wishes in all your future endeavors."

"Prem Rawat is an international speaker acknowledged for his profound message of peace, particularly inner peace and self-fulfillment. We at the United Nations Association of Malaysia and the United Nations Development Programme see his message as a true reflection of the hopes, aspirations, and ideals of the United Nations, whose aim is international peace and security. All encouragement and support should be given to The Prem Rawat Foundation for its noble efforts to spread the message of Prem Rawat, as well as to bring peace and happiness to the needy. Let us support the message of Prem Rawat, empowering us to generate the hope of peace in this world of despair. The foremost concern of the international community is peace. Prem Rawat says, ‘Peace is possible.’ Let us listen to his message."

"Throughout time, leading thinkers, academicians, and government leaders have attempted to develop an understanding of how to build peace. Many approaches have been explored, all attempting to create favorable conditions for peace. These solutions have drawn from economics, history, international law, comparative peace studies, conflict resolution, political science, sociology, anthropology, and more. Prem Rawat’s message of peace is rooted in the need for each person to find peace within themselves. He emphasizes that whether our search is for world peace or for personal peace, we very much need to look at the search for peace as a personal quest, rooted in an understanding of who we are."

"His message is one of hope and peace, and he has inspired millions throughout the world. As an educator, the opportunity to learn has been central and the focus of my life. I have witnessed brilliant teachers and eager students turn classrooms into magical places. Prem Rawat reminds us that magic begins with people, and it’s within each person. That the possibility of peace and the possibility of living a life to the fullest begins with recognizing the value of life itself. That is, in my opinion, the deepest learning and is certainly a curriculum for everyone."

"“Self-knowledge starts with understanding that you’ve got the single most important thing absolutely right – you are alive.”"

"If this guy is God, then this is the God that the United States of America deserves."

"You can start going around and taking examples and taking stories and taking everything. Or you can just one straight thing: 'Guru Maharaj Ji, take me'."

"I’m me. I am a human being. Many things have been said about me. Many of these things have come from people’s own emotions, good or bad. I’m proud to be a human being. I am very happy that I have this life. I am also happy that I can feel joy and pain like everyone else. I’m happy being me. Some people would love to put labels on me, but I am just me."

"Peace needs to be in everyone's life. Of all the things we have tried in this world, there is one thing we have never given a chance. That one thing is peace. If we want to hope for something, maybe we could hope in our heart that peace will come in our life. The peace that we are looking for is within. It is in the heart, waiting to be felt, and I can help you get in touch with it. It is not the world that needs peace; it is people. When people in the world are at peace within, the world will be at peace."

"We don’t need to be in dire straits to need to feel hope. On a perfectly beautiful, sunny, clear day when everything is going just right, you can still use hope. That we are able to be content within is the most hopeful message there is. That we can find that one thing the heart has searched for, for so long, is a very hopeful message. That’s the message I bring. And that brings people hope. That is what is important for all of us: that hope, that idea of self-fulfillment, that idea of being able to have contentment in one’s life."

"This whole sphere, this whole world of Knowledge and the Master and, practicing, and devotion, and participation and all that— This is traditionally in India is called the path of devotion, bhakti marg. All the Masters came from this. All the Sikh gurus came from this. All the Masters you talked about came from this. It is regarded as the highest path, inclusive of Buddha— Because any time, any time there is a Master, wants to talk about a living thing, boomf. That's where they find themselves. And, amazingly, enough, it is not called the path of enlightenment, and it is not called the path of Knowledge, and it is not called the path of service, and all of those things, inclusive, it is then given the name. And the name is devotion."

"Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" — or physical object — and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later — at least to those who come to believe in them — as "objective truths" (or "facts"). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness — whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause — let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill? In what follows I shall describe briefly the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put. I shall argue that this notion has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had and that it now functions merely as a convenient myth."

"Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by "cure." What we do have are problems in living — whether these be biologic, economic, political, or sociopsychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations."

"In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients."

"Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to."

"For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. ... With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization."

"What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery."

"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."

"Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is."

"Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults."

"Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you. Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you."

"Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime."

"Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession. It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role."

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates."

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse."

"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget."

"The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else."

"Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people."

"The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs."

"Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person."

"We speak of a person being “under the influence” of alcohol, or heroin, or amphetamine, and believe that these substances affect him so profoundly as to render him utterly helpless in their grip. We thus consider it scientifically justified to take the most stringent precautions against these things and often prohibit their nonmedical, or even their medical, use. But a person may be under the influence not only of material substances but also of spiritual ideas and sentiments, such as patriotism, Catholicism, or Communism. But we are not afraid of these influences, and believe that each person is, or ought to be, capable of fending for himself."

"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic."

"Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions”?"

"Although both the natural and moral sciences seek to understand the objects of their observation, in natural science the purpose of this is to be able to control them better, whereas in moral science it is, or ought to be, to be better able to leave them alone. The morally proper aim of psychology, then, is self-control."

"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic."

"Psychiatry is institutionalized scientism: it is the systematic imitation, impersonation, counterfeiting, and deception. This is the formula: every adult smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc.); hence, to prove that he is an adult, the adolescent smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc). Mutatis mutandis: every science consists of classification, control, and prediction; hence to prove psychiatry is a science, the psychiatrist classifies, controls, predicts. The result is that he classifies people as mad; that he confines them as dangerous (to themselves or others); and that he predicts people's behavior, robbing them of their free will and hence of their very humanity."

"For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club."

"A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong."

"I became interested in writing this book approximately ten years ago when, having become established as a psychiatrist, I became increasingly impressed by the vague, capricious and generally unsatisfactory character of the widely used concept of mental illness and its corollaries, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Although (mental illness) might have been a useful concept in the nineteenth century, today it is scientifically worthless and socially harmful. In non-psychiatric circles mental illness all too often is considered to be whatever psychiatrists say it is. The answer to the question, Who is mentally ill? thus becomes: Those who are confined in mental hospitals or who consult psychiatrists in their private offices."

"It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped? One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults. Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man. Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives."

"It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living. I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases. Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest."

"I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice... Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness."

"If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes."

"Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities."

"The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense."

"Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous."

"The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point — and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior — smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians. Can American society survive this legal-psychiatric assault on its moral and political foundations?"

"People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law. If we really believed that poverty caused crime, we would have a "poverty defense" as well, attorneys calling professors of economics to testify in court whether a particular defendant is guilty of theft or not by reason of poverty."

"The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms."

"In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious. That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences."

"The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen."

"The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity."

"As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person—so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters."

"Since it seems to be the nature of man that he wants to go to hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising that effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions. … Many individuals try to drive men into slavery, as if they were cattle, but only a few succeed. These we hail as “great historical figures.” I submit that we cannot judge the noble rhetorician by this standard. Since he urges men to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because his task is to bring men to themselves, not to him, the noble rhetorician ought not to be judged by his manifest effect on others at all. Rather, he ought to be judged by the clarity and steadfastness with which he proclaims his counsel. Should not a single person heed his advice, the noble rhetorician would still have to be judged successful in proportion as he succeeds in perfecting his own language. … In the final analysis, what Karl Kraus sought was to purify himself by purifying his own language. He achieved his goal. He dies a semantic saint in a semantically satanic society."

"Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear—particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception."

"As Justice Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, censorship rests on the idea that “every idea is an incitement.” Perhaps he should have specified “every interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting."

"Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users."

"As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen."

"We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today."

"The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women."

"The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God’s plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders."

"The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts—just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions."

"In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. … Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines “buggery” as “heresy, sodomy.”"

"This connection, at once semantic and conceptual, between unorthodoxy and sodomy, was firmly established during the late Middle Ages, and has never been severed. It is as strong today as it was six hundred years ago. To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in the fourteenth century was to cast out of society. Since the dominant ideology was theological, religious deviance was considered so grave an offense as to render the individual a nonperson. Whatever redeeming qualities he might have had counted for naught. The sin of heresy eclipsed all contradictory, personal characteristics, just as the teachings of God and the Church eclipsed all contradictory empirical observations. The disease called “mental illness”—and its subspecies “homosexuality”—plays the same role today."

"By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice."

"The disease concept of homosexuality—as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide—conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. … Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy—just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics."

"The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr."

"So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)—so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self—mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution."

"My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to “treat” this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it."

"The “treatment” can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual."

"Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression."

"The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds."

"There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts—and the traditional persecution of men for their religion. … What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts, … but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences."

"Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you."

"The final result of our researches has widened the class of substances sensitive to light vibrations, until we can propound the fact of such sensitiveness being a general property of all matter."

"There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things."

"I had made up my mind to find that for which I was searching even if it required the remainder of my life. After innumerable failures I finally uncovered the principle for which I was searching, and I was astounded at its simplicity. I was still more astounded to discover the principle I had revealed not only beneficial in the construction of a mechanical hearing aid but it served as well as means of sending the sound of the voice over a wire. Another discovery which came out of my investigation was the fact that when a man gives his order to produce a definite result and stands by that order it seems to have the effect of giving him what might be termed a second sight which enables him to see right through ordinary problems. What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it."

"Before anything else, preparation is the key to success."

"Neither the Army nor the Navy is of any protection, or very little protection, against aerial raids."

"The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization."

"I begin my work at about nine or ten o'clock in the evening and continue until four or five in the morning. Night is a more quiet time to work. It aids thought."

"Perseverance must have some practical end, or it does not avail the man possessing it. A person without a practical end in view becomes a crank or an idiot. Such persons fill our asylums."

"I am a believer in unconscious cerebration. The brain is working all the time, though we do not know it. At night it follows up what we think in the daytime. When I have worked a long time on one thing, I make it a point to bring all the facts regarding it together before I retire; I have often been surprised at the results... We are thinking all the time; it is impossible not to think."

"You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them."

"Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus."

"Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years."

"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. That intellectuality is more vigorous that has attained its strength gradually. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider — and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation — persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree."

"If a man is not bound down, he is sure to succeed."

"A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with — a man is what he makes of himself."

"Don't keep forever on the public road. Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before, and something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought."

"Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before, and something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought."

"Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought."

"Don't keep forever on the public road. Leave the beaten path occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before, and something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought."

"Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to see something you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore around it, and before you know it, something worth thinking about to occupy your mind."

"Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will find something you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore around it, and before you know it, you will have something to think about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought."

"Bell had his own theories about the threat that people with disabilities represented to the future of the species. His mother and wife had both been born deaf, and in 1883 he warned the National Academy of Sciences that unless the use of sign language was vigorously discouraged in schools for the deaf, society ran the risk of engendering "a race of deaf-mutes.""

"Years later I told Alexander Graham Bell of my introduction to the telephone. "Nobody," he said, "can estimate what the teachers of science in colleges and high schools were doing in those days not only to spread knowledge of the telephone but to stir youth to tackle the possibilities in electricity." What I best remember is not the telephone but Professor Tingley's amazing enthusiasm for the telephone. This revelation of enthusiasm, its power to warm and illuminate was one of the finest and most lasting of my college experiences. The people I had known, teachers, preachers, doctors, business men, all went through their day's work either with a stubborn, often sullen determination to do their whole duty, or with an undercurrent of uneasiness, if they found pleasure in duty. They seemed to me to feel that they were not really working if they were not demonstrating the Puritan teaching that labor is a curse. It had never seemed so to me, but I did not dare gloat over it. And here was a teacher who did gloat over his job in all its ramifications. Moreover, he did his best to stir you to share his joy."

"At that time Mr. Bell was giving his nights to trying to "make iron talk"...He was up and began his day around four to six. Often there were guests for dinner, for everybody of note the world over who came to Washington wanted to meet him. On Wednesdays after dinner there usually gathered a group of scientists and public men to talk things over. Mr. Bell was something to see at these dinners and gatherings, the finest social impresario I ever saw in action, so welcoming, appreciative, eager, receptive. I thought then I had never seen anybody so generous about what others were doing. He loved to draw out great stories of adventure and discovery and would silence all talkers when once such narrating was started."

"he was the type of inventor whose interest flags when he has solved his problem. Let somebody else take care of the development. He would be off on a new voyage of discovery."

"Hitchcock: You know that I think all actors are cattle? George Raft: Yes, I know—but I'm no actor."

"[T]he director passed off the phrase as one of his "Machiavellian quips," not to be taken seriously. "Let us say, rather, that actors are a necessary evil," he cautioned, with a straight face. "As a matter of fact, I couldn't work if I weren't on friendly terms with them; I'll bend over backward every time. Besides, I get into each picture I make, if only for a couple of seconds—so I'm probably a frustrated actor at heart myself.""

"It still goes. But Pat is the nicest cattle I've ever seen."

"The lower lip definitely states that all actors are cattle—including the authorǃ"

"Actors are cattle. I've always said actors are cattle. In fact, Carole Lombard once built a corral on set and put three live calves into it, in recognition of my feelings. I tell them that, and treat them as such, and we get along fineǃ"

"Deep inside, I am a shy man. And in the presence of colorful characters, I am a clam. I never try to out-eccentric the eccentricsǃ"

"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."

"The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made."

"You can't direct a Laughton picture. The best you can hope for is to referee."

"I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it."

"A clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive and that's within yourself. Within me I can't bear quarreling, I can't bear feelings between people. I think hatred is wasted energy and it's all non-productive. I'm very sensitive. A sharp word, said by a person who has a temper, if they're close to me, hurts me for days. I know we're only human, we do go in for these various emotions, call them negative emotions but when all these are removed and you can look forward, and the road is clear ahead, and now you're going to create something. I think that's as happy as I would ever want to be."

"We do not recommend suicide as a way of life."

"I deny that I ever said actors are cattle. What I said was, "Actors should be treated like cattle.""

"Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house."

"One of television's great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs."

"Seeing a murder on television can … help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."

"Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."

"Puns are the highest form of literature."

"Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."

"Self-plagiarism is style."

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."

"[This award is] meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid."

"I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are . Had the beautiful Miss Reville not accepted a lifetime contract without options as Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock some 53 years ago, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock might be in this room tonight, not at this table but as one of the slower waiters on the floor."

"I’m not against the police; I'm just afraid of them."

"In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life."

"The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema."

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."

"Hitch is a gentleman farmer who raises goose flesh."

"I'd like to know more about his relationships with women. No, on second thought, I wouldn't."

"Here is someone … who has an enormous, inordinate, neurotic fear of disorder. And that's from which he makes his art. He always has his people in a moment of disorder. They think they're in control, they think they have power, they think they have order, and then he just slips the rug out from under them to see what they're going to do."

"Like Freud, Hitchcock diagnosed the discontents that chafe and rankle beneath the decorum of civilization. Like Picasso or Dali, he registered the phenomenological threat of an abruptly modernised world."

"The man with the navy-blue voice."

"[Hitchcock, on the set of Marnie] I've never gone into detail about this, and I never will. I'll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became."

"I've made it my mission ever since to see to it that while Hitchcock may have ruined my career, I never gave him the power to ruin my life."

"[Explaining her initial silence on his behaviour] sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn't exist [at the time]."

"During my ten-year friendship with Hitch the full name is unthinkable to anyone who knows him I have never known him fail to impress strangers with a start of surprise. He has always been chubby, but to-day he is a mellow, exuberant mountain of a man in the late thirties, whose passion is music, whose pleasure is good living, and whose genius is for visual imagery. He is a man who visualises both by instinct and training. He cannot help drawing. As he talks to you his broad, draughtsman's pencil sneaks out, and he blocks in groups and figures on the napkin or table top. When he signs his name to a letter the flourish under the signature slips into a cartoon. His Christmas cards are self-portraits, broadly satiric."

"Actually Hitch, like most heavy men, is the gentlest creature you could meet in a month of Sundays. He has done more kindly turns to out of work actors, assistants, secretaries, and mere sponging acquaintances than anyone I know in this industry. Off set he is many people's angel. On, he is frequently a fiend. Hitch has a tiny wife, who helps him with all his scenarios, and a tiny fairylike daughter, who bobs an old-fashioned curtsey to you when she speaks. These are the people who really rule his life. He is an old-fashioned person at heart, believing in the ordinary things of life, the small common decencies, the trivial events that alone make the big ones extraordinary. That is why, I am convinced, he is a good film-maker."

"When I first met Hitchcock he was writing and ornamenting sub-titles for silent pictures. He used to announce "Came the dawn" in black letters on a while ground, or tell us that "Heart spoke to heart in the hush of the evening" in white letters on a black ground. His title cards were both elegant and original, because the man simply could not help drawing. All his instincts were towards visualisation, and all his training towards draughtsmanship."

"[Hitchcock quoted] "I'm on a diet. And I don't do crazy tricks in my pictures any more. You know what a good time I used to have in the old days, with violent cuts and dissolves and wipes, everything in the room spinning round, standing on its head, all that sort of thing. But I've stopped all that. I haven't time to waste any more on technical tricks. I like my screen well filled, every corner used, but I've no fancy theories I want the cutting and continuity to be as inconspicuous as possible. All I'm concerned with is to get the characters developed and the story clearly told, without wasting any footage. I've turned technical ascetic, kid, without either fun or luxuries.""

"I suppose what surprised me most about Hitchcock was how little he directed us. I had done a number of films for and he seemed quite meticulous in contrast. Hitchcock, however, didn't seem to direct us at all. He was a dozing, nodding Buddha with an enigmatic smile on his face."

"When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you're seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he's telling."

"Hitchcock finds women captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature but she is chief artificer in civilisation, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception."

"In another Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent, one of the most exciting and melodramatic sequences ever made, the airplane crash in mid-ocean is accomplished with a minimum of reference, in the speed and economy of image that is to be found in concentrated poems."

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."

"As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do."

"We make progress in society only if we stop cursing and complaining about its shortcomings and have the courage to do something about them."

"Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences; all events are blessings given to us to learn from. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub."

"We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering."

"There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning."

"Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death."

"Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever."

"Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body."

"It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it."

"Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means."

"Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth."

"The Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross changed western cultural resistance to dealing with death, and the teaching of how to accept it... Kubler-Ross's best known contribution to the study, thanatology, that she had helped to create, was the five stages of dying people go through. She described them - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - in her bestseller On Death And Dying (1969), written in two months. Not everyone experiences all five, she cautioned, but at least two are always present. The definition, reached after scores of interviews with people facing imminent death, helped the medical profession to deal with a factor it had long refused to acknowledge, especially in the US... She wrote more than 20 books.. A firm believer in a god and the life hereafter, she became fascinated with near-death experiences and an advocate for people's stories of seeing a shining light and familiar faces, before being brought back from the brink."

"Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable."

"In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution."

"Competitions are for horses, not artists."

"By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs … Nowhere does he recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations."

"Contrary to popular belief, English women do not wear tweed nightgowns."

"My family were of good English peasant class from St. John's Wood. My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands."

"The more wishes you make, the more magnificent Fantasia will become."

"I am committed to using technology in my dances but not for the purpose of making a comment on technology, but rather to use it as a tool to express the human condition. I think that there are many disadvantages to using technology, it is expensive, difficult to set up and can steal the show by drawing too much attention away from the dance. I love the beauty and the simplicity of a warm body moving without frills, but I think technology is part of our common language now and to not create a relationship with it in dance seems like ignoring a vital tool for connection."

"A slyly anarchic dancer"

"Stronach’s fragile beauty belies an emotional strength, pragmatic resiliency, and intellectual courage. Her ideas and choreography are both enigmatic and playful."

"Perhaps the Russians have done the right thing, after all, in abolishing copyright. It is well known that conscious and unconscious appropriation, borrowing, adapting, plagiarizing, and plain stealing are variously, and always have been, part and parcel of the process of artistic creation. The attempt to make sense out of copyright reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism."

"Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up."

"It is generally believed that scientific talent reveals itself in early youth. [...] This was certainly not my case. I somehow slid into my scientific profession. My mother wished for me to become a physician, just like my father. [...] I myself wanted to be a lawyer, defender of the unjustly accused. But my career is the result of political circumstances, academic possibilities, and lucky accidents."

"It's easier to say something stupid than write something stupid."

"He was not a pioneer of speech recognition, he was the pioneer of speech recognition."

"It is the threat of the use of force [against Iraq] and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

"Our nation's memory is long and our reach is far."

"Lesley Stahl: We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it? Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it."

"My deepest regret from my years in public service is the failure of the United States and the international community to act sooner to halt these crimes."

"What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

"Little effort was made to explain Saddam's culpability, his misuse of Iraqi resources, or the fact that we were not embargoing medicine or food. I was exasperated that our TV was showing what amounted to Iraqi propaganda...I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it. Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations. Instead, I said the following: 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.' As soon as I had spoken, I wished for the power to freeze time and take back those words. My reply had been a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong. Nothing matters more than the lives of innocent people. I had fallen into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean. That is no one's fault but my own."

"I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life"

"Mahmoud Abbas is a puppet."

"I never should have made it. It was stupid."

"What really troubles me is that democracy is getting a bad name because it is identified with imposition and occupation. I'm for democracy, but imposing democracy is an oxymoron. People have to choose democracy, and it has to come up from below."

"There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."

"I'm not a person who thinks the world would be entirely different if it was run by women. If you think that, you've forgotten what high school was like."

"The victor of the war in Iraq is Iran."

"Armageddon is not a foreign policy."

"When we're trying to solve difficult national issues its sometimes necessary to talk to adversaries as well as friends. Historians have a word for this: diplomacy."

"There is a significant moral difference between a person who commits a violent crime and a person who tries to cross a border illegally in order to put food on the family table. Such migrants may violate our laws against illicit entry, but if that's all they do then they are trespassers, not criminals. They deserve to have their dignity respected."

"I'm a critic. I think the administration has really undermined America's power and reputation and that Iraq may go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy, which means that I think it's worse than Vietnam in its unintended consequences and for our reputation. This president, because his administration is imposing democracy, which is an oxymoron, has, I think, hurt the concept. It is not just that the administration has been unilateral but that it has been unidimensional. It has paid attention primarily to one part of the world, without enough attention being paid to other parts."

"Get out, you disgusting Serbs!"

"In early 2000, I became the first senior U.S. official to meet with Vladimir Putin in his new capacity as acting president of Russia. We in the Clinton administration did not know much about him at the time — just that he had started his career in the K.G.B. I hoped the meeting would help me take the measure of the man and assess what his sudden elevation might mean for U.S.-Russia relations, which had deteriorated amid the war in Chechnya. Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Whereas Mr. Yeltsin had cajoled, blustered and flattered, Mr. Putin spoke unemotionally and without notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen rebels. Flying home, I recorded my impressions. “Putin is small and pale,” I wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” He claimed to understand why the Berlin Wall had to fall but had not expected the whole Soviet Union to collapse. “Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”"

"I have been reminded in recent months of that nearly three-hour session with Mr. Putin as he has massed troops on the border with neighboring Ukraine. After calling Ukrainian statehood a fiction in a bizarre televised address, he issued a decree recognizing the independence of two separatist-held regions in Ukraine and sending troops there. Mr. Putin’s revisionist and absurd assertion that Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia” and effectively robbed from the Russian empire is fully in keeping with his warped worldview. Most disturbing to me: It was his attempt to establish the pretext for a full-scale invasion. Should he invade, it will be a historic error."

"In the 20-odd years since we met, Mr. Putin has charted his course by ditching democratic development for Stalin’s playbook. He has collected political and economic power for himself — co-opting or crushing potential competition — while pushing to re-establish a sphere of Russian dominance through parts of the former Soviet Union. Like other authoritarians, he equates his own well-being with that of the nation and opposition with treason. He is sure that Americans mirror both his cynicism and his lust for power and that in a world where everyone lies, he is under no obligation to tell the truth. Because he believes that the United States dominates its own region by force, he thinks Russia has the same right."

"Instead of paving Russia’s path to greatness, invading Ukraine would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance."

"Mr. Putin’s actions have triggered massive sanctions, with more to come if he launches a full-scale assault and attempts to seize the entire country. These would devastate not just his country’s economy but also his tight circle of corrupt cronies — who in turn could challenge his leadership. What is sure to be a bloody and catastrophic war will drain Russian resources and cost Russian lives — while creating an urgent incentive for Europe to slash its dangerous reliance on Russian energy. ... Such an act of aggression would almost certainly drive NATO to significantly reinforce its eastern flank and to consider permanently stationing forces in the Baltic States, Poland and Romania. ... And it would generate fierce Ukrainian armed resistance, with strong support from the West."

"Although Mr. Putin will, in my experience, never admit to making a mistake, he has shown that he can be both patient and pragmatic. He also is surely conscious that the current confrontation has left him even more dependent on China; he knows that Russia cannot prosper without some ties to the West."

"Mr. Putin must know that a second Cold War would not necessarily go well for Russia — even with its nuclear weapons. Strong U.S. allies can be found on nearly every continent. Mr. Putin’s friends, meanwhile, include the likes of Bashar al-Assad, Alexander Lukashenko and Kim Jong-un. If Mr. Putin feels backed into a corner, he has only himself to blame. As Mr. Biden has noted, the United States has no desire to destabilize or deprive Russia of its legitimate aspirations. That’s why the administration and its allies have offered to engage in talks with Moscow on an open-ended range of security issues. But America must insist that Russia act in accordance with international standards applicable to all nations.<!--"

"Mr. Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, like to claim that we now live in a multipolar world. While that is self-evident, it does not mean that the major powers have a right to chop the globe into spheres of influence as colonial empires did centuries ago. -->"

"Ukraine is entitled to its sovereignty, no matter who its neighbors happen to be. In the modern era, great countries accept that, and so must Mr. Putin. That is the message undergirding recent Western diplomacy. It defines the difference between a world governed by the rule of law and one answerable to no rules at all."

"Consider Madeleine Albright. The U.N. imposed draconian sanctions on Iraq, pushed by the U.S. and Britain after it invaded Kuwait. Before that, in 1989 Iraq was reported to have “one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, as well as universal, free healthcare and education.” (“Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq,” johnpilger.com, 1-15-05) Iraq’s remarkable health was due to President Saddam Hussein nationalizing the country’s vast oil resources, and investing certain of its revenue in the Iraqi people. This policy did not set well with Western oil corporations, which saw Iraq’s bountiful oil reserves as a gold mine to be controlled and tapped. The sanctions prevented Iraq from importing supplies of food and medicine and other necessities. A survey by two scientists, Drs. Mary Smith Fawzi and Sarah Zaidi, found that “as many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the Persian Gulf war because of economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council.” (“Iraqi Sanctions, Kill Children, U.N. Reports,” By Barbara Crossette, The New York Times, Dec. 1, 1995)"

"Shortly after the end of the Cold War, virtually the entire American foreign-policy establishment succumbed to a monumentally self-destructive ideological fever. Call it INS.... Indispensable Nation Syndrome, along with the militarism that it’s spawned in this century... Back in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright not only identified INS, but also captured its essence. Appearing on national TV, she famously declared, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Now, allow me to be blunt: this is simply not true. It’s malarkey, hogwash, bunkum, and baloney.,, The United States does not see further into the future than Ireland, Indonesia, or any other country, regardless of how ancient or freshly minted it may be.,, To charge Albright with lying, however, somehow rates as bad form, impolite, even rude...To be fair, Albright herself is not solely or even mainly responsible for the havoc that INS has caused. While the former secretary of state promoted the syndrome in notably expansive language, the substance of her remark was anything but novel. She was merely reiterating what, in Washington, still passes for a self-evident truism: America must lead... we make the rules."

"..veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50% over the next 10 years... U.S. officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War "power dividend," a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States, by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Gen. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" In 1999, as secretary of state under Bill Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia. The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action "to maintain or restore international peace and security." This was neither. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was "having trouble with our lawyers" over NATO's illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to "get new lawyers.""

"Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third-poorest country in Europe (after Moldova and post-coup Ukraine) and its independence is still not recognized by 96 countries. Hashim Thaçi, Albright's hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at the Hague, charged with murdering at least 300 civilians under cover of NATO bombing in 1999 to extract and sell their internal organs on the international transplant market. Clinton and Albright's gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results."

"There was now a bipartisan consensus on war, and it extended into the next conflict, Iraq. Indeed the predicate for that war had been laid by the previous administration, which hyped the threats of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program. “No one has done what Saddam Hussein has done, or is thinking of doing,” Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright told the audience at a town hall meeting at Ohio State University in 1998. “He is producing weapons of mass destruction, and he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other dictators.” When some in the room expressed skepticism, Albright attacked their character. “I’m really surprised that people feel they need to defend the rights of Saddam Hussein,” she said. At least one person in the crowd wasn’t intimidated. “You’re not answering my question, Madame Albright,” he yelled. Albright’s response: “As a former university professor, I suggest, sir, that you study carefully what American foreign policy is. Every one of the violations has been pointed out on what is not right, and I would be happy to spend fifty minutes with you after the forum to explain it.” She never did. Nor did Albright explain how exactly Saddam was “qualitatively and quantitatively” different from other strongmen around the world. She didn’t need to. Everyone back in Washington already agreed with her."

"I really am tired of all the Clinton Democrats running around getting all-sanctimonious over Iraq. It was them who killed 1.5 to 2.2 million Iraqis through sanctions. Sanctions that Madeline Albright, their illustrious Secretary of State, when confronted with the fact of 500,000 dead Iraqi children, said it was a price she was willing to pay."

"About half a million Iraqi children have died as a result of the sanctions. Of them, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, famously said, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it." "Moral equivalence" was the term that was used to denounce those who criticized the war on Afghanistan. Madeleine Albright cannot be accused of moral equivalence. What she said was just straightforward algebra."

"Maybe it wasn't such a great idea for Hillary Clinton to invite Madeleine Albright to campaign for her in New Hampshire. During a campaign event in Concord on Saturday, the former Secretary of State declared: "Young women have to support Hillary Clinton. The story is not over!...They’re going to want to push us back," she continued. "It’s not done and you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you. And just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other." And while it was not the first time Albright muttered that phrase, the backlash was swift and severe. Pointing to Albright's notorious defense of the 1990 sanctions on Iraq, during which she said that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it," observers speculated about someone else who may end up in that "special place.""

"Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event—something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough—and slow enough—so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?"

"We keep on fighting, we keep on playing. We won tonight and we're going to try to keep on winning."

"I just love the feeling from the fans and when I'm walking on deck I can hear people screaming and wishing you the best. That puts you into the game more than anything."

"This is our fucking city! And nobody is gonna dictate our freedom. Stay Strong! (After the Boston Marathon Bombings)"

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

"Only by proving that we are superior to the savages, not only through our power to kill them but through our entire way of life, can we control them as they are now, in their present stage; it is necessary for their own well-being, even more than ours."

"You can find it on almost any tree. As we made our way through the forest, it was literally raining rubber juice. Our clothes were full of it. The Congo has so many tributaries that a well-organized company can easily extract a few tons of rubber per year here. You only have to sail up such a river and the branches with rubber hang almost up to your ship."

"The barge was an invention of my own. It was 40 feet long, 6 feet beam, and 30 inches deep, of Spanish cedar 3/8 inches thick."

"I was received with an overwhelming display of military and civilian tributes, all the way to the royal palace where I was to stay, troops were lined up behind which enthusiastic people were chanting their viva, it seemed to me that a major change had come in the Belgian public opinion on the importance of the Congo, when I first went there, the Belgian newspapers spouted nothing but criticism, they were completely dumbfounded, the king was recognized as the great benefactor of the nation."

"We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns, and 3 or 4 score villages."

"I desire some generous and opulent philanthropist, who shall permit me a force for commerce in central Africa."

"As seen in my loneliness, there was this difference between the Bible and the newspapers. The one reminded one that, apart from God, my life was but a bubble of air, and it bade me remember my Creator; the other fostered arrogance and loneliness."

"Religion acts as a moral gardener, to weed out, or suppress, evil tendencies, which, like weeds: grow."

"Though many illusions are of a character we should gladly cherish, yet the sooner we lose some of them, the sooner we gain the power of seeing clearly into things. The one who possesses least has the best chance of becoming wise. The man who travels, and reflects, loses illusions faster than he who stays at home."

"Socialism is a return to primitive conditions."

"[The whole Congo without—the lower Congo] isn't worth a penny."

"I do not believe in the accusations made in England against King Leopold II, the Congo and I do not share the feelings of those who inspire them. No state would be willing to spend the money spent by the King of the Belgians and Belgium in the most dark places of darkest Africa. When I consider the few years that have passed since the Congo became a state, I believe that the work accomplished is a great honor to Belgium. You can be sure that the King of the Belgians is interested in every detail of his administration. I do not claim that he can monitor all the actions of each individual, what Government could? The stories of the atrocities that have been spread are almost all gossip. The English note of month of August is based on biased reports. I am convinced that Leopold II has been doing his best to prevent any crime in the Congo, he is not responsible for the crimes anymore that could be committed there than those that are sometimes committed in Belgium. The reason of all these slanders? Jealousy! The Congo is doing better than any other African state. Those stories of atrocities will not stop, they will persist with the little basis they had, this was never anything but pure invention."

"I am certain that not one of the countries who are invited by the newspapers to put itself in its (Belgium's) place would have been able to do better."

"The recitals of atrocities and bad administrations which have of late been spread about are almost all, if not all, pure reports."

"To-day, with its forests pierced and open, its routes, its stations, it is in advance of all other African States. Take the French Congo, the German East Africa, Portuguese West Africa, and compare them. The Congo State prospers in a greater degree than any other part of the black continent."

"When I was on the Congo and accused a tribe of cannibalism, it replied : "We are not cannibals, but our neighbors are." The neighboring tribe said : "It is not we, it is the next tribe that you will meet" ; and that tribe referred us on to the next, and so on continually. They seemed to be ashamed of their cannibalism. They concealed it. Yet there was no doubt as to the existence of the practice. It was very seldom that I could discover the guilty. How, then, in recruiting its troops, was the Congo to distinguish the black cannibals from those who were not cannibals?"

"They discharge their mission under the most difficult conditions, and I Relieve that I may assert that, from the Governor-General down to the humblest official, there is not one guilty of cruelty."

"I had on the Congo under my orders three hundred men, English, Germans, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgians. I found no difference between them. All did their best according to their means. All were in the course of duty the object of some charge. I examined the charges minutely and always found them to be without foundation. That did not prevent these stories reaching Banana, and from there, Europe."

"England would not have managed the Congo better than King Leopold has done if she had been mistress of it, as she might have become in 1877."

"I crossed Africa from East to West and from West to East, and I never saw any excesses committed. I do not think that from this point of view there is a single sovereign living who has done so much for humanity as Leopold II.""

"I regret to inform you that Baruti, the black boy who was with me in England, deserted here the night before last, taking with him two Winchester rifles, my little pocket revolver, and pedometer. With him went Mburra and Feruzi, boys belonging respectively to the captain and engineer of the ' Stanley.' They took with them a couple of Remingtons and ammunition pouches. You will have fifty-three guns with you when you come up. If you had ah interpreter — if he is a boy from Upper Congo, secure him — you might be able by menace to get those guns back. I do not care for the lads. Of course the natives will strenuously deny — they always do so — but it is an ab- solute certainty that the boys took a canoe from our landing place. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence proving this has been collected after their departure. Your people are not first class, yet, if these guns are not delivered consult with Captain Schogestrom what you had best do. Do not act precipitately or rashly. Offer to purchase the guns for anything they need. But do not land your people in the village, nor do not camp opposite. There is nice camping ground above the Baroko village at the confluence of a creek. Put the creek between your camp and the natives. Keep a good look out, that is all. Give my compliments to Bonny, and believe me anxious for your early arrival here as my lieutenant."

"Last came the famous Hamed bin Mohammed, alias Tippu Tib, or, as it is variously pronounced by the natives, Tipo Tib, or Tibbu Tib. He was a tall, black-bearded man, of negro complexion, in the prime of life, straight and quick in his movements, a picture of energy and strength. He had a fine, intelligent face, with a nervous twitching of the eyes, and gleaming white and perfectly formed teeth. lie was attended by a large retinue of young Arabs, who looked up to him as chief, and a score of Wangwana and Wanyamwezi followers, whom he had led over thousands of miles through Africa. With the air of a well bred Arab, and almost courtier-like in his man- ner, ho welcomed me to Mwana Mamba*s village, and his slaves being ready at hand with mat and bolster, we reclined vis-a-vis, while a buzz of admiration of his style was perceptible from the on-lookers. After regarding him for a few minutes, I came to the conclusion that this Arab was a remarkable man — the most remarkable man I had met among Arabs, Wa-Swahili, and half-castes in Africa. He was neat in his person; his clothes were of spotless white; his fez cap brand new; his waist was incircled by a rich dowle; his dagger was splendid with silver filagree work; and his tout ensemhle was that of an Arab gentleman in very comfortable circumstances."

"I was interested the other day in making a curious calculation, which was, supposing that all the inhabitants of the Congo basin were simply to have one Sunday dress each, how many yards of Manchester cloth would be required, and the amazing number was 320,000,000 yards, just for one Sunday dress. Proceeding still further with these figures, I found that two Sunday dresses and four everyday dresses would in one year amount to 3,840,000,000 yards, which, at 2d. per yard, would be of the value of £16,000,000. The more I pondered upon these things, I discovered that I could not limit these stores of cotton cloth to day dresses. I would have to provide for night dresses also, and these would consume 160,000,000 yards. Then the grave clothes come into mind, and, as a poor lunatic who burned Bolobo Station destroyed 30,000 yards of cloth in order that he should not be cheated out of a respectable burial, I really feared for a time that the millions would get beyond measurable calculation. However, putting such accidents aside, I estimate that, if my figures of population are approximately correct, 2,000,000 die every year, and to bury these decently, and according to the custom of those who possess cloth, 16,000,000 yards will be required, while the 40,000 chiefs will require an average of 100 yards each, or 4,000,000 yards. I regarded these figures with great satisfaction, and I was about to close my remarks upon the millions of yards of cloth that Manchester would perhaps be required to produce, when I discovered that I had neglected to provide for the family wardrobe or currency chest, for you must know that in Lower Congo there is scarcely a family that has not a cloth fund of about a dozen pieces of about 24 yards each. This is a very important institution; otherwise how are the family necessities to be provided for? How are the fathers and mothers of families to go to market to buy greens, bread, oil, ground nuts, chickens, fish, and goats, and how is the petty trade to be conducted? How is ivory to be purchased, the gums, rubber, dye powders, gunpowder, copper slugs, guns, trinkets, knives, and swords to be bought without a supply of cloth? Now, 8,000,000 families at 300 yards each will require 2,400,000,000. You all know how perishable such currency must be; but if you sum up these several millions of yards, and value all of them at the average price of 2d. per yard, you will find that it will be possible for Manchester to create a trade, in the course of time, in cottons in the Congo basin, amounting in value to about £26,000,000 annually. I have said nothing about Rochdale savelist, or your own superior prints, your gorgeous handkerchiefs with their variegated patterns, your checks and striped cloths, your ticking and twills. I must satisfy myself with suggesting them; your own imagination will no doubt carry you to the limbo of immeasurable and incalculable millions."

"The Portuguese provinces are governed by men whom I hold to be animated with as sincere a hatred against the slave trade as any English or American philanthropist has shown. It would really be one of the riskiest undertakings for any slave trader to attempt to revive the slave trade on Portuguese territory today, either by sea or by land. It cannot be denied that there is some traffic on the frontiers of the colonies of Portugal by Portuguese subjects, when they succeed in escaping the surveillance of the authorities; however, it is essential to make a clear distinction between the African Portuguese and the European Portuguese."

"What does the greatness of a monarch consist in? I fit is the extent of his territory, then the Emperor of Russia is the greatest of all. I fit is the splendour and power of military organization, then William II [of Germany] takes first place. But if royal greatness consists in the wisdom and goodness of a sovereign leading his people with the solicitude of a shepherd watching over his flock, then the greatest sovereign is your own."

"And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape."

"Stanley shoots negroes as if they where monkeys."

"The terms of the treaties Stanley has made with native chiefs do not satisfy me. There must at least be an added article to the effect that they delegate to us their sovereign rights, the treaties must be as brief as possible and in a couple of articles must grant us everything."

"His conduct will very soon give rise to a very lively debate; or it will justify itself and it will be very good to use; or he will fail to do so and, in this case, we will be glad to have no connection or relationship of any kind with a compromising ally."

"I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be let alone! There is all the difference."

"I am bewildered by the thousands of strange people who write me letters. They do not know me. Why do they do that?"

"I t'ank I go home."

"The mystery surrounding Garbo was as thick as a London fog."

"Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced."

"Today this young woman —The Garbo as she is known — is the most glamorous figure in the whole world; there is no one with a more magnetic, romantic or exotic personality, there never has been a film star with so wide an appeal... Greta Garbo is Queen of Hollywood, her salary is fabulous, her word law. She has pointed features in a round face, her mouth is wide and knife-like. Her teeth are large and square and like evenly matched pearls; her eyes are pale, with lashes so long that when she lowers her lids they strike her cheeks; her complexion is of an unearthly whiteness and so delicate that she looks to have one layer of skin less than other people, and the suspicion of a frown is sooner perceptible."

"Every man's harmless fantasy mistress. By being worshiped by the entire world she gave you the feeling that if your imagination had to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste."

"Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera."

"Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality. The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive."

"We knew each other. We talked. We passed each other going to the set of our own films. We were doing our jobs. We had great mutual respect."

"You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain. You're the National Gallery; you're Garbo's Salary; you're cellophane!"

"She is the most miraculous blend of personality and sheer dramatic talent that the screen has ever known and her presence in The Painted Veil immediately makes it one of the season's cinema events."

"What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober."

"Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare."

"I think an artist who abandons his art is the saddest thing in the world, sadder than death. There must have been something about Garbo's film career that profoundly revolted her."

"It's done a lot of players a lot of good. And obviously, this drug is a drug where it's dose-related. Anything in overdose will destroy your liver. I mean, look at cigarettes and look at liquor. Cigarettes says on the packet, this will kill you; it will cause cancer; and you're still smoking it."

"I am and will always be just simply a baseball [sic] player, my tomb stone will just say. Baseball."

"Let's win one for the Gipper."

"Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points."

"Win or lose, do it fairly."

"One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than 50 preaching it."

"The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven."

"Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up."

"Show me a good and gracious loser, and I'll show you a failure."

"Now I'm going to tell you something I've kept to myself for years. None of you ever knew George Gipp. He was long before your time, but you all know what a tradition he is at Notre Dame. And the last thing he said to me, "Rock," he said, "sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock," he said, "but I'll know about it and I'll be happy.""

"The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing."

"Each person designs his own life, freedom gives him the power to carry out his own designs, and power gives the freedom to interfere with the designs of others."

"A healthy person goes "Yes," "No," and "Whoopee!" An unhealthy person goes "Yes, but," "No, but," and "No whoopee.""

"No man is a hero to his wife's psychiatrist."

"To be popular is easy; to be right when right is unpopular, is noble... I repudiate with scorn the immoral doctrine, 'Our country, right or wrong'."

"Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves."

"Watch the costs and the profits take care of themselves."

"Did you ever sum up these prizes and think how very little the millionaire has beyond the peasant, and how very often his additions tend not to happiness but to misery!"

"The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship."

"While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race."

"Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends—the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions."

"Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity."

"Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee of the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. (pp. 663-664)"

"The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."

"Such, in my opinion, is the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring "Peace on earth, among men Good Will.""

"[S]urplus wealth should be considered as a sacred trust, to be administered during the lives of its owners, by them as trustees, for the good of the community in which and from which it had been acquired."

"Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection?"

"Observation teaches that, generally speaking, it is not well for the children that they should be so burdened. Neither is it well for the state. Beyond providing for the wife and daughters moderate sources of income, and very moderate allowances indeed, if any, for the sons, men may well hesitate, for it is no longer questionable that great sums bequeathed oftener work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients."

"Wise men will soon conclude that, for the best interests of the members of their families and of the state, such bequests are an improper use of their means."

"As to the second mode, that of leaving wealth at death for public uses, it may be said that this is only a means for the disposal of wealth, provided a man is content to wait until he is dead before it becomes of much good in the world."

"It may fairly be said that no man is to be extolled for doing what he cannot help doing, nor is he to be thanked by the community to which he only leaves wealth at death. Men who leave vast sums in this way may fairly be thought men who would not have left it at all had they been able to take it with them. The memories of such cannot be held in grateful remembrance, for there is no grace in their gifts."

"It is not the rich man's son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race of life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the "dark horse" in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office."

"Salary, (I said, quite offended) what do I care for salary? I do not want the salary; I want the position. It is glory enough to go back to the Pittsburgh Division in your former place. You can make my salary just what you please and you need not give me any more than what I am getting now... Oh, please don't speak to me of money!"

"The sound rule in busi­ness is that you may give money freely when you have a sur­plus, but your name never—nei­ther as en­dorser nor as mem­ber of a cor­po­ra­tion with in­di­vid­ual li­a­bil­ity"

"... I came fortunately upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s works “The Data of Ethics,” “First Principles,” “Social Statics,” “The Descent of Man.” Reaching the pages which explain how man has absorbed such mental foods as were favorable to him, retaining what was salutary, rejecting what was deleterious, I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. "All is well since all grows better” became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection. His face is turned to the light; he stands in the sun and looks upward."

"No, Your Majesty, I do not like kings, but I do like a man be­hind a king when I find him."

"To his direction, Mr. Carnegie and others entrusted a fund for certain studies among Negroes. This is standard American procedure; if there is a job to be done and a Negro fit to do it, do not give the job or the responsibility to the Negro; give it to some white man and let the Negro work under him."

"in 1901, when Andrew Carnegie offered to augment the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation's trust with enough money to fund the construction of sixty-five public library branches for the City of New York, the history of North American public libraries entered a new phase, one that, among other things, led to making library services for children and young adults a priority (Lyndenberg 1972)."

"the great fathers Jefferson, Lincoln and Jackson had given way to Carnegie, Morgan and DuPont."

"Old-time steel workers who listened to the speeches on June 5, 1936 recalled the relentless war by Andrew Carnegie and his henchmen to preserve the open shop, and the repeated failures of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers to organize the steel industry."

"Each generation repeats its leaders. Each sees men endowed with superior inventiveness, energy, and genius for business, inspired by love of power and possession, launch selfish schemes-Carnegies, Rockefellers, Goulds…Each generation has had its Henry George, its Bellamy, its Bryan, intent on persuading mankind that he had found the way, could lead men to the good life. In each generation employer and employee have faced the decision-war or cooperation."

"One of the mistakes that Rand makes is that after she condemns a belief or an action, she goes on to tell you the psychology of the person who did it, as if she knows. I focus my judgment on the action and not on the person. My primary interest is: do I admire or dislike this behavior? And there, judgment is important for me. People often attribute all kinds of things to another person, without ever knowing where that person’s coming from. Most of the time, I regard the judgment of people as a waste of time. I regard the judgment of behavior as imperative."

"Rand always says, “Never pass up an opportunity to pass moral judgment.” Well I say: “Look for an opportunity to do something more useful instead.” Nobody was led to virtue by being told he was a scoundrel."

"Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house."

"It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior."

"Pride is the emotional reward of achievement. It is not a vice to be overcome but a virtue to be attained."

"Bourgeois political economy … never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a ‘science of people’ but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities."

"In conditions of private property … “life-activity” stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity."

"Reason and Revolution, Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Herbert Marcuse, London Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD 2nd edition 1941, reprinted 1955"

"We hope that the analysis offered here will demonstrate that Hegel’s basic concepts are hostile to the tendencies that have led into Fascist theory and practice. Preface"

"As the German idealists saw it, the French Revolution not only abolished feudal absolutism, replacing it with the economic and political system of the middle class, but it completed what the German Reformation had begun, emancipating the individual as a self-reliant master of his life. p. 3"

"Man is a thinking being. His reason enables him to recognize his own potentialities and those of his world. He is thus not at the mercy of the facts that surround him, but is capable of subjecting them to a higher standard, that of reason. P. 6"

"Man alone has the power of self-realization, the power to be a self-determining subject in all processes of becoming, for he alone has an understanding of potentialities and a knowledge of ‘notions.’ His very existence is the process of actualizing his potentialities, of molding his life according to the notions of reason. P. 9"

"German idealism rescued philosophy from the attack of British empiricism, and the struggle between the two became not merely a clash of different philosophical school, but a struggle for philosophy as such. P. 16"

"Hegel’s theological discussion repeatedly asks what the true relation is between the individual man and a state that no longer satisfies his capacities but exists rather as an ‘estranged’ institution from which the active political interest of the citizens has disappeared. Hegel defined this state with almost the same categories as those of eighteenth century liberalism: the state rests on the consent of the individuals, it circumscribes their rights and duties and protects its members from those internal and external dangers that might threaten the perpetuation of the whole. P. 32"

"The operations of understanding thus divide the world into numberless polarities, and Hegel uses the expression ‘isolated reflection’ (isolierte Reflection) to characterize the manner in which understanding forms and connects its polar concepts. The rise and spread of this kind of thinking Hegel connects with the origin and prevalence of crucial relationships in human life. The antagonisms of ‘isolated reflections’ express real antagonisms. …. Isolation and opposition are not, however, the final state of affairs. The world must not remain a complex of fixed disparates. The unity that underlies the antagonisms must be grasped and realized by reason, which has the task of reconciling the opposites and ‘sublimating’ them in a true unity. P. 45"

"The notion contradicts reality when the latter has become self-contradictory. Hegel says that a prevailing social form can be successfully attacked by thought only if this form has come into open contradiction with its own ‘truth,’ in other words, if it can no longer fulfill the demands of its own contents. P. 51"

"The Kantian philosophy left a gulf between thought and being, or between subject and object, which the Hegelian philosophy sought to bridge. The bridge was to be made by positing one universal structure of all being. Being was to be a process wherein a thing ‘comprehends’ or ‘grasps’ the various states of existence and draws them into the more or less enduring unity of its ‘self,’ thus actively constituting itself as ‘the same’ throughout all change. Everything, in other words, exists more or less as a ‘subject.’ P. 64"

"The concept of labor is not peripheral in Hegel’s system, but is the central notion through which he conceives the development of society. Driven by the insight that opened this dimension to him, Hegel describes the mode of integration prevailing in a commodity-producing society in terms that clearly fore-shadow Marx’s critical approach. P. 78"

"The historical world, in so far as it is built, organized, and shaped by the conscious activity of thinking subjects, is a realm of mind. But the mind is fully realized and exists in its true form only when it indulges in its proper activity, namely, in art, religion, and philosophy. P. 87"

"The Preface to the Phenomenology is one of the greatest philosophical undertakings of all times, constituting no less an attempts than to reinstate philosophy as the highest form of human knowledge, as ‘the Science.’ P. 97"

"Understanding finds nothing but itself when it seeks the essence behind the appearance of things. ‘It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain, which is to hide the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind there, as much in order that we may thereby see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.’ P. 111"

"We return to our analysis of qualities. Something preserves itself throughout this flux, something that passes into other things, but also stands against them as a being for itself. This something can exist only as the product of a process through which it integrates its otherness with its own proper being. Hegel says that its existence comes about through ‘the negation of the negation.’ The first negation is the otherness in which it turns, and the second is the incorporation of this other into its own self. Such a process presupposes that things possess a certain power over their movement, that they exist in a certain self-relation that enables them to ‘mediate’ their existential conditions. P. 132-133"

"Being is continuous becoming. P. 136"

"The real field of knowledge is not the given fact about things as they are, but the critical evaluation of them as a prelude to passing beyond their given form. Knowledge deals with appearances in order to get beyond them. …. The concept of reality has thus turned into the concept of possibility. The real is not yet ‘actual,’ but is at first only the possibility of an actual. P. 145"

"We have reached the point where the Objective Logic turns into the Subjective Logic, or, where subjectivity emerges as the true form of objectivity. We may sum up Hegel’s analysis in the following schema: The true form of reality requires freedom. Freedom requires self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth. Self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth are the essentials of the subject. The form of reality must be conceived as subject. P. 154-155"

"The absolute idea is the subject in its final form, thought. The otherness and negation is the object, being. The absolute idea now has to be interpreted as objective being. Hegel’s Logic thus ends where it began, with the category of being. This, however is a different being that can no longer be explained thought he concepts applied in the analysis that opened the Logic. For being now is understood in its notion that is, as a concrete totality wherein all particular forms subsist as the essential distinctions and relations of on comprehensive principle. Thus comprehended, being is nature, and dialectical thought passes on to the Philosophy of Nature. P. 165-166"

"The will is a unity of two different aspects or moments: first, the individual’s ability to abstract from every specific condition and, by negating it, to return to the absolute liberty of the pure ego; secondly, the individual’s act of freely adopting a concrete condition, freely affirming his existence as a particular, limited ego. P. 185"

"The free will, the actual motor of reason in society, necessarily creates wrong. The individual must clash with the social order that claims to represent his own will in its objective form. But the wrong and the ‘avenging justice’ that remedies it not only expresses a ‘higher logical necessity,’ but also prepare the transition to a higher social form of freedom, the transition from abstract right to morality. For, in committing a wrong, and in accepting punishment for his deed, the individual becomes conscious of the ‘infinite subjectivity’ of his freedom. He learns that he is free only as a private person. P. 198"

"The fault with Hegel lies much deeper than in his glorification of the Prussian monarchy. He is guilty not so much of being servile as of betraying his highest philosophical ideas. His political doctrine surrenders society to nature, freedom to necessity, reason to caprice. And in so doing, it mirrors the destiny of the social order that falls, while in pursuit of its freedom, into a state of nature far below reason. P. 218"

"The concept of freedom, as the Philosophy of Right has shown, follows the pattern of free ownership. As a result, the history of the world that Hegel looks out upon exalts and enshrines the history of the middle-class, which based itself on this pattern. There is a stark truth in Hegel’s strangely certain announcement that history has reached its end. But it announces the funeral of a class, not of history. P. 227"

"The transition from philosophy to the domain of state and society had been an intrinsic part of Hegel’s system. P. 251"

"The transition from Hegel to Marx is, in all respects, a transition to an essentially different order of truth, no to be interpreted in terms of philosophy. We shall see that all the philosophical concepts of Marxian theory are social and economic categories, whereas Hegel’s social and economic categories are all philosophical concepts. P. 258"

"Kierkegaard’s individualistic interpretation of ‘the negation of philosophy’ inevitably developed a fierce opposition to Western rationalism. …. According to Kierkegaard, the individual is not the knowing but only the ‘ethically existing subjectivity.’ The sole reality that matters to him is his own ‘ethical existence’. P. 263-264"

"Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276"

"Hegel’s philosophy revolved about the universality of reason; it was a rational system with its every part (the subjective as well as the objective spheres) integrated into a comprehensive whole. Marx shows that capitalist society first put such a universality into practice. P. 286-287"

"The guiding question of Marx’s analysis was, How does capitalist society supply its members with the necessary use-values? And the answer disclosed a process of blind necessity, chance, anarchy and frustration. The introduction of the category of use-value was the introduction of a forgotten factor, forgotten, that is, by the classical political economy which was occupied only with the phenomenon of exchange value. In the Marxian theory, this factor becomes an instrument that cuts through the mystifying reification of the commodity world. P. 304"

"When capitalism is negated, social processes no longer stand under the rule of blind natural laws. P. 318"

"Positive philosophy made its counter-attack against critical rationalism on two fronts. Comte fought against the French form of negative philosophy, against the heritage of Descartes and the Enlightenment. In Germany, the struggle was directed against Hegel’s system. Schelling received an express commission from Frederick William IV ‘to destroy the dragon seed’ of Hegelianism, while Stahl, another anti-Hegelian, became the philosophical spokesman of the Prussian monarchy in 1840. P. 326"

"Saint-Simon, like Hegel, begins with the assertion that the social order engendered by the French Revolution proved that mankind has reached the adult state. In contrast to Hegel, however, he described this stage primarily in terms of its economy; the industrial process was the sole integrating factor in the new social order. P. 330"

"‘Resignation’ is a keynote in Comte’s writings, deriving directly from assent to invariable social laws. ‘True resignation, that is, a disposition to endure necessary evils steadfastly and without any hope of compensation therefore, can result only from a profound feeling for the invariable laws that govern the variety of natural phenomena. P. 345"

"The revolution, Stahl declared, is the ‘world-historic mark of our age.’ It would found ‘the entire State on the will of man instead of on the commandment and ordinance of God.’ p. 364"

"Sociology does not ‘negate’ philosophy, in the sense of taking over the hidden content of philosophy and carrying it into social theory and practice, but sets itself up as a realm apart from philosophy, with a province and truth of its own. Comte is rightly held to be the inaugurator of this separation between philosophy and sociology. P. 375"

"Loren von Stein thus turned the dialectic into an ensemble of objective laws calling for social reform as the adequate solution of all contradictions and neutralized the critical elements of the dialectic. P. 388"

"Ever since the first World War, when the system of liberalism began to shape into the system of authoritarianism, a widespread opinion has blames Hegelianism for the ideological of the new system. P. 390"

"To those who hold abstractly to Hegel’s political philosophy, Hobhouse replies that the very fact of class society, the patent influence of class interests on the state, renders it impossible to designate the state as expressive of the real will of individuals as a whole. ‘Wherever a community is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class or race is permanently in the position of having to take what it can get.’ P. 396"

"An integral part of totalitarian control is the attack on critical and independent thought. The appeal to facts is substituted for the appeal to reason. No reason can sanction a regime that uses the greatest productive apparatus man has ever created in the interest of an increasing restriction on human satisfactions—no reason except the fact that the economic system can be retained in no other way. Just as the Fascist emphasis on action and change prevents the insight into necessity of rational courses of action and change, [[Giovanni Gentile|[Giovanni] Gentile]]’s deification of thinking prevents the liberation of thought from the shackles of ‘the given.’ P. 405"

"Gentile himself call his doctrine ‘absolute formalism’: there is no; ’matter’ apart from the pure ‘form’ of acting. ‘The only matter there is in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity.’ P. 407"

"Hegel’s philosophy was an integral part of the culture which authoritarianism had to overcome. It is therefore no accident that the National Socialist assault on Hegel begins with the repudiation of his political theory. P. 411"

"The total victimization of the individual that takes place is encouraged for the specific benefit of the industrial and political bureaucracy. It therefore cannot be justified on the ground of the individual’s true interest. National Socialist ideology simply states that true human existence consists in unconditional sacrifice, that it is of the essence of the individual’s life to abbey and to serve-‘service which never comes to an end because service and life coincide.’ P. 416"

"The social and political theory responsible for the development of Fascist Germany was, then, related to Hegelianism in a completely negative way. P. 418"

"Either one defines “personality” and “individuality” in terms of their possibilities within the established form of civilization, in which case their realization is for the vast majority tantamount to successful adjustment. Or one defines them in terms of their transcending content, including their socially denied potentialities beyond (and beneath) their actual existence; in this case, their realization would imply transgression, beyond the established form of civilization, to radically new modes of “personality” and “individuality” incompatible with the prevailing ones. Today, this would mean “curing” the patient to become a rebel or (which is saying the same thing) a martyr."

"By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests."

"the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."

"The intellectual is called on the carpet. ... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you."

"Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason."

"The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before—which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living."

"The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, … underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself."

"Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such “transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory."

"The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing. It is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress to the degree to which it is capable of “delivering the goods” on an increasingly large scale, and using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man."

"The category “society” itself expressed the acute conflict between the social and political sphere—society as antagonistic to the state. Similarly, “individual,” “class,” “private,” “family” denoted spheres and forces not yet integrated with the established conditions—spheres of tension and contradiction. With the growing integration of industrial society, these categories are losing their critical connotation, and tend to become descriptive, deceptive, or operational terms. An attempt to recapture the critical intent of these categories, and to understand how the intent was cancelled by the social reality, appears from the outset to be regression from a theory joined with historical practice to abstract, speculative thought: from the critique of political economy to philosophy. This ideological character of the critique results from the fact that the analysis is forced to proceed from a position “outside” the positive as well as negative, the productive as well as destructive tendencies in society."

"In which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs."

"The way in which a society organizes the life of its members … is one “project” of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole."

"If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own."

"All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own."

"Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual."

"The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control."

"We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, … the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced."

"In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go along” appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the “inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.” Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society."

"Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe."

"The radical empiricist onslaught … provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior."

"Outside the academic establishment, the “far-reaching change in all our habits of thought” is more serious. It serves to coordinate ideas and goals with those exacted by the prevailing system, to enclose them in the system, and to repel those which are irreconcilable with the system. The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet."

"Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself."

"Ascending modern rationalism, in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes' ego cogitans was to leave the “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and in preventing subversion. However, these accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the “great public bodies” and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation. from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives. With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back” of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. The “cunning of Reason” works, as it so often did, in the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on operational and behavioral concepts turns against the efforts to free thought and behavior from the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives."

"The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality."

"The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves."

"This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument."

"This mutual dependencies no longer the dialectical relationship between master and servant, which has been broken in the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses both the master and the servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?"

"Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth. Today's novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale."

"The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It."

"As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented, idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture. In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth."

"The higher culture of the West—whose moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values industrial society still professes—was a pre-technological culture in a functional as well as chronological sense. Its validity was derived from the experience of a world which no longer exists and which cannot be recaptured because it is in a strict sense invalidated by technological society. Moreover, it remained to a large degree a feudal culture, even when the bourgeois period gave it some of its most lasting formulations. It was feudal not only because of its confinement to privileged minorities, not only because of its inherent romantic element (which will be discussed presently), but also because its authentic works expressed a conscious, methodical alienation from the entire sphere of business and industry, and from its calculable and profitable order."

"While this bourgeois order found its rich—and even affirmative—representation in art and literature, … it remained an order which was over-shadowed, broken, refuted by another dimension which was irreconcilably antagonistic to the order of business, indicting it and denying it. And in the literature, this other dimension is represented not by the religious, spiritual, moral heroes (who often sustain the established order) but rather by such disruptive characters as the artist. the prostitute, the adulteress, the great criminal and outcast, the warrior, the rebel-poet, the devil, the fool—those who don't earn a living, at least not in an orderly and normal way. To be sure, these characters have not disappeared from the literature of advanced industrial society, but they … perform a function very different from and even contrary to that of their cultural predecessors. They are no longer images of another way of life but rather freaks or types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order."

"The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it"

"They [great works of literature] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. Some of these images pertain to contemporary literature and survive in its most advanced creations. What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content—their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture? The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a “higher” order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction—the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality."

"To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces."

"In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false."

"[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order."

"No matter how close and familiar the temple or cathedral were to the people who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevating contrast to the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan—and perhaps even to that of their masters. Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion. In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “high culture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience. Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs."

"The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth."

"Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity—remote from the society which suppressed them."

"Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics."

"The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization."

"Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning."

"Paul Valéry insists on the inescapable commitment of the poetic language to the negation. The verses of this language “ne parlent jamais que de choses absentes.” They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility—neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply “le bonheur.”"

"The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will."

"The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the “meaning” of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer."

"In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things—opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave."

"Society … can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens."

"A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure—which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body—has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the “universe” of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction."

"Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo—it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun."

"The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced—deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission."

"The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor."

"The happy consciousness is shaky enough—a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust."

"Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams—a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told—sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. … This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception."

"Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the “conquest of transcendence” achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail."

"The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification."

"When the whole is at stake, there is no crime except that of rejecting the whole, or not defending it. … Those who identify themselves with the whole, who are installed as the leaders and defenders of the whole can make mistakes, but they cannot do wrong—they are not guilty. They may become guilty again when this identification no longer holds, when they are gone."

"This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason."

"Is this fight against history part of the fight against a dimension of the mind in which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop—faculties and forces that might hinder the total coordination of the individual with the society? Remembrance of the Fast may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of “mediation” which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life again"

"If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to liquidate, as an “irrational rest,” the disturbing elements of Time and Memory, it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality contained in this irrational rest. Recognition and relation to the past as present counteracts the functionalization of thought by and in the established reality. It militates against the closing of the universe of discourse and behavior it renders possible the development of concepts which destabilize and transcend the closed universe by comprehending it as historical universe. Confronted with the given society as object of its reflection, critical thought becomes historical consciousness as such, it is essentially judgment. Far from necessitating an indifferent relativism, it searches in the real history of man for the criteria of truth and falsehood, progress and regression. The mediation of the past with the present discovers the factors which made the facts, which determined the war of life, which established the masters and the servants; it projects the limits and the alternatives. When this critical consciousness speaks, it speaks “le langage de la connaissance” (Roland Barthes) which breaks open a closed universe of discourse and its petrified structure. The key terms of this language are not hypnotic nouns which evoke endlessly the same frozen predicates. They rather allow of an open development; they even unfold their content in contradictory predicates. The Communist Manifesto provides a classical example. Here the two key terms, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, each “govern” contrary predicates. The “bourgeoisie” is the subject of technical progress, liberation, conquest of nature, creation of social wealth, and of the perversion and destruction of these achievements. Similarly, the "proletariat” carries the attributes of total oppression and of the total defeat of oppression. Such dialectical relation of opposites in and by the proposition is rendered possible by the recognition of the subject as an historical agent whose identity constitutes itself in and against its historical practice, in and against its social reality. The discourse develops and states the conflict between the thing and its function, and this conflict finds linguistic expression in sentences which join contradictory predicates in a logical unit—conceptual counterpart of the objective reality. In contrast to all Orwellian language, the contradiction is demonstrated, made explicit, explained, and denounced."

"The closed language does not demonstrate and explain—it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes “separation of good from evil;” it establishes unquestionable"

"This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood."

"Functional communication is only the outer layer of the one- dimensional universe in which man is trained to target—to translate the negative into the positive so that he can continue to function, reduced but fit and reasonably well. The institutions of free speech and freedom of thought do not hamper the mental coordination with the established reality. What is taking place is a sweeping redefinition of thought itself, of its function and content. The coordination of the individual with his society reaches into those layers of the mind where the very concepts are elaborated which are designed to comprehend the established reality. These concepts are taken from the intellectual tradition and translated into operational terms—a translation which has the effect of reducing the tension between thought and reality by weakening the negative power of thought."

"It is the sphere farthest removed from the concreteness of society which may show most clearly the extent of the conquest of thought by society."

"Operational analysis … cannot raise the decisive question whether the consent itself was not the work of manipulation—a question for which the actual state of affairs provides ample justification. The analysis cannot raise it because it would transcend its terms toward transitive meaning—toward a concept of democracy which would reveal the democratic election as a rather limited democratic process. Precisely such a non-operational concept is the one rejected by the authors as “unrealistic” because it defines democracy on too articulate a level as the clear-cut control of representation by the electorate—popular control as popular sovereignty."

"An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a “level of articulate opinion and ideology” which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as “unrealistic”—has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And—if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological."

"Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation—this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name—the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the “faithless faith” in the reality whose victims they are."

"The world of immediate experience—the world in which we find ourselves living—must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is."

"If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology."

"The philosopher … subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment — namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society."

"In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an “untrue” and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the “natural” function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. … Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid."

"For thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function — thus it depends on those who control these requirements."

"Who is, in the classical conception, the subject that comprehends the ontological condition of truth and untruth? It is the master of pure contemplation (theoria), and the master of a practice guided by theoria, i.e., the philosopher-statesman. To be sure, the truth which he knows and expounds is potentially accessible to everyone. Led by the philosopher, the slave in Plato’s Meno is capable of grasping the truth of a geometrical axiom, i.e., a truth beyond change and corruption. But since truth is a state of Being as well as of thought, and since the latter is the expression and manifestation of the former, access to truth remains mere potentiality as long as it is not living in and with the truth. And this mode of existence is closed to the slave — and to anyone who has to spend his life procuring the necessities of life. Consequently, if men no longer had to spend their lives in the realm of necessity, truth and a true human existence would be in a strict and real sense universal. Philosophy envisages the equality of man but, at the same time, it submits to the factual denial of equality. For in the given reality, procurement of the necessities is the life-long job of the majority, and the necessities have to be procured and served so that truth (which is freedom from material necessities) can be. Here, the historical barrier arrests and distorts the quest for truth; the societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition. If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group. This state of affairs contradicts the universal character of truth, which defines and “prescribes” not only a theoretical goal, but the best life of man qua man, with respect to the essence of man. For philosophy, the contradiction is insoluble, or else it does not appear as a contradiction because it is the structure of the slave or serf society which this philosophy does not transcend. Thus it leaves history behind, unmastered, and elevates truth safely above the historical reality. There, truth is reserved intact, not as an achievement of heaven or in heaven, but as an achievement of thought — intact because its very notion expresses the insight that those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence."

"The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project."

"In the Platonic dialectic, … the terms “Being” “Non-being” “Movement,” “the One and the Many” “Identity” and “Contradiction” are methodically kept open, ambiguous, not fully defined. They have an open horizon, an entire universe of meaning which is gradually structured in the process of communication itself, but which is never closed. The propositions are submitted, developed, and tested in a dialogue, in which the partner is led to question the normally unquestioned universe of experience and speech, and to enter a new dimension of discourse — otherwise he is free and the discourse is addressed to his freedom. He is supposed to go beyond that which is given to him — as the speaker, in his proposition, goes beyond the initial setting of the terms. These terms have many meanings because the conditions to which they refer have many sides, implications, and effects which cannot be insulated and stabilized."

"The subversive character of truth inflicts upon thought an imperative quality. Logic centers on judgments which are, as demonstrative propositions, imperatives, — the predicative “is” implies an “ought.” … Verification of the proposition involves a process in fact as well as in thought: (S) must become that which it is. The categorical statement thus turns into a categorical imperative; it does not state a fact but the necessity to bring about a fact. For example, it could be read as follows: man is not (in fact) free, endowed with inalienable rights, etc., but he ought to be."

"Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between “is” and “ought” first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being — its theory — intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative."

"Thought is led, by the situation of its objects, to measure their truth in terms of another logic, another universe of discourse. And this logic projects another mode of existence: the realization of the truth in the words and deeds of man. And inasmuch as this project involves man as societal animal,” the polis, the movement of thought has a political content. Thus, the Socratic discourse is political discourse inasmuch as it contradicts the established political institutions. The search for the correct definition, for the “concept” of virtue, justice, piety, and knowledge becomes a subversive undertaking, for the concept intends a new polis."

"Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not — in his mind — undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity."

"At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. … Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them."

"The supremacy of thought (consciousness) also pronounces the impotence of thought in an empirical world which philosophy transcends and corrects — in thought. The rationality in the name of which philosophy passed its judgments obtained that abstract and general purity” which made it immune against the world in which one had to live. With the exception of the materialistic “heretics,” philosophic thought was rarely afflicted by the afflictions of human existence. Paradoxically, it is precisely the critical intent in philosophic thought which leads to the idealistic purifications critical intent which aims at the empirical world as a whole, and not merely at certain modes of thinking or behaving within it. Defining its concepts in terms of potentialities which are of an essentially different order of thought and existence, the philosophic critique finds itself blocked by the reality from which it dissociates itself, and proceeds to construct a realm of Reason purged from empirical contingency. The two dimensions of thought — that of the essential and that of — the apparent truths — no longer interfere with each other, and their concrete dialectical relation becomes an abstract epistemological or ontological relation. The judgments passed on the given reality are replaced by propositions defining the general forms of thought, objects of thought, and relations between thought and its objects. The subject of thought becomes the pure and universal form of subjectivity, from which all particulars are removed."

"In [Aristotle’s] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion — but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular “substance.” This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order — in logic as well as in society — the price of universal control."

"By virtue of the universal concept, thought attains mastery over the particular cases. However, the most formalized universe of logic still refers to the most general structure of the given, experienced world; the pure form is still that of the content which it formalizes. The idea of formal logic itself is a historical event in the development of the mental and physical instruments for universal control and calculability. In this undertaking man had to create theoretical harmony out of actual discord, to purge thought from contradictions, to hypostatize identifiable and fungible units in the complex process of society and nature. Under the rule of formal logic, the notion of the conflict between essence and appearance is expendable if not meaningless; the material content is neutralized; the principle of identity is separated from the principle of contradiction (contradictions are the fault of incorrect thinking); final causes are removed from the logical order. Well defined in their scope and function, concepts become instruments of prediction and control. Formal logic is thus the first step on the long road to scientific thought"

"The methods of logical procedure are very different in ancient and modem logic, but behind all difference is the construction of a universally valid order of thought, neutral with respect to material content. Long before technological man and technological nature emerged as the objects of rational control and calculation, the mind was made susceptible to abstract generalization. Terms which could be organized into a coherent logical system, free from contradiction or with manageable contradiction, were separated from those which could not. Distinction was made between the universal, calculable, “objective” and the particular, incalculable, subjective dimension of thought."

"The contemporary mathematical and symbolic logic is certainly very different from its classical predecessor, but they share the radical opposition to dialectical logic. In terms of this opposition, the old and the new formal logic express the same mode of thought. it is purged from that “negative” which loomed so large at the origins of logic and of philosophic thought — the experience of the denying, deceptive, falsifying power of the established reality. And with the elimination of this experience, the conceptual effort to sustain the tension between “is” and “ought”, and to subvert the established universe of discourse in the name of its own truth is likewise eliminated from all thought which is to be objective, exact, and scientific. For the scientific subversion of the immediate experience which establishes the truth of science as against that of immediate experience does not develop the concepts which carry in themselves the protest and the refusal. The new scientific truth which they oppose to the accepted one does not contain in itself the judgment that condemns the established reality. … In contrast, dialectical thought is and remains unscientific to the extent to which it is such judgment."

"Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts — that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man."

"Reason … contradicts the established order of men and things on behalf of existing societal forces that reveal the irrational character of this order — for “rational” is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression."

"If dialectical logic understands contradiction as “necessity” belonging to the very “nature of thought,” … it does so because contradiction belongs to the very nature of the object of thought, to reality, where Reason is still Unreason, and the irrational still the rational. Conversely, all established reality militates against the logic of contradictions — it favors the modes of thought which sustain the established forms of life and the modes of behavior which reproduce and improve them. The given reality has its own logic and its own truth; the effort to comprehend them as such and to transcend them presupposes a different logic, a contradicting truth. They belong to modes of thought which are non-operational in their very structure; they are alien to scientific as well as common-sense operationalism. … These modes of thought appear to be a relic of the past, like all non-scientific and non-empirical philosophy. They recede before a more effective theory and practice of Reason."

"the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things” (on economic laws, the market etc.)."

"To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it."

"The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature."

"The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral."

"The liberating force of technology—the instrumentalization of things—turns into … the instrumentalization of man."

"The scientific abstraction from concreteness, the quantification of qualities which yield exactness as well as universal validity, involve a specific concrete experience of the Lebenswelt—a specific mode of “seeing” the world. And this “seeing,” in spite of its “pure,” disinterested character, is seeing within a purposive, practical context. It is anticipating (Voraussehen) and projecting (Vorhaben). Galilean science is the science of methodical, systematic anticipation and projection. But—and this is decisive—of a specific anticipation and projection—namely, that which experiences, comprehends, and shapes the world) in terms of calculable, predictable relationships among exactly identifiable units. In this project, universal quantifiability is a prerequisite for the domination of nature. Individual, non-quantifiable qualities stand in the way of an organization of men and things in accordance with the measurable power to be extracted from them. But this is a specific, socio-historical project, and the consciousness which undertakes this project is the hidden subject of Galilean science."

"Now precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt. It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality."

"It is the most advanced industrial society which feels most directly threatened by the rebellion, because it is here that the social necessity of repression and alienation, of servitude and heteronomy is most transparently unnecessary, and unproductive in terms of human progress. Therefore the cruelty and violence mobilized in the struggle against the threat, therefore the monotonous regularity with which the people are made familiar with, and accustomed to inhuman attitudes and behavior-to wholesale killing as patriotic act."

"Repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i.e., the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history is made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the great crusades against humanity (like that against the Albigensians) with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man."

"No, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap."

"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."

"Can the human appropriation of nature ever achieve the elimination of violence, cruelty, and brutality in the daily sacrifice of animal life for the physical reproduction of the human race? To treat nature "for its own sake" sounds good, but it is certainly not for the sake of the animal to be eaten, nor probably for the sake of the plant. The end of this war, the perfect peace in the animal world — this idea belongs to the Orphic myth, not to any conceivable historical reality. In the face of the suffering inflicted by man on man, it seems terribly "premature" to campaign for universal vegetarianism or synthetic foodstuffs; as the world is, priority must be on human solidarity among human beings. And yet, no free society is imaginable which does not, under its "regulative idea of reason," make the concerted effort to reduce consistently the suffering which man imposes on the animal world."

"Critical theory was sometimes teased for its aristocratic components, its disinclination to praise popular culture, jazz or Americanism, its sometimes overwhelming sense of cultural pessimism, and all these sentiments echo the larger and older traditions of aristocratic radicalism, for which the old world, in general, was better than the brashness and shock of the new. The European critique of modernity was born as a critique of the mass, mass society, mass production, mass migration, the mass man, the image of life based on the factory, on its regimentation and yesmen, the conformism of following orders. This was also Marcuse’s anxiety into the 1960s – that the lucid or erotic components of being had been submerged into dull regimes of compliance, consumption, and getting on. Perhaps this was the moment when sociology began to shifts its focus from the realm of production to that of consumption. Gramsci had already anticipated the cultural turn in marxian thirty years earlier. Marcuse was not the only high-profile critical theorist, though the fact that he remained in the USA after Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany placed him strategically to be more significantly influential into the 1960s. More, he wrote in jeremiad form, unlike the laconic and dense Adorno, anticipating, in this sense, the later popularity of Zygmunt Bauman, another critical Cassandra figure. The second generation of critical theory became associated especially with the work and figure of Jürgen Habermas, who turned back to the inspiration of Kantian universalism. Where Marcuse saw systemic closure and frustration, Habermas saw possibilities for change, reform, and democratization. His early work drew together Marxian and Weberian themes and filaments, again seeking a critical theory with a practical or emancipatory intention in the manner of Marx."

"I think that the influence of philosophy is a question of formulating, asking the kinds of questions that would otherwise be foreclosed. I suppose I can say that I learned a great deal from Herbert Marcuse about the relation between philosophy and ideology critique, political critique. His work, for example, Counterrevolution and Revolt, engages directly with the material conditions of the period, the late 1960s. But, at the same time, the framework is philosophical. The kinds of questions that are posed are those questions that otherwise would not be capable of formulation, and I think that is what I try to do. Because really it's not so much about the answers you discover, it's about the reach of the questions."

"His most accessible works-Reason and Revolution, One-Dimensional Man, and Eros and Civilization-synthesized the essence of the great nineteenth-century German thinkers-Hegel, Marx, and Freud. Every time I'd heard him speak at UCLA, Marcuse drew huge crowds and commanded rapt attention, speaking in a heavy German accent, somber and professorial...The San Diego authorities and the newly elected California governor, Ronald Reagan, did everything within legal limits to get Marcuse fired, and their terrorist kindred threatened his life and property. Marcuse never budged nor responded; he was a gift we may or may not have deserved."

"To understand the scope and significance of women's involvement in radical political movements, we must have some idea of the contradictions and patterns of this participation as they have appeared in the past. The struggle of other women to define ideology, translate feminist consciousness into practice, and scale major obstacles provides us with a historical base by which we can more accurately assess the current potential of feminist radicalism and understand the real portent of Herbert Marcuse's observation that the "Women's Liberation movement today is perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement we have""

"A couple of years later I was an Assistant Professor and read Critique of Pure Tolerance. I quite hated it. It espoused a doctrine of the objective truth of what are in fact simply personal opinions with emotive value but no fact value. I also read Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, which I also hated. I had lunch with Marcuse when he was lecturing in Cambridge, Ma. I quite liked Marcuse because his was capable of changing his mind, and was mentally vigorous at an advanced age (most of my colleagues ceased thinking beyond tenure). I told him that he and his critical studies comrades were true totalitarians. They hoped for a workers' revolution, after which they would be appointed Cultural Commisars by the Great Leader of the working class, and they would teach people what to think."

"Mr. Marcuse. . . . It’s the kind of Marxism which I dislike the most. It’s a combination of Marxism and Freudianism. I am equally opposed to both of the sources, and in its combined form I find it particularly repulsive."

"By 1968 there was another intellectual it seemed everybody wanted to quote: Marxist-Hegelian revisionist revolutionary Herbert Marcuse. His most appealing idea was what he called "the great refusal," the time to say "No, this is not acceptable"—another idea that was expressed in Savio's "odious machine" speech. Marcuse, a naturalized American citizen who had fled the Nazis, was on the faculty of Brandeis when Abbie Hoffman was a student there, and Hoffman was enormously influenced by him, especially by his book Eros and Civilization, which talked about guilt-free physical pleasure and learned about "false fathers, teachers, and heroes." The most talked about Marcuse book of the late sixties, One-Dimensional Man, was published in 1964. It denounced technological society as shallow and conformist and put into the carefully orchestrated discipline of German philosophy all of the sentiments of the 1950s James Dean-style rebels and the 1960s student revolutionaries. The New York Times called Marcuse "the most important philosopher alive." In 1968, at the age of seventy, Marcuse taught at San Diego State, where he could be seen fussing over his rust-colored cat and enjoying the hippos at the zoo, an avuncular white-haired figure whose impact was felt across the globe. The students who forced the University of Rome to close in March of that year carried a banner with three Ms that stood for Marx, Mao, and Marcuse."

"While more conventional thinkers insisted that technology would create more leisure time, Marcuse warned that it would instead imprison people in unoriginal lives devoid of creative thinking. He warned that the though technology appeared to to help the dissenter, it would actually be used to muffle protest. People were being anesthetized into a complacency that was mistaken for happiness. Goods and services were rendering mankind useless and incapable of real thought. There was an increase in media, but it espoused less and less variety of ideas. People in today's world who "surf" through eighty or more television stations, only to find less there than when they had only four choices, might be beginning to grasp Marcuse's vision for a technological age in which people think they have more choices but the choices lack significant differences. In an age of abundance, when technology has made individuals extraordinarily efficient, why do people spend even more time working, and why is so much work mindless instead of stimulating? One of the first Marxists to lose faith in the Soviet system, Marcuse saw the West as also in a state of "unfreedom" and often suggested that revolution may be the only path to true freedom. Marcuse, the aging professor, seemed to warm to the role of guru to the student radicals. He frequently discussed their movements. He warned Abbie Hoffman on "flower power" that "flowers have no power" other than the force of the people that cultivate them—one of the few occasions on which Hoffman had no reply. But as Marcuse freely admitted, many of the young rebels who talked about his ideas had never read him. His work is written in the German dialectic tradition. Marcuse achieved popularity without ever developing an accessible writing style. Luis Gonzalez de Alba, one of the student leaders in Mexico, described finally sitting down to read some Marcuse simply because President Gustavo Díaz Ordez had accused the movement of being influenced by the philosopher: "I opened One-Dimensional Man and got as far as page five. Eros and Civilization had been a terrible bore. And now I had to read another of Marcuse's books, all because Diaz Ordaz had happened to mention the 'philosophers of destruction.'""

"In his essay on Repressive Tolerance...Marcuse argues that the tolerance of the advanced industrial democracies is a deceit... Freedom of speech is not an overriding good, for to allow freedom of speech in the present society is to assist in the propagation of error, and "the telos of tolerance is truth." The truth is carried by the revolutionary minorities and their intellectual spokesmen, such as Marcuse, and the majority have to be liberated by being re-educated into the truth by this minority, who are entitled to suppress rival and harmful opinions. This is perhaps the most dangerous of all Marcuse's doctrines, for not only is what he asserts false, but his is a doctrine which if it were widely held would be an effective barrier to any rational progress and liberation... What, then, are the true connections between tolerance, rationality, and liberation? The telos of tolerance is not truth but rationality. Certainly we value rationality because it is by rational methods that we discover truth; but a man may be rational who holds many false beliefs, and a man may have true beliefs and yet be irrational. What is crucial is that the former has the possibility of progressing toward truth, while the second not only has no grounds for asserting what he believes, even though it is true, but is continually liable to acquire false beliefs. What is it to be rational? It is a necessary condition of rationality that a man shall formulate his beliefs in such a way that it is clear what evidence would be evidence against them and that he shall lay himself open to criticism and refutation in the light of any possible extreme. But to foreclose on tolerance is precisely to cut oneself off from such criticism and refutation. It is to gravely endanger one’s own rationality by not admitting one's own fallibility."

"Another veteran communist calling for the revision of conventional contemporary Marxism was Herbert Marcuse. After emigrating from Nazi Germany in 1933, he took American citizenship and wrote prolifically about the need to graft several intellectual trends of the twentieth century – especially Freudianism and German sociology – on to the tree of the Marxist tradition. Marcuse rejected Stalin’s version of communism as dogmatic, narrow and plain wrong in its interpretation of Marx. He was a freer spirit than Lukács and refused to recognise Lenin as an absolute authority. He insisted that sexual drives as well as economic imperatives help to explain the mechanisms of politics and society. He scorned the Communist Party of the USA and refused to align himself with any organisation. His experiences as a young militant in Europe had eroded his faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class. Marcuse saw well-paid industrial workers as constituting one of the obstacles to humanity’s liberation from oppression. Based on the San Diego campus of the University of California, he counted instead upon the unemployed, the vagabond poor and the Hispanic immigrants; he also had a soft spot for college students. He regarded these groups as living in detachment from ‘bourgeois’ society and ready to overcome the ‘one-dimensional’ aspects of contemporary capitalist existence. Marcuse’s forte was as a philosopher. His preoccupation with epistemology and dialectics was typical of a growing trend among Marxist writers seeking to challenge the Marxism that had been customary since 1917."

"Marcuse, Sartre, Colletti and Althusser were style-maestros of turgidity and never tried to rise to the flights of Marx and Engels in their inspired moments. Not one of them would choose a monosyllable if a longer word could be discovered or devised. Their Marxism, if not exactly pessimistic, was cramped and cautious. What is more, they were philosophers writing mainly for other philosophers. Only Marcuse became a genuine favourite of the thousands of students who rebelled in 1968 against ‘bourgeois society’ and university discipline, as well as the American war in Vietnam. He and his ideas were accorded a profile in Playboy magazine. (It is hard to imagine another Marxist theorist, except perhaps Marx himself, tolerating this without complaint.) Marcuse had grown popular because of the significance he attached to the students; it also did him no harm that he was willing to discuss the erotic as well as the socio-political."

"When I heard that Herbert Marcuse had died, I immediately thought, "The same year as John Wayne." For people like me Marcuse was something of a star, a presence, a symbol of certain values. I felt connected to him, though not in any simple I discovered his books at a time when I was groping toward a radicalism that would make sense of my experience as a middle-class American. Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man excited me because they were about problems I was struggling with the relation of psychology to politics, the idea of a cultural revolution, the prospects for radical change in a society where most people had enough to eat. Still, my copies of the books are filled with comments like "European elitism" and "glib" and "what bullshit!" As my politics matured, I found that I disagreed with most of what Marcuse said and hated what the new left made of his ideas. In some ways I defined my political outlook in reaction to Marcuse's, an acknowledgment that he'd made certain territory his own. In his monolithically bleak view of advanced capitalism and his contempt for American workers' enjoyment of their material gains, Marcuse was hardly distinguishable from conservative critics of mass culture…The Times quotes Marcuse wistfully referring to the "heroic period" of "the hippies and yippies." I wonder if he understood how thoroughly his heroes' values were rooted in mass culture. What did he think it meant when the Yippies got the Chicago police and the news media to cooperate in bringing revolutionary theater to millions? But then, he may have been more appreciative of such ironies than I tend to assume."

"Adorno, Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School were explicit about the link between “antifascism,” which was the banner they sported, and sympathy for Communist governments. Like Sartre and his collaborators at Les Temps Modernes, the Critical Theorists considered anti-Communist attitudes proof positive of fascist residues in those who expressed them. After the publication of The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, Adorno was shocked by a suggestion from one of his coworkers, Seymour Martin Lipset, that the psychic grid they had applied to right-wingers might work for left-wing extremists equally well."

"The psychological basis for the use of nonviolent methods is the simple rule that like produces like, kindness provokes kindness, as surely as injustice produces resentment and evil. It is sometimes forgotten by those whose pacifism is a spurious, namby-pamby thing that if one Biblical statement of this rule is "Do good to them that hate you" (an exhortation presumably intended for the capitalist as well as for the laborer), another statement of the same rule is, "They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind." You get from the universe what you give, with interest! What if men build a system on violence and injustice, on not doing good to those who hate them nor even to those who meekly obey and toil for them? And persist in this course through centuries of Christian history? And if, then, the oppressed raise the chant:"

"Educational enterprises do not for any length of time remain immune from the struggle of interests for power which is the dominant feature of social life under a class system."

"We belong to the Society of Friends, a community of love, a family of persons. In so far as we are not just another “denomination,” we know also that the salvation of our age is in our keeping; that is, that it lies in the divine-human society which is "rooted and grounded in love." This is the unity which alone can make one world out of "one world", and not one nightmare, one hell, one burned-out cinder. We know also and in a way we respond to the fact that we have a mission, we are "called to be saints"."

"It is said that if the United States were to stop shooting and withdraw its troops from Vietnam, the Viet Cong would then stage a great purge of the people who we have been seeking to protect — have pledged to protect. First of all, so far they have been getting precious little protection from us. The Vietnamese people as human individuals have been shot at by the French, by us, by Communists, by guerrillas for years. Maybe, if only somebody would stop shooting at them that would be something to the good."

"There is no way to peace; peace is the way."

"There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force."

"We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life. Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society."

"[Their foremost task] … is to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil — material and spiritual — this entails for the masses of men throughout the world.... So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression."

"Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure — more, doubtless, by life than by words — to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved."

"In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist."

"[He made] remarkable effort to show that pacifism was by no means passivism and that there could be such a thing as a non-violent social revolution."

"There are two themes that ran through A.J. Muste's life so clearly and marked his own actions so decisively, that the conflict between them became a dialectic, never resolved. One theme was peace, nonviolence, profound reverence for life. The other theme was social justice. To respect life meant to struggle to achieve social justice, yet the struggle for social justice invariably disturbed the peace and risked the nonviolence so central to A.J. The life-destroying institutions of injustice which A.J. saw around him were intolerable--yet violent social change was also intolerable. It was this "dialectic" which led him into the Marxist-Leninist movement and then back into the religious pacifist movement. Those who worked most closely with him are convinced that he was never fully able to leave behind his Christian mysticism when he was a Marxist-Leninist, and that on his return to the Church he brought with him much of his Marxism. No authentic honor can be done to the memory of the man and his life if we select one theme and ignore the other. Few people have been so deeply committed at the same time both to peace and to social justice, so fully aware of the difficulty of reconciling these two demands, and so intent on making that effort."

"I came to realize that exaggerated concern about what others are doing can be foolish. It can paralyze effort, and stifle a good idea. One finds that in the history of science almost every problem has been worked out by someone else. This should not discourage anyone from pursuing his own path."

"Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."

"A scientist studies what is, whereas an engineer creates what never was."

"[The neurotic] feels caught in a cellar with many doors, and whichever door he opens leads only into new darkness. And all the time he knows that others are walking outside in sunshine. I do not believe that one can understand any severe neurosis without recognizing the paralyzing hopelessness which it contains. … It may be difficult then to see that behind all the odd vanities, demands, hostilities, there is a human being who suffers, who feels forever excluded from all that makes life desirable, who knows that even if he gets what he wants he cannot enjoy it. When one recognizes the existence of all this hopelessness it should not be difficult to understand what appears to be an excessive aggressiveness or even meanness, unexplainable by the particular situation. A person so shut out from every possibility of happiness would have to be a veritable angel if he did not feel hatred toward a world he cannot belong to."

"Taking again as an example the need to appear perfect, I would be interested primarily in understanding what this trend accomplishes for the individual (eliminating conflicts with others and making him feel superior to others), and also what consequences the trend has on his character and his life. The latter investigation would make it possible to understand, for example, how such a person anxiously conforms with expectations and standards to the extent of becoming a mere automaton, and yet subversively defies them; how this double play results in listlessness and inertia; how he is proud of his apparent independence, yet actually is entirely dependent on the expectations and opinions of others; how he is terrified lest anyone should discover the flimsiness of his moral strivings and the duplicity which has pervaded his life; how this in turn has made him seclusive and hypersensitive to criticism."

"Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist... The therapy effected by life itself is not, however, within one's control. Neither hardships nor friendships nor religious experience can be arranged to meet the needs of the particular individual. Life as a therapist is ruthless; circumstances that are helpful to one neurotic may entirely crush another."

"Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning."

"It is amazing how obtuse otherwise intelligent patients can become when it is a matter of seeing the inevitability of cause and effect in psychic matters. I am thinking of rather self-evident connections such as these: if we want to achieve something, we must put in work; if we want to become independent, we must strive toward assuming responsibility for ourselves. Or: so long as we are arrogant, we will be vulnerable. Or: so long as we do not love ourselves, we cannot possibly believe that others love us, and must by necessity be suspicious toward any assertion of love. Patients presented with such sequences of cause and effect may start to argue, to become befogged or evasive."

"Through the eclipse of large areas of the self," says Karen Horney in Our Inner Conflicts, "by repression and inhibition as well as by idealization and externalization, the individual loses sight of himself; he feels, if he does not actually become, like a shadow without weight and substance."

"If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none; And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door."

"What to my Saviour shall I give Who freely hath done this for me? I'll serve him here whilst I shall live And Loue him to Eternity"

"A Spring returns, and they more youthful made; But Man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid."

""Sister," quoth Flesh, "what liv'st thou on Nothing but Meditation?"

"Such cold mean flowers the spring puts forth betime, Before the sun hath thoroughly heat the clime."

"Leave not thy nest, thy dam and sire, Fly back and sing amidst this choir."

"If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me ye women if you can."

"The principal might yield a greater sum, Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb;"

"Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending."

"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish."

"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

"Fire hath its force abated by water, not by wind; and anger must be allayed by cold words, and not by blustering threats."

"Anne Bradstreet wrote seven thousand lines of verse and most of it is derivative, unremarkable, sometimes even soporific, although her best is very good indeed; and her real achievements in poetry have not been duly recognized for almost three hundred years. But in greatness of spirit, generosity of outlook, love for learning as a path toward truth; in their quick responsive delight in the everyday wonder of the world and their deeply devout faith in the goodness of God, Anne Bradstreet and Juana Inés de la Cruz-the one a Puritan, the other a Roman Catholic-were very close akin. Remarking upon the brevity of human life, Anne Bradstreet wrote, "And though thus short, we shorten many ways, / Living so little while we are alive"; and Sor Juana said, "Angels are higher than men because they understand more.""

"Anne Bradstreet's sweet-tempered moderation can be read as ironic or conformist, but the significant fact is that she persisted all her life in working and publishing as a poet. At what cost to herself and her art can only be surmised. As Adrienne Rich observed: "To have written poems, the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of wilderness, was to have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.""

"This is an industry, it's a business. We exist to make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The programming that is put on between those commercials is simply the bait we put in the mousetrap."

"I’m terribly concerned that when you talk about the New York Times these days, when you talk about The Washington Post these days, we’re not talking about the New York Times of 50 years ago. We are not talking about the Washington Post of 50 years ago. We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States. We have things appearing on the front page of the New York Times—right now that would never have appeared 50 years ago—analysis, commentary—on the front page."

"The [NYT] Times is absolutely committed to making sure that this guy does not get elected. So his perception that the establishment press is out to get him doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done. It is. But the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco, he’s not mistaken in that perception, and he’s not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, described themselves as belonging to the Resistance. What does that mean? That’s not said by people who consider themselves reporters, objective reporters of facts. That’s the kind of language that’s used by people who genuinely believe, and I rather suspect with some justification, that Donald Trump is bad for the United States, and they’re betting that the sooner he’s out of office, the better they will like it. Whether that happens by virtue of indictment, impeachment or election, we’ll see… We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were."

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."

"Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal."

"Are there quantitative aspects to the phenomena of war that can be counted? Evidently!"

"The resort to human flesh, often after months of ever-increasing hunger pangs, appeared to be an animallike reaction without painful emotional overtones."

"Either the conscious intellect is impotent, or is not sufficiently strong, or is not the factor positively connected with altruistic phenomenon generally or their sublime form particularly."

"[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe."

"The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; its depth is unfathomable, its end not yet in sight, and the whole of the Western society is involved in it. It is the crisis of a Sensate culture, now in its overripe stage, the culture that has dominated the Western World during the last five centuries. It is also the crisis of a contractual (capitalistic) society associated with it. In this sense we are experiencing one of the sharpest turns in the historical road."

"Man is a conscious, rational thinker and a supra-conscious creator genius."

"Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love."

"Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous treasure in the world."

"Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe."

"Pitirim A. Sorokin was born in 1889 in Komi (province in Northern Russia) into a peasant family. During his early childhood he traveled with his father and two brothers earning their living by remodeling and painting rural churches. His strong interest in education, combined with a natural talent and work ethic, soon transformed him into a leading Russian social scientist and famous politician who was at the center of the Russian Revolution in 1917. In 1923, after his banishment by the Bolsheviks, Pitirim Sorokin started a new life in the United States. In less than 10 years the Russian émigré became a world-renowned sociologist and the founder of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Over 30 major books were published over a period of 50 years of active intellectual life. His ideas attracted the attention of Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer, Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy, political activists and yoga followers, military and peace proponents. At the time of his death in 1968 Pitirim Sorokin was one of the leading thinkers of the 20th century."

"Even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet. In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. And it would be a crime against Nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were presumably designed in the first place, and which the gravest statesmen and the hoarsest politicians hope to make available to all men in the end: I mean the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to sit under trees, to read, to hit a ball and bounce the baby."

"In life no such colour brightened the grey picture of a man devoted to the daily study of warfare on several continents with all the ardour of a certified public accountant."

"Some people say we are on the verge of the Second Civil War. And it may be so. But even on the darkest days, cheerfulness kept breaking in. I am not by nature a 'Whither America?' man."

"All Presidents start out pretending to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely, the presidency."

"LSD ... is one of the company of drugs now known as hallucinogens, and there is no doubt that in some people it produces exquisite visions. The big question is whether they are of the outer or inner world, whether in fact they heighten or deepen reality or fool the taker into believing that the kind of vision a madman sees is the real world that convention, habit, or sheer blunting of instinct hide from him."

"To the goggling unbeliever Texans say — as people always say about their mangier dishes — "but it's just like chicken, only tenderer." Rattlesnake is, in fact, just like chicken, only tougher."

"Probably, I wound up—if not as a jack-of-all-trades—at best as a thirdrate polymath never able to focus these curiosities into a commanding “view of life.” The most practical solution appeared to be to make a profession of observation, to become a reporter simply, a profession easily damned as that of a fence-sitter, a moral coward unwilling to take a stand, a chronic water-treader who lacks the strength to take the plunge. To these strictures, I can only reply that once every four years at least I take a stand: I vote. And immediately afterward return to my reporting habits and the continuing discovery that in life the range of irreconcilable points of view, characters, flaws, idiosyncrasies and virtues is astounding, and that in politics there is very often much to be said on both sides, and sometimes on three or four."

"During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers; from Estes Kefauver amid the snows of New Hampshire to Jack Nicklaus amid the azaleas of Augusta, Georgia; from Henry Kaiser's Liberty ships to Francis Chichester's Gypsy Moth sailing into Staten Island at one in the morning; from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood; from Senator Joseph McCarthy's last stand to the massacre of Muhammad Ali by Joe Frazier."

"(The Negro) is a permanent invalid in American society. And the places he lives, whether in the town or the country, are its casualty wards. (p. 146.)"

"One hundred years after the Declaration that 'all men are created equal,' there began to gather in Newport a colony of the rich, determined to show that some Americans were conspicuously more equal than others."

"(Las Vegas) composes a night-time image of Babylon in the desert. But it is Everyman's cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution. It says: 'Topless Pizza Lunch.' (p. 280)"

"He was at his best only when the going was good."

"He measured all his fellow workers by the test of professionalism, and a professional is a man who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it."

"Moving among wretched people in mean places, as I often saw him do, he had the impulses of a saint but not the serenity."

"Cooke is a nuisance. He telephones his copy at the last moment, so that everything else has to be dropped to get it into the paper. He says that he will be in Chicago and turns up in Los Angeles. He discards the agreed subject to write about something which has taken his fancy, news of the moment or not. But we think he’s worth it, and we love him just the same."

"Disloyalty in trusted servants is one of the most disheartening things that can happen to a public performer. But it must not be thought that I say this out of personal experience: for in the many years that I have been before the public my secret methods have been steadily shielded by the strict integrity of my assistants, most of whom have been with me for years. Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter. But then, so far as I know, I am the only performer who ever pledged his assistant to secrecy, honor and allegiance under a notarial oath."

"Rosabelle — answer — tell — pray, answer — look — tell — answer, answer — tell."

"I'm tired of fighting, Dash. I guess this thing is going to get me."

"I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death. That's what attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the 'human fly' who scales the walls of the same building."

"Rosabel believe Not even eternity Can hold Houdini!"

"The effects produced at some of Houdini's "seances" were brilliant, and had he claimed the possession of genuine psychic powers he would have made a fortune."

"He had the essential masculine quality of courage to a supreme degree. Nobody has ever done and nobody in all human probability will ever do such reckless feats of daring. His whole life was one long succession of them."

"Houdini, the great transitional figure between "magical" acts and ingenious tricks, was at pains to explain that everything he did was a trick; he offered rewards, never collected, for any "supernatural" act he could not explain. The Amazing Randi carries on in the same tradition, bending spoons as easily as Uri Geller. And yet in Houdini's time, there were those who insisted he was doing real magic; how else could his effects be achieved? Daniel Mark Epstein wrote about the Houdini believers in a 1986 issue of the New Criterion, which I read as I read everything I can get my hands on about Houdini. The thing was, Houdini really did free himself from those fetters and chains and sealed trunks dropped into the river, and survived the Chinese Water Torture (an effect used prominently in The Prestige night after night). But there were those who argued his tricks were physically impossible, and thus must be supernatural."

"People either didn't believe Houdini when he said that his tricks on film were real, or they didn't care. Illusion became big bigness, and the magicians were out of work."

"I'm not here for long, catch me or I go Houdini."

"As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens."

"The first time I fired up a car, felt the engine shudder and the wheel come to life in my hands, I was hooked. It was a feeling I can't describe. I still get it every time I get into a race car."

"Of course now that I am retired I see it from a totally different perspective, the bad days just don't look so bad to me, and I try to share that with Michael."

"When you are losing it can seem like there is a black cloud following you around, but like they say there is a silver lining in every cloud."

"The visas came through in 1955, when I was 15. That June, we sailed for New York aboard the Conte Biancamano. When we passed the Statue of Liberty, Anna Maria [my sister] tried to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner"."

"Getting down to brass tacks, how in the Hell are you going to explain general American n- 'I' except genetically? It's disturbing, I know, but (more) non-committal conservatism is only dodging, after all, isn't it? Great simplifications are in store for us. … It seems to me that only now that is American linguistics becoming really interesting, at least in its ethnological bearings."

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."

"Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal."

"It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language. Any concept, whether or not it forms part of the system of grammatical categories, can be conveyed in any language. If a notion is lacking in a given series, it implies a different configuration and not a lack of expressive power."

"Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak."

"Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols."

"Fashion is custom in the guise of departure from custom."

"Human beings do not wish to be modest; they want to be as expressive — that is, as immodest — as fear allows; fashion helps them solve that paradoxical problem."

"Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm."

"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes."

"Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs. I was the first composer to explore, so to speak, musical outer space."

"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena. As a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather...So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture — without frills or unnecessary decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a very early stage."

"There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is a consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals."

"Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word Race has a fair claim to being the most common, the most ambiguous, and the most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are everywhere spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what Race means."

"In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, race was already a weapon in the struggle between absolutism, aristocracy, and the middle class. The warfare spread to the arts and philosophy in the nineteenth century, by which time independent shoots in other cultures had also borne fruit, leaving the grand harvesting on a world-wide scale to our generation.Viewed in the light of such facts, the race question appears a much bigger affair than a trumped-up excuse for local persecution. It becomes rather a mode of thought endemic in Western civilization. It defaces every type of mental activity — history, art, politics, science and social reform."

"The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve."

"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."

"If they [students] leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity."

"A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements."

"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game — and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams."

"Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught."

"The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art."

"We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct — magnanimity, in short — does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches."

"History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction."

"When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority."

"My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more."

"The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing an alien, as blank as a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself. Otherwise, with the unstoppable march of specialization, the individual mind is doomed to solitude and the individual heart to drying up."

"The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it."

"Everybody keeps calling for Excellence — excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic."

"When nothing is revered, irreverence ceases to indicate critical thought."

"He [Allen Ginsberg] sent me a letter from India, where I think he got a fellowship to spend a year or so. He sent me a letter that read, I've just met a wonderful guru who can read minds. "I want you to" — Allen had a way of saying "I want you to do this, I want you to do that" — "I want you to get him a position in the Philosophy Department." I wrote back, "Dear Allen, the members of the Philosophy Department want nothing so little as to have their minds read.""

"Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual."

"I have always been — I think any student of history almost inevitably is — a cheerful pessimist."

"Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing."

"Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose."

"Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought — certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight."

"Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion — to say nothing of the shape of his sentences — are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness."

"Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right."

"Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being."

"Shaw's emotional development was one with his intellectual strength. His path led him into the thick of the scrimmage, where more spontaneous natures defend themselves with the usual weapons of malice, humility, bad temper or conceit. But Shaw used the death ray of imperturbability. His feelings were never hurt, his envy never aroused, his conceit was a transparent fiction, he never quarreled."

"No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw."

"Like Nietzsche, he rails at romanticism, but it is evident that what they both mean by the word is the clichés of second-hand romance. Historic romanticism is in fact the ground-work of their philosophy."

"He never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment … His eclecticism saving him from the cycle of hope-disillusion-despair, his highest effectiveness was as a skirmisher in the daily battle for light and justice, as a critic of new doctrine and a refurbisher of old, as a voice of warning and encouragement. That his action has not been in vain, we can measure by how little Shaw's iconoclasm stirs our blood; we no longer remember what he destroyed that was blocking our view."

"For Shaw as for Goethe, the obligation to strive is a primary feeling: reason initiates nothing and would stop everything. Its use is to come after the fact and devise helpful justification of action. Culture, humaneness, spiritual grace, are not forced upon us by logic: they either are self-evident or pointless. There is, Shaw reminds us, no argument in behalf of moral conduct which would not equally well support immoral. But it is clearly impossible (and immoral) to exact moral conduct, cultivation, and grace from those whom circumstances force to lead sub-human lives. Therefore society must be reformed."

"On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time."

"Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals. But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is attributed to "technical problems" in the subject. Since William James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the contamination of general use."

"Scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometric mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not "discourse about," nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship."

"Criticism will need an injection of humility — that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system."

"We seem to live mainly in order to see how we live, and this habit brings on what might be called the externalizing of knowledge; with every new manual there is less need for its internal, visceral presence. The owner or user feels confident that he possesses its contents — there they are, in handy form on the handy shelf. And with their imminent transfer to a computer, that sense of possession will presumably attach itself to the hard disk or the phone number of the data bank. To say this is also to say that the age of ready reference is one in which knowledge inevitably declines into information. The master of so much packaged stuff has less need to grasp context or meaning than his forbears: he can always look it up. His active memory is otherwise engaged anyway, full of the arbitrary names, initials, and code figures essential to carrying on daily life. He can be vague about the rest: he can always check it out."

"On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues."

"Can an idea — a notion as abstract as Relativism — produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism."

"The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers."

"Being law-abiding means filing a paper on time, not parking near a hydrant, and getting a zoning variance before moving a fence on one's own property. A world continually tighter in these ways intensifies the search for loopholes, tempts the unscrupulous to invent them, hardens the cynic, and keeps alive the urge to break loose. Such pulses of thought and feeling are bound to take away the ease and pleasure of ethical conduct. Habitual morality is baffled by the stop-and-go, and people's disregard of injunctions causes no surprise; it seems rather to show firmness of mind."

"A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us."

"The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by "buffs" and "fans" of all species—the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts—if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor."

"The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist."

"The only political ism surviving in full strength from the past is nationalism. This was partly to be expected from the liberation of so many colonies simultaneously, beginning in the 1920s. But this nationalism differs from the old in two remarkable ways: it is not patriotic and it does not want to absorb and assimilate. On the contrary, it wants to shrink and secede, to limit its control to its one small group of like-minded-we-ourselves-alone. It is in that sense racist, particularist, sectarian, minority-inspired."

"My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity--intuition and compassion and tenderness--and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved."

"Oh, I think it was like when, you know, Cupid throws an arrow and hits you. First, there was this Mexican band, dressed up with bows and arrows. They were playing some funky weird music,, I didn't know it yet, but it was like Lee Perry, George Clinton, and Sun Ra mixed up, Mexican funky."

"Blues was my first love. It was the first thing where I said "Oh man, this is the stuff." It just sounded so raw and honest, gut-bucket honest. From then I started rebelling."

"Shi'ism is a religion of doing nothing. It can never succeed without doing nothing. When it succeeds, Shi'ism is still nothing. In the Islamic context at large, it partakes in the masculinism of its transcendental deity and in the Iranian context in particular it exacerbates itself by partaking in monarchical masculinity."

"The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity."

"While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism…in order to match, balance and thus authenticate ‘Western Civilization’."

"'Islam and globanalisation', or giving European and American space to Muslim names to denounce their own Islamic phantasms, is a new phase in the social manufacturing of domination -- using nominal Muslims against Islamic abstractions. This -- pitting lapsed Muslims against Islamic sensibilities -- is ultimately an exercise in futility. The fate of the globe, Europe included, is written elsewhere, somewhere between the lines of massive labour migration, on one side, and the global reconfiguration of the capital that systematically seeks to abuse it, on the other. The culture war this has occasioned in the meantime is a murderous nightmare for many, a lucrative pastime for some, a headache for others, and yet at the end an entirely negligible footnote to history."

"The link between Betty Mahmoody’s “Not Without My Daughter” and Azar Nafisi’s [Reading Lolita in Tehran] is the link between two phases and modes of labor migration, the moral salvation that “the West” provides, and imperial hubris. What is paramount in all of these is the denigration of local cultures as the site of actual or potential resistance to imperial domination. There cannot be any politics of resistance, aesthetics of emancipation, or prose and poetry of agential autonomy in history for people around the world—nothing except a Starbucks Coffee version of the so-called “Western classics” to go and save them. Interview with Znet."

"Otherwise lacking internal support or external legitimacy, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire. All this to momentarily manufacture consent, to secure a selective memory, and to sustain a far more enduring collective amnesia that may perhaps serve immediate US imperial purposes well, but will ipso facto sustain its self-destructive force of building fictive sand castles near the factual waves of history. This empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today. Native informers and the making of the American empire."

"People often repeat the fallacy that "film is a passive medium". The statement is usually elaborated like this: "When I read a story in a book, I have to use my imagination to conjure up what the characters look like, the sound of their voices, the appearance of their surroundings, the house, the landscape. When I see a movie, those things are all nailed down for me, so I don't feel as involved." What the person is describing are the most obvious aspects of a given story, that is, its physical properties. They are, in fact, the least interesting and least important components of a story. I do not read books in order to imagine the physical appearance of things."

"A good film is one that requires the viewer to create, through an orchestration of impressions, the meaning of its events. It is, in the end, our ability to create meaning out of the raw experience of life that makes us human. It is the exercise of our faculty to discover meaning which is the purpose of art. The didactic imparting of moral or political messages is emphatically not the purpose of art -- that is what we call propaganda."

"Regarding the doll in the Purge, since it's one of my favorite moments in the series: The Custodians are the physical embodiment of a very vaporous notion -- human conscience. Does conscience really exist, or is it just a way of convincing ourselves that a center for moral judgment resides within us, thus lending our judgments a natural authority? As always, Trevor prefers to provide a tangible solution. He can't tolerate uncertainty. Whether it is real or not, Trevor understands the usefulness of the belief in conscience as a tool for practical ends, the improvement of society. In the end, the doll which emerges from the Custodian reveals to us that Trevor's artificial conscience, like the classical notion, is no more than a flimsy gimmick, a parlor trick, a plaything of the mind powered by a circular process. (Advocating the existence of conscience usually involves an appeal to our conscience). Notice that Trevor himself winds up the toy while in the train earlier in the episode."

"For a viewer to think the custodian was trying to break free is the exact opposite of what the scene was supposed to convey. There is nothing gained from that kind of ambiguity. Ambiguity is not desirable or meaningful if it confuses an issue that is meant to be clear. This is the challenge of making a film that communicates but doesn't talk down: a lot of viewers and studio execs (and directors) hold that ANY ambiguity is the result of the filmmaker's failure. I disagree, but I also hold that, in order for ambiguity to be effective, certain things NEED to be unambiguous. For example, if it wasn't clear that Judy on the stage is the same character as Judy who'd invited Aeon to the Hostess' lair, then that's just bad execution. If the episode had been finished and seen in a version say, where we don't see her face drawn correctly, and viewers weren't sure it was the same character, they may wonder about things irrelevant to the story's themes, such as "do the custodians alter the appearance of their hosts", or "Trevor is masquerading a different person who is playing the role of Judy on the stage", etc, all of which does not help the story. Thinking that the custodian had a will of its own and wanted to break free is the same type of undesired speculation."

"It's a universal tendency in films to be more about sex and violence than the real world is, but I would pose the opposite question: Why are so many characters that you see on TV so desexualized? A lot of them seem to be completely asexual — especially animated characters — and it implies that those characters are normal. The characters in Aeon Flux are normal people who have normal sex lives and appetites."

"I'm not concerned with body building; I'm just trying to make people normal human beings."

"Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness. Our interpretation of physical fitness is the attainment and maintenance of a uniformly developed body with a sound mind fully capable of naturally, easily, and satisfactorily performing our many and varied daily tasks with spontaneous zest and pleasure."

"The acquirement and enjoyment of physical well-being, mental calm and spiritual peace are priceless to their possessors if there be any such so fortunate living among us today. However, it is the ideal to strive for, and in our opinion, it is only through Contrology that this unique trinity of a balanced body, mind, and spirit can ever be attained."

"It's very dangerous, a British person saying "I felt ownership of this country". Historically, does not go well. It's amazing! I just went to India and I felt like I belonged."

"I would say, what is more quintessentially America than coming to a country you don't belong in and deciding you're going to stay?"

"Thanks very much for taking this magical moment and reminding me that joy is ephemeral, pain is forever."

"The deeper you look into these stories, the more flawed you realize things are, systemically. But the more you encounter people work incredibly hard to change things. Like clockwork, at some point during a story, I go into Tim [Carvell]'s office, who I... run the show with, and we'll say "Burn it down. Just burn everything to the ground." 'Cause it feels like things are so bad in a story, only flames are going to purify the hell that we've built for ourselves. But you do then work through that, much like this shitty hot sauce, to realizing that, in lieu of-— even as you're waiting for major change that you think might not come, incremental change is possible, and valuable."

"Many people would argue that the most dangerous inhabitant of the earth is currently the self styled 43rd president of the United States. Not so much in deed anymore as in word. Because to hear that man speak is to wish upon yourself physical harm."

"I started looking into these groups in America, campaigns groups who want to put stickers on the front of all school science text books saying that Evolution is only one possible theory of life on earth. Now, although this seems like a stupid idea at first, second, and thirty ninth glance, look at it once more. Give it that fortieth view. Because it's brilliant. Let's have stickers on the front of all books! Slap one on the front of the Bible saying "Of course this could all be bullsh*t. Maybe he never died! Perhaps he opened a donkey sanctuary. He had a clear bond with donkeys." Or slap one on the Theory of Gravity! "Look, that's just one man's opinion. Maybe we could all fly! R. Kelly believed it so. Why would he lie to us? What does he possibly stand to gain?""

"But if you think it's going to get any better, let me burst that bubble of optimism now because I was fortunate enough last year to be invited to the First Republican Presidential Candidate Debate in Simi Valley in California, which, interestingly, was exactly as much fun as it sounds. But it was, obviously a privilege to be there and I did get to witness one incredible moment of political theater when all, at that point, ten of the potential leaders of the free world were asked the same question. And that question was "Who here doesn't believe in evolution?" And three of those men raised their hands. And then none of those three men put their hands down and said "Only joking." And their confidence was seductive!"

"You might look at the Oreo Pizza and think, "That is a reprehensible foodstuff". I put it to you that that is the single most patriotic item I have ever seen in my life! Hoist that up a flagpole! ... Because that is the biggest imaginable "fuck you" you could possibly issue to terrorists. By hoisting the Oreo Pizza up a flagpole, what you're essentially saying is, "There is nothing you can do to us, we are not already doing to ourselves"."

"The world's become so horrifying now. It's too easy to become cynical about things and that's not fair and it doesn't work. And in fact, there is hope for the world. And it is in the form of Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia will save us all. I found this out when recently a friend of mine emailed me and he said that someone had created a Wikipedia entry about me. I didn't realize this was true, so I looked it up. And like most Wikipedia entries, it came with some flamboyant surprises, not least amongst them my name. Because in it it said my name was John Cornelius Oliver. Now my middle name is not Cornelius because I did not die in 1752. But obviously, I want it to be. Cornelius is an incredible name. And that's when it hit me — the way the world is now, fiction has become more attractive than fact. That is why Wikipedia is such a vital resource. It's a way of us completely rewriting our history to give our children and our children's children a much better history to grow up with. We seem to have no intention of providing them with a future. Let's at least give them a past. It is in a very real sense the least we can do."

"Jon called me and asked, "Would you like to host the show?" My first reaction was, "Yeah, sure. Whatever you want. No problem." It was only on hanging up that my knees started to buckle. I was like, "Holy shit! What did I just agree to? I'm about to destroy the most beloved show on American television.""

"You’re not supposed to see your country’s most famous author [J.K. Rowling] in the audience watching you. You’re supposed to look down at that point and realize that you’re naked and then wake up."

"I’ve made so many people angry that they kind of blur into one unpleasant memory of people staring at you with somewhere between passive aggression and active aggression."

"Welcome to Last Week Tonight! I am John Oliver and welcome, welcome... welcome to whatever this is."

"Lest we forget, when Europe goes far right, they go far, right through Belgium."

"The cable companies have figured out the great truth of America: If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring. Apple could put the entire text of "Mein Kampf" inside the iTunes user agreement, and you'd just go, "Uh, agree, agree, agr-- what? Agree, agree.""

"When your rainy day fund is so big you've got to check it for swimming cartoon ducks, you might not be a not-profit anymore."

"Congratulations, Dave, you've just constructed a straw man so large you could burn it in the desert and hold an annoying festival around it."

"John Oliver: You've stated that you believe there could be an infinite number of parallel universes. Does that mean that there is a universe out there where I am smarter than you? Stephen Hawking: Yes. And also a universe where you're funny."

"… we were in a situation where, in the event of us launching a nuclear strike, the President's command would theoretically have gone through a man gambling with fake poker chips, who would've then tried to call a drunk guy wrestling with a Russian George Harrison, who would've then needed to send someone with a bag full of burritos to wake up an officer and tell him to go grab an LP-sized floppy disk and begin the solemn process of ending the world as we know it."

"Please, make sure your college years are the best ones of your life because, thanks to the debt that we are saddling you with, they almost certainly will be."

"Drug companies are a bit like high school boyfriends; they're much more concerned with getting inside you than being effective once they're in there."

"As far as I can see, this is a system that has enriched multiple companies and that pays and fires teachers with a cattle birthing formula, confuses children with talking pineapples, and has the same kind of rules regarding transparency as Brad Pitt had for Fight Club."

"For the record if someone did that to me I'd hitch a ride to the International Space Station straight away; of course who am I kidding, they would never let me in, I've got spiders for hands! The internet is mean!"

"In science, you don't just get to cherry-pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway! That's religion! You're thinking of religion."

"It's like catching an ice cream cone out of the air because a child was hit by a car."

"You can't just hear a conspiracy theory, fan the flames, and then walk away! "Is Katy Perry Jonbenet Ramsey?" "Well, identity theft is a real and persistent issue in this day and age, and we really need to look into that!""

"He is truly one of the most revolting humans (minions) I have ever seen. In a way, there is no more fitting spokesman for the Trump administration than an entitled, elitist arsehole who refuses to take responsibility for the messes he makes, and who can somehow pick a fight with the Statue of Liberty."

"Oh, why do I love Salisbury? It's simple. The population is 40,302. And their member of parliament is John Glen, a Conservative whose eight-year tenure has been widely viewed as a failure. (open brackets: "citation needed", closed brackets.)"

"Please, buy [Last Week Tonight Presents: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo] for your children, buy it for any child you know, or just buy it because you know it would annoy Mike Pence. You'd be doing a nice thing in a really dickish way, and isn't that the dream at the end of the day?"

"Britain is basically Pompeii if Pompeii had voted for the volcano."

"Calling slave labor "chores" is a euphemism on par with calling Hitler a "best-selling author with a side hustle" or JFK's assassination a "bad hair day" or this a comedy show."

"And look, do I think it’s bad if Disney pays more taxes? No, I don’t. That would be a good thing. I don’t love that it might happen not through meaningful tax reform but on the whim of one right-wing dipshit who’s scared of gay people and doesn’t understand the First Amendment. But hey: Ends, means, what are you gonna do?"

"Hope and joy are crucial here; they are the fuel that powers the ongoing fight for equality. And while there is a lot of fear and uncertainty right now, it is worth remembering that progress -- while not always linear -- is always possible."

"There is a natural human impulse to protect children, to grab a toddler you don't know if you see them running into traffic, and if that impulse is broken or disincentivized by a government, there is absolutely a humanitarian crisis, no matter what any asshole has to say about it."

"It has to be possible to feel the pain in one community without denying it in another. It has to be! That is perhaps the most necessary precondition for peace because real peace here will clearly be difficult! It's gonna be struggled toward as part of a larger pursuit of justice which will, in turn, require an honest and uncomfortable reckoning with all the decisions that brought us to this point."

"You can see how baiting customers with one price and then switching it for another might be considered a bait-and-switch! There's actually a great Econ book on the subject entitled "Words Mean What Words Mean"!"

"Wait, he "loves drama"?! I'm sorry, I'm really not that comfortable with one of the most powerful people on Earth being summed up the same way you describe Andy Cohen on New Year's Eve!"

"From the beginning, America -- like most countries -- was built on polite fictions by men who could somehow hold in their heads the idea that all men were created equal at the exact same time that they were drawing up the three-fifths compromise."

"We have spoken to experts who have all told us that, best they can tell, this is somehow legal. Which seems crazy to me, 'cause it really feels like it shouldn't be."

"Whenever they don't want to talk about something, it's probably worth you knowing about it."

"If your friend told you to download an app and you saw it in the App Store with good reviews, you might assume that everything on it was legitimate even before you saw MetaTrader's logo, which looks like three men in suits jerking each other off under a table -- an appropriate metaphor for cryptocurrency if I have ever seen one."

"If you're funny enough, you can make people forget a lot of things, whether it's common-sense internet safeguards, lessons from previous relationships, or that they've been accidentally learning about financial fraud and human trafficking for the last twenty minutes. We're having fun, aren't we?"

"One project leader in the 80s and early 90s is remembered for saying "No secrets" and "The only thing that will make me rip off your head and shit down your neck is withholding information." And I'm sorry, but that should be the mug."

"I'm curious, is it a rule that, to be in Congress, you have to be one of the weirdest motherfuckers to ever live?"

"I'm not saying college is the right choice for everyone -- but it should be a choice."

"I know I've spend a lot of time over the last ten years reassuring everyone that this show does comedy and not journalism, but I think we can all agree that the most important thing we do here is stir shit up."

"The fact is, no matter how executions are performed, they'll never be humane. No matter how many times you call them "textbook" or claim it's "much better than anything they did to the victims", or show people viral videos of dizzy tweens on helium, it's never gonna be okay, and we are kidding ourselves if we think taking someone's life actually lowers the number of killers in the world; it literally, definitionally, creates more."

"Manchin's argument speaks to what can be so dispiriting about our current politics, because while there is nothing fundamentally wrong with civility and compromise, it does depend on who you're being civil to and what you're compromising with. 'Cause remember, this is the moment when one of the loudest voices in the senate campaign against Mangi is also happily encouraging people to "take things into their own hands" when it comes to those they don't agree with. And it's pretty scary to think that, in the name of building bridges, some appear to be perfectly fine finding a middle ground with those willing to throw protestors off them."

"While you can believe aliens exist or not, when it comes to UFOs, belief doesn't really come into it; whatever they are, people are seeing them. That poster in Mulder's office shouldn't have said "I Want To Believe", it should've said "Believe, Smelieve, What The Fuck Is That Thing?""

""There's something out there that's better than our airplane." It is chilling to hear that from a Navy pilot and not the usual place: the Executive Boardroom at Boeing."

"When New Jersey sends us mayors, they're clearly not sending their best."

"Everyone who's ever been to a protest has, at some point, seen a sign and thought to themselves "Shit, not sure about that one. I'm here for abortion rights; do we really need to bring 9/11 into this"?"

"Student protests against injustice generally age pretty well, and the efforts to criticize or crack down on them tend not to."

"You know God! The freak known for building a nude garden He could watch all day. The guy who commissioned the construction of an all-animal fuck boat, and who sat back and watched while His own son got nailed. Oh, I'm sorry! Am I misunderstanding the Bible by taking things out of context? Forgive me, I haven't read it. I looked at the summary; it told me all I needed to know."

"I know it is not shocking that an episode of this show would advocate to support your local libraries; it's pretty much implicit in our whole vibe. My suit, glasses, and desk all practically scream "support your local libraries" to which the rest of my body would say out of respect, "Shh!""

"[The] U.S., where our constitution guarantees virtually unlimited freedom of speech, except, of course, when the Supreme Court decides it’s cool for a public university to ban drag shows. Yeah, that happened two months ago. It’s kind of surprising no one flew a pride flag upside down on their lawn in protest."

"Lots of people are 68, working, and paying taxes, and I’d venture to say most of them are not Nazi enthusiasts, other than, it seems, you and Mel Gibson."

"[Between] the attempted assassination of a central European leader, and the rise of a far-right party in Germany, Europe really seems to be playing the 20th century hits right now, even if some of their former history teachers refuse to see the similarity."

"[There’s] no better tribute to [the Beatles'] legacy than having terrified children wander around Ringo’s nostrils wondering if they’ll ever see their families again."

"Thinking of the negatives is pretty much all I do, along with speaking the negatives out loud and making jokes about the negatives all while modeling the latest suits from "Sir Michael Gambon’s Haberdashery for Oddly Long Gentlemen"."

"[Unless] we force the government and the handful of large companies that control this industry to change their priorities, we’re going to be stuck where we are, like a bunch of fifth graders in the world’s largest corn maze begging for our fucking lives."

"The election is in full swing right now, and it's pretty much your usual campaign -- candidates offering policy proposals, trading barbs... and occasionally getting convicted of 34 felonies and complaining about the judge."

"That is really the Trump experience in a nutshell right there: hateful ideology, a promise to make life harder for minorities, all wrapped up in a non-sequitur so stupid it is inconveniently funny. The radical left invented trans people a few years ago? I’m sorry, what? Did they put it on Shark Tank and I somehow missed it?"

"Trump as president was sort of like a hamster in an attack helicopter. Sure, he wants to bathe the world in blood and terror—he wants it with his whole rotten hamster heart—but luckily he doesn’t know what buttons to press and his brain’s the size of a peanut, so that puts some hard limits on the damage he’s actually able to do."

"Okay, that is essentially all the background you need to know about federal personnel management. If you’re bored, it’s over, and if you’re hard, welcome home."

"Okay, a few things. First, you don’t need a new dating app to find conservatives online. Just go onto any existing app and filter for people who describe their views as "moderate". Any single woman in a big city can tell you "moderate" just means "I’m a right-wing nut job, but I’d like to get laid, please"."

"When you fire everyone who knows what they’re doing and only hire people who will say yes to the rich guy in charge, that’s not a recipe for good government. It’s a recipe for the Titan Submersible. I don’t want scientific research about nuclear power being done by people without experience. I don’t want my latte being made by someone without experience. Oh, it’s your first day? I’m sorry, step aside, please. Give me the barista with a sleeve of techno-tan stick-and-poke tattoos and a septum piercing who’s worked here for five years and who hates everybody here. Experience matters."

"Project 2025 is born from an impulse as old as America. It’s an impulse that says "one class of Americans is entitled to lead, and the rest of us are lucky to be allowed to serve". That thinks there should be a limited government when it comes to rules they have to live by, but also a unitary executive to keep the rest of us in line. These are old, old ideas that have been shouted from podiums by the likes of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan but have now been placed into a new handbook for an only-too-willing president to use on day one. And in a perfect world, I would love if we had an opposing party better able to articulate a strong defense of our country’s ideals and that also consistently lived up to them. People are entitled to hope for more from the next four years than someone just not being Trump and for at least two Supreme Court justices to die. I’m not saying which ones I would prefer, but I think we all have our top two. And for anyone tempted to think, "Well, we survived Trump’s first term," first, not everyone did. And it should hopefully be very clear by now: a second Trump term really does promise to be far, far worse. Because if Trump’s first term was defined by chaos, his second could be defined by ruthless efficiency, and that should be troubling to absolutely everyone, because Project 2025 is a movement whose members joke about wanting a white homeland and insist women have to have more babies to uphold Western society. And its work could be about to be funneled through a man who happily calls his fellow Americans “vermin.” It is not subtle, it’s hard to miss, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it."

"Listen, as a 47-year-old who looks like a 67-year-old, I clearly don’t understand TikTok, but I do know perfect film-making when I see it, and that right there is perfect film-making."

"I know I talk a lot on this show about the bad stuff Ronald Reagan did. So to balance that out, I do want to mention something positive he did for the planet. In 2004 – and this is true – he died."

"Conservatives love to rail against “cancel culture” while trying to ban any speech they don’t like. So when it’s someone else’s symbol, it’s an affront that needs to be burned or banned, but when it’s theirs, it can be mandated by law, and anyone who doesn’t like it can just turn their head and not look."

"Like many things, the way Britain operates is "kind of like the U.S., but whimsically worse.""

"[Do] you have any idea just how unlikable you have to be to get milkshaked? No one just casually has a milkshake on their person, or thinks "I better grab one in case I encounter any assholes today." No, they think "You know what I haven’t had in a while but deserve? A milkshake. A treat." Yet despite that, Nigel Farage is clearly so much of an asshole that this hero was willing to get rid of her possible birthday milkshake having decided "this is a better use of it."

"Do you know how much of an out-of-touch wang you have to be for people to think your whole vibe can be summed up by the word "rich"? Elon Musk’s the richest man on Earth, and it’s not even the first word that comes to mind when I think of him. That’d be "apartheid". It’s also not the first word that comes to mind when I think of Bill Gates. That would be "how-many-times-was-he-on-Epstein's-plane" which counts as one word if you say it really fast."

"The thing about denying the press is there is, the press tends to catch you doing that, because the press is fucking there!"

"But that is the natural endpoint of austerity right there: punishing people for circumstances completely beyond their control. And Sunak is now promising to introduce what he calls the next generation of welfare reforms, including yet more cuts, justifying it by saying, “I worry very much about benefits becoming a lifestyle choice.” Which is a rich fucking statement from a rich fucking man who’d probably go into anaphylactic shock if he ever had to fly coach."

"If a wild badger broke into your home and fucked everything up for 14 straight years, tearing everything apart, you can argue about redecorating choices later, right now, that badger’s got to fucking go. And I will say, if the U.K. can successfully rid itself of the Tories next month, that’s not cause for a shrug, that’s cause for a celebration. And I know that celebration’s not something that comes naturally to Britons. The country’s most famous motivational slogan is “Keep Calm and Carry On” and even that morale booster basically amounted to, “I know you’re about to die, but there’s no need to make a scene.” That was supposed to get us through World War II! But if Britain can extricate itself from the party whose unremitting cruelty has stained the last decade and a half of British life, that does deserve to be marked."

"The UK managed to kick the Tories out after fourteen years, France narrowly managed to keep the far-right out of power, and Kendrick Lamar released a music video for the spectacularly hostile "Not Like Us" on the Fourth of July, and that is the end of the good things that happened."

"[You] expect to see certain things at the RNC -- elephant logos, cowboy hats, a massive spike in Grindr usage -- but "a message of unity" is not something traditionally associated with that event or indeed, this man!"

"If you’d asked me, “What’s next to this guy, just out of the frame?” and gave me a thousand guesses, there is no way I’m saying, “a lumpy bulldog lounging in an armchair like it’s being interviewed at the 92nd Street Y.” And don’t drag a bulldog to the RNC. Life’s hard enough for them. To have the soul of a wolf trapped inside the body of a wrinkly bowling ball? To be inbred over centuries into the perfect genetic car crash? That dog doesn’t deserve to be made into a prop at the RNC, it deserves a rawhide bone and an apology from humanity!"

"I do not like that man, Ted Cruz. I do not like his toxic views. I do not like his nasty speeches, I do not like the shit he preaches. I do not like him when he fishes, I do not like him when he kisses. Pulling off that beard, he ain't. That man, Ted Cruz... looks like a taint."

"The thing is, if you want to prevent crime and death, that’s a great idea, and there are absolutely ways to do that. But when you draw a circle around a few members of a particular group—especially one identifiable by race or nationality—then generalize about what this means about all of them, no matter what you say, you’re not having a reasoned debate about crime or safety. You’re being racist."

"So, what can we do? Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re currently four months out from an election, so just assume that the underlying “what can we do” for most of our U.S. stories from now until then is going to be “do not vote for Donald Trump again.” That seems like that should be barely worth saying, like “drink water” or “go to the dentist,” but it does bear repeating because… Be honest: when was the last time you drank water? Or, indeed, went to the dentist? Exactly."

"There are so many things we, as Americans, do have to resign ourselves to: airline cancellations, a national anthem with too many high notes, Glen Powell inevitably starring in a Field of Dreams remake. We can’t fight those things. But we can, and must fight this. And at the end of this week, it should be clear to absolutely everyone: it doesn’t matter if Trump and his party say they have a "new tone" or nominally call for "unity," or throw a cute dog onstage for some reason. They have told us who they are, they’ve told us what they want, they literally put it on a sign and waved it in everyone’s face. They’re trying to win this election by pointing a finger at immigrants, and the only appropriate response is to take a cue from the so-called "symbol of the Biden presidency" and say "fuck that shit!""

"Okay. I don’t usually do this, but I want you to pause this right now, and write down what you think you just saw. I don’t want to do this for you, just write down what you feel you just witnessed there, then come back and I’ll tell you what I think, okay?"

"And you might be thinking: "Why are you telling me about any of this right now?" Well, first: I dunno. The world’s a pretty shitty place right now. Do you not want to be told about Mr. Panda? Would you rather talk about how someone managed to get a semiautomatic rifle past the Secret Service? Or are we allowed to have some fucking fun for a second?! Please! Let me! Have this!"

"It's not like the Geneva Convention says "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies... unless there's, like, really convenient shopping and a super manageable commute to Jerusalem"."

"The whole settlement project has been massively encouraged by the Israeli government to such a degree that it is hard to argue that living in one is an apolitical choice. Building on stolen land is an inherently political act. It is also, by the way, copyright infringement."

"Does apartheid actually have a smell? Because I'll be honest, until now, I was pretty sure it had only produced the one kind of Musk."

"Wow. "I decide what the law is, and your actions are illegal." That is a bold fucking attitude. It's the sort of thing an American cop would only be comfortable tattooing above their sleeve line."

"Human dignity has to be a prerequisite for negotiating anything. And Palestinians in the West Bank have their dignity challenged hundreds of times a day! From having beer bottles thrown at their heads, to being detained for kicking balls near fences, to having their homes stolen, bulldozed, and far, far worse. And to be clear, dignity is the absolute beginning of this. What's required is justice. And the call for that is getting louder."

"Look, a phrase that gets brought up a lot with regard to Israel is "never again" -- an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust, and it's always been open to two interpretations: there's the one that means "This must never again happen to the Jewish people", and the one that means "This must never again happen to any people anywhere." And in the West Bank, as in Gaza right now, it's pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored."

"I guess, at the very least, I just want my government to have the moral backbone that's been shown by Ben and fucking Jerry's. Please, just try not to get morally outflanked by the makers of Impretzively Fudged! That cannot be too much to ask!"

"He's promised to be "the greatest environmental President in American history" and has talked about a bunch of things that we have covered, like so-called "forever chemicals" and PFAS and the proliferation of microplastics. You know, all the fun stuff that you expect from our "comedy" show. Which, at this point, should probably be called You Have Already Been Poisoned with the Duolingo Owl's Biological Uncle."

"Okay, so before we go any further, let me just say this: I also don't want to be doing this. I don't want to be debunking his arguments at length! […] But he's made so many confident assertions there, and if you leave even one unchallenged, people will think "Well, maybe there's something to it.""

"It is the ultimate conspiracist code -- "Nothing is a coincidence except when I do it"."

"If you like that [RFK Jr.] is against polluters and Big Pharma, I get it! We criticize them all the time! But when we do that, we make sure we've got our facts right and don't just pull them out of the ass of our best workout jeans."

"Picking apart policy proposals when the alternative is Trump is a bit like debating which color to paint the living room when your house is on fucking fire! You kind of have to prioritize the imminent threat!"

"I know it is hard to imagine things getting worse on this but to be fair, Trump has always been one to roll up his sleeves, throw on a very unflattering vest, and dig us into a new layer of hell."

"Look, I know this isn't inspiring to hear, but politics isn't always inspiring; it's transactional. It rarely matches our greatest hopes and dreams. I'll be honest: I really didn't want the first vote I cast as an American citizen to be for Joe fucking Biden, but here we are. Here is how I look at it: The struggle for justice isn't just about what happens on election day. It's a fight waged constantly -- day in, day out. In protests on the streets, meetings with legislators, and in the thousand small actions that cumulatively move the government forward an inch at a time. Abbas Alawieh, the co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, has urged Democrat voters to "pair their vote, their support for Vice President Harris with a public commitment to pressure her to stop sending weapons, should she become President. As for Ruwa Romman, she voted for Harris in Georgia -- another critical swing state -- while doing a vote swap with someone in a blue state who cast a protest vote on her behalf. And she explained her Harris vote by saying "My vote is a promise — a promise that I and those who stand with me will not stop demanding the end of mass slaughter and violence everywhere", and that is the point. Elections alone aren't sufficient for large-scale change, but they're absolutely necessary for it to ever happen. Because it's the day when essentially you get to choose who you'd prefer to be pushing for the next four years and where you'll be pushing them from. Look, I love this country. I'm an American. I chose to be here. In the words of the late Lee Greenwood, "I'm proud to be an American". And I'd argue there's nothing more American than having a healthy adversarial relationship with those in power, even if you voted for them!"

"If what you want is a centrist candidate that's quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed, and she just lost!"

"On the 6th May 2011 episode of The Bugle John created the phrase "fuckyoulogy", an obituary for someone recently deceased who most certainly will not be missed."

"Here's a guy who likes to take boring topics and make them interesting. If you can do that for an administrative process like the FCC on net neutrality, imagine the level of interest in issues people are even more familiar with at the state level."

"The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important, but go no further: What is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch links and mockery at those who don't. The Good Facts are enough: Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns."

"When John Oliver told viewers that if they opposed abortion they had to change the channel until the last minute of the program, when they would be shown “an adorable bucket of sloths,” he perfectly encapsulated the tone of these shows: one imbued with the conviction that they and their fans are intellectually and morally superior to those who espouse any of the beliefs of the political right. Two days before the election, every talking head on television was assuring us that Trump didn’t have a chance, because he lacked a “ground game.” After his victory, one had to wonder whether some part of his ground game had been conducted night after night after night on television, under flattering studio lights and with excellent production values and comedy writing."

"For years, Oliver has criticized the estate tax, which opponents, in a smart linguistic move dreamed up by Frank Luntz, long ago labeled the “death tax”; and the tax code’s raft of loopholes that benefit special interests he identified as oil companies and hedge fund managers. Oliver even briefly established the bogus Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption to draw attention to tax-exempt status granted to churches and charities. Back in July 2014, in an episode in which he lamented the "Wealth Gap in America” (which has resulted in the richest one percent of Americans controlling 20 percent of annual income), Oliver said, “At this point the rich are just running up the score…What sets America apart is that we are actively introducing policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy,” such as tax cuts and loopholes like trusts. So it’s a little surprising to discover that just months before, Oliver had a tax attorney set up two revocable trusts, one for him and one for his wife, to hide the couple’s purchase of a $9.5 million Manhattan penthouse. Then he used a tax loophole created by Donald Trump himself back in the 1970s, when the current president was merely a prominent New York real estate developer and aspiring celebrity author."

"No one takes more glee in dumping their shit on middle America than John Oliver. [...] If he delivered the exact same words sounding as if he went to school with Miley Cyrus, no one would take him seriously."

"There is no "fact-checking" of John Oliver, Beyonce or Kim Kardashian. They're entertainers, not politicians or journalists."

"Over the years, John Oliver has a history of creating energy for an overlooked issue over the course of his program, and then turning that energy into activism through a stunt at the end. He's pointed out how ridiculously corrupt the predatory lending industry is by buying 15 million dollars worth of medical debt for just 60 thousand dollars and forgiving it. He's raised awareness for net neutrality by making the petititon site "goffcyourself.com". He's written a children's book called Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Presents: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo to combat Mike Pence's support for conversion therapy, which raised millions of dollars for The Trevor Project and AIDS United. That is a much more concrete difference to make than getting a bunch of liberals to show up to the "Rally to Restore Sanity.""

"Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt talls. My brother would go out at 7pm to party and get laid, and when he'd come back at 3am, I would still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years — I still do that."

"I don't like doing interviews, I don't like doing what I'm doing right now. I'd rather be at home playing my guitar."

"Playing together without having to compromise our sound was a dream come true."

"In 1971, a young Eddie witnessed Page’s one-handed solo for Heartbreaker, “took the idea and ran with it”. And then some."

"Eddie could play his borrowed Clapton licks at four times their original speed. But describing EVH’s guitar playing as “fast” undervalues it, like describing the Great Pyramid of Giza as “large”. Not just the best soloist on the planet, Eddie was possibly even better at rhythm – effortlessly grooving, extremely dynamic, and with the best swing in the game. Debates about whether he invented tapping (answer: no) are beside the point. Eddie Van Halen also did not invent harmonics, divebombs, palm muting, legato, or high gain tones, but no one had combined them seamlessly into one coherent guitar style, let alone perfected it on their debut album. [...] Where he hits a wrong note, he styles it out and keeps on wailing. Like the gymnast Simone Biles, no matter what acrobatics happen in the air, he always sticks the landing."

"[Eddie's solos are] short, concise and brilliantly crafted. They’re not just about speed. He can do a bit of something that’s quite gentle, and then throw in something that just blows you away because of the sheer pace of it for a second—and then he goes back to something else."

"Like Jimi Hendrix a decade earlier, Van Halen caused guitarists to look at their instruments in an entirely new way, and, arguably, no single guitarist has had such universal impact since."

"It’s an incredible technique for what he does. I can’t do it. I can’t smile like him either."

"Eddie’s smile reflects the sheer exuberance bursting from the grooves on the first Van Halen album. [...] Eddie’s licks had soul, even when he was showing off. Then there was the tone. It’s doubtful the electric guitar has ever sounded better. Guitarists have devoted their lives to trying to discover how it was done. [...] The 23-year-old Eddie didn’t just invent 80s rock guitar; he did it in a way that no one would ever surpass. A generation of shredders took his technique to new heights, but no one had the tone or the vibe, and no one else looked like they were having nearly as much fun."

"In 1978, Edward Van Halen redefined virtuosity on the electric guitar."

""Eruption" changed everything. Sure, it clocked in at less than two minutes and never came close to being a hit. As presented on the first Van Halen album in 1978, it seemed like an instrumental introduction to "You Really Got Me", the band’s debut single. But it was obvious to anyone who heard the Eddie Van Halen masterpiece that the world of rock guitar had changed dramatically. [...] Before Van Halen, guitar heroes were known mainly for their mastery of the blues and ability to pull a rich, vocal tone from their axes. [...] With Eruption, Eddie Van Halen set new standards on both fronts. He not only ripped through demisemiquavers with a speed and clarity that made McLaughlin seem splay-fingered; his mastery of feedback, tremolo and pinged harmonics made his guitar sound as fluid as a synthesizer."

"The incredible speed and consistency of his take on [the tremolo picking] technique has been a source of fascination for 35 years. In Van Halen’s approach, the picking hand hangs suspended in mid-air, with no anchoring or muting at all, and uses a middle-index pick grip to generate positively giant picking movements. It really seems to break all the rules."

"As unpredictable and flamboyant as Hendrix, Van Halen has had an unmeasurable impact on the guitar community. By the mid Eighties, his self-described “brown” sound, over-the-top techniques (including two-handed tapping), and revolutionary trem-bar effects inspired a generation of aspiring guitarists who bought the one-pickup, one-volume-knob, Floyd Rose–equipped Strat-style guitars that Van Halen made famous."

"Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius."

"We must not contradict, but instruct him that contradicts us; for a madman is not cured by another running mad also."

"The Spirit tells me - Fidel Castro will die - in the 90's. Oooh my! Some will try to kill him and they will not succeed. But there will come a change in his physical health, and he will not stay in power, and Cuba will be visited of God."

"The Spirit of God tells me an earthquake will hit the East Coast of America and destroy much in the '90s. Not one place will be safe from earthquakes in the '90s. These who have not known earthquakes will know it. People, I feel the Spirit all over me!"

"We may have two years before the Rapture. Can I be blunt with you? I don't know if we have two years left. I'm going to prove to you from the Word tonight, that we have less than two years, unless the Lord changes his mind."

"But here's first what I see for Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). You're going to have people raised from the dead watching this network. You're going to have people raised from the dead watching TBN. Programs -- just plain programs -- programs that haven't done much when it comes to supernatural manifestations -- teaching programs!"

"Jesus is coming again within the next two years."

"I don't need gold in heaven, I gotta have it now."

"God the Father is a person separate from the Holy Ghost. Totally separate. ...Do you know that the Holy Spirit has a soul and a body separate from that of Jesus and the Father? ...God the Father then is a triune being within Himself. He's a person, He has a soul. ...A soul is an intellect. ...God thinks ...separate from the Son and separate from the Holy Ghost. ...God the Father is a separate individual from the Son and the Holy Ghost, who is a triune being who walks in a spirit body and He has hair...has eyes...has a mouth...has hands."

"Adam was a super being when God created him...he had dominion over the fowls of the air which means he used to fly...well of course how could you have dominion over the birds and not be able to do what they do. Adam flew into space, with one thought he would be on the moon."

"Jesus Christ will appear with me on the platform..."

"The reason people lose their healing, is because they begin questioning if God really did it."

"In his sermons and books, Hinn has portrayed his childhood as that of a social outcast, handicapped by a severe stutter, who was nonetheless a stellar student. But when G. Richard Fisher and M. Kurt Goedelman, two journalists who write for Personal Freedom Outreach, looked into Hinn's youth, they found that both claims were untrue: nobody remembered Hinn stuttering, and he had dropped out of high school after the 11th grade."

":Illustration by 4G² Issue #191, January/February 2004"

"Hinn claims to have preached at an all-girls Catholic school in Jerusalem in 1976 and "every single girl in that school got saved, including all the nuns." Since there's only one Catholic girls school in Jerusalem, Schmidt's Girls College, it was a fairly easy matter to question all the nuns who were there in 1976, as well as Father Dusind, who has overseen all religious instruction since 1955. The result? "This is nonsense, real nonsense," Dusind told Fisher and Goedelman. "It never happened and could not happen because a Charismatic healer or Protestant preacher would never ever be let in to talk to the girls."

"The heavyweight boxer Evander Holyfield, banned from boxing because of a heart condition, went to a Benny Hinn crusade in Philadelphia, had Hinn lay hands on him, and gave Hinn a check for $265,000 after he was told he was healed. In fact, he passed his next examination by the boxing commission, but later his doctors said he never had a heart condition in the first place – he had been misdiagnosed."

":Illustration by 4G² Issue #191, January/February 2000"

"We will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

"Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mold the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalism of future generations."

"I know that my retirement will make no difference in its [my newspaper's] cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

"There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice, that does not live by secrecy."

"Every issue of the paper presents an opportunity and a duty to say something courageous and true; to rise above the mediocre and conventional; to say something that will command the respect of the intelligent, the educated, the independent part of the community; to rise above fear of partisanship and fear of popular prejudice. I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words."

"Don't fiddle while Byrne roams!"

"The greatest compliment one can pay a master is to compare him with Capablanca."

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."

"Florentine painting between Giotto and Michelangelo contains the names of such artists as Orcagna, Masaccio, Fra Filippo, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Botticelli. ... Forget that they were painters, they remain great sculptors; forget that they were sculptors, and still they remain architects, poets, and even men of science."

"Can any mortal portray himself with words, as perhaps he can with chalk or paint? ... A gifted verbal artist may convey some coherent idea of a person he attempts to portray, but not likely an objective one."

"Taste begins when appetite is satisfied."

"Desperation will allow you to do incredible things in the name of survival."

"I created an environment for myself and a way of living for myself that on the outside seemed incredibly gregarious and vivacious and it was just... I don't believe I have any chemical pre-disposition towards depression but let's just call it, I was suffering from a spiritual malady I suppose, for years, and I just indulged that and it was sweet. Because at times to be in pain, if it's self-perpetuated, at times, can be sweet. You can feel very alive when you're in pain. And I also know that from another perspective when somebody who I love in my life has passed away, there is something incredibly internally vivacious about feeling pain and mourning and even if it's as egocentric and self-indulgent as mourning for yourself or pitying for yourself and that sort of stuff. So I'm glad I'm out of that cycle of my life, and I'm very lucky that way."

"Those who fell by the wayside. Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."

"Soon after Athens had reached the height of its glory under Pericles in the Fifth Century, B. C., and had started on its decline, the rise of Macedon under Philip carried Greek influence into new regions. The glory of Athens had been based upon sea power, but the conquests of Macedon were the work of land armies— Philip invented the invincible phalanx. Upon Philip's death his son, Alexander the Great, set forth to conquer the whole of the then known world, and as that world in his day lay to the east, his marches were in that direction. In a few years he had overrun the fertile plains and opulent cities of Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia, and had carried his conquests to the gates of Delhi. In all the cities in the intervening countries he left large garrisons of Greek soldiers. In many of these countries he founded flourishing new cities. In every place his soldiers were followed by large colonies of Greek civilians. The result was that the whole of western Asia, and of what we call the Near East, including Asia Minor, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and northwestern India, was saturated with the Greek influence and with Greek colonies."

"The imagination of these conquered peoples was dazzled by the introduction of Greek art, literature, philosophy, and public works. Though the successors of Alexander were unable to maintain the political control of the lands he conquered, and though successive waves of Roman, Arabian, and Tartar conquests swept over these lands in succeeding centuries, none of the later conquerors has been able wholly to eradicate the influence of Greek culture, nor to exterminate that element of population which was of Greek blood."

"….The Greek War of Independence, which came to a successful conclusion in 1832, affected less than one half of the Greeks in the Turkish Empire. It did not bring freedom to the Greeks of Macedonia and Thrace, of Crete and the Aegean Islands, nor to the more than two million Greeks in Asia Minor and Constantinople."

"When the Turks and the Bulgarians left, Macedonia remained a purely Greek region."

"To this day, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. This is strange, since the historical evidence of what happened is plentiful. Western observers like the US ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, wrote detailed reports about what was being done - including the telling statement of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, that all the Armenians had to perish because 'those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow'. Western missionaries too wrote harrowing accounts of what they witnessed. Their testimony formed an important part of the wartime report on 'The Treatment of the Armenians' compiled by Viscount Bryce, who had also investigated the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914."

"For the longest time, I didn't know the name of anyone in Led Zeppelin. I didn't care about what they looked like or ate. I wanted to listen, not read about them. I've always had that philosophy. I never started playing drums to get chicks or money or anything else. Long before I had concepts of those things, I wanted to be a drummer. That's the basic concept of what I do. I'm a drummer. I play drums. We are artists as drummers, and people should realize that. Not everyone can sit down and use all four of your limbs simultaneously to create something out of wood and plastic. We're creating something beautiful, and it may not sound pretty, but if you listen with the right ear, it sounds very pretty. If you try and listen to a song without drums, you haven't got anything."

"We never expected anything, actually. I think we still don't expect anything. We were proud of the album when we finished it, so whatever success it has we are just like, 'Wow, cool.' It's not going to change the way we work or think. I'm as proud of this record now as I was when we finished it."

"Anywhere I found wood I took it home and started working with it..to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind."

"It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

"If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. ..(they) express something real and existing in ourselves."

"For the first time a subject is present, not by virtue of its absence, but actually present, though its appearance is torn away, and only the structure bared. The Modern City! Precise, rectangular, squared, whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and sterilized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie; the underground music of the at once resigned and rebellious.. .Mondrian has left his white paradise, and entered the world. [1942, on the late painting Broadway Boogie Woogie of Piet Mondrian ]"

"We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. .If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self."

"For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still]"

"I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible."

"The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood."

"The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.. .We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content."

"The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended."

"The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society's logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist's path."

"It is Cézanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling."

"Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world.. .The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life."

"Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea. Van Gogh's drama and Seurat's silent harmony were born in the same country and epoch: but they do not contradict one another; they refer to different patterns among those which constitute reality."

"But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays [in 1946] is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality."

"Like the Cubists before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures. What an inspiration the medium is.."

"Like Rimbaud before them, the surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa [as Rimbaud himself did]. They revealed their insight as essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true 'poetry' was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane – if not the creatures themselves."

"[O]ne must agree with Rilke when he says that with 'nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words...'. It was Marcel Duchamps who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa. And so was Mondrian when he dreamed of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a transcendent ensemble."

"I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command."

"Since I have a deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world, I will with gratitude accept any form of their exposition in which their life and meaning can be maintained, and avoid all occasions where I think that this cannot be done.. ..unfortunately, there are few existing alternatives for the kind of activity which your museum represents. Nevertheless, in my own life at least, there must be some congruity between convictions and actions if I am to continue to function and work."

"It's a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!"

"I am not an abstractionist...I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else...I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions...The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!"

"I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room."

"[the first ingredient of his work]... is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality."

"[I]t was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes...But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it. [his quote in 1959, looking back to the 1930s]"

"A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience."

"One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist. [in conversation with W.C. Seitz]"

"[I am] dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times."

"It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.. ..these new shapes say.. ..what the symbols said. [Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s]"

"I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me."

"The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation.. .Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible."

"I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space.. .Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur. The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the cubist program."

"The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need."

"On shapes:"

"With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment."

"I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity."

"..For example; in the early forties Rothko and I decided to paint a certain subject matter. Perhaps if we saw some of those paintings now.. ..they might not seem so different as they did at the time. However, at no point was there ever any sort of a doctrine or a program or anything that would make a school. I think it was simply a situation in which all of the painters [of the New York School] were at that time; they were trying to break away from certain things."

"Rothko and I came to an agreement on the question of the subject matter; if we were to do something which could develop in some direction other than the accepted directions of that time, it would be necessary to use different subjects to begin with, and 1942, we embarked on a series of paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter, preferably from Greek mythology. I did a series of paintings on the theme of Oedipus and Rothko did a series of paintings on other Greek themes.. ..this offered a possibility of a way out [of a. o. w:Social Realism and Cubism ]"

"There is a moment of blinding light. There is a moment that seems like death, a paralysis. Then a new man, Paul, emerges from the experience. Rothko, the most famous example, changed his name, his wife and his style in a few months of profound self-questioning."

"I wanted to be soft like Rothko and ruthless like Ad Reinhardt."

"[B]ut Rothko was hypnotized by his own role and there was just one. The role was that of the Messiah-I have come; I have the word. I mean, Rothko had a very healthy self-worship and he did feel that he had discovered some great secret. He felt that this was of universal import...Rothko became totally involved in his own mythology, more than anyone I know except Barney Newman. They both were tremendously involved with their self-image. As the Kennedy White House was - where everything was done in terms of its fitting in with the self-image."

"And Milton Avery influenced Rothko. Rothko explained to me that Avery was the first person that Rothko knew who was a professional artist 24 hours a day. And he gave Rothko the idea that that was a possibility. But also Avery's attitude toward color - I mean, Rothko had much more to do with Avery. Of course, what Rothko had that Avery did not have was scale. And also Rothko freed the color from shapes. I mean, with Avery the color always inhabited shapes and, you know, logical divisions. So Avery was a very powerful influence on Rothko's life. However, when I mentioned that in my article about Rothko, he [Rothko] wanted me to delete it. He had this curious lack of generosity that certain artists have toward people to whom they are in debt."

"Well, I interpreted them [the late 'gray' paintings of Rothko] differently from his self-image right then and there. We argued about the significance of his paintings because he felt that they had a certain sense of foreboding and so on, and I didn't feel that at all. I felt they were very involved with comfort and luxury and they looked very natural in Jeanne Reynal's luxurious house, and people looked very well against them. They made a wonderful graceful decor, all of which was anathema to Rothko. I think in his very last paintings that he had down at the Rice Institute that there he got what he was talking about to me in the early '50s, but I don't think he had it then. I think when he got away from the pretty colors, beautiful colors and he got into those mysterious blacks and nameless deep, dark colors, that then the paintings did have this sense of foreboding. And I think they're his most magnificent paintings [in the Rothko Chapel....But those big black paintings, they took me by surprise. ...I was tremendously impressed. I found them very grand and the scale of them, the size, it was just quite amazing."

"Mark Rothko was very conscious of his sources, both as location and as cultural heritage."

"Historical research is my drug of choice."

"Hours of research can cut months of field work."

"I've found it! I've found the Hunley. (Best selling author Nancy Roberts writes: Filled with excitement, and a certain lack of caution, Spence shot up to the surface, shouting to the men in the boat, 'I've found it! I've found the Hunley. The location of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley (first submarine in history to sink an enemy ship) had been a mystery for over one hundred years. In 1978, the Hunley was placed on the United States National Register of Historic Places as a result of Spence's discovery. The wreck was raised in 2000. Her crew was still inside.)"

"First understand infinity then you will understand God and how evolution is intelligent design."

"As a child, everyone dreams of finding treasure. There’s romance and drama. But as an adult most people aren’t going to spend their lives trying to find it."

"Rocks are like wreck magnets and ships run aground today in pretty much the same locations and for the same reasons they did thousands of years ago."

"Genius is the ability to look at things simply."

"Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations."

"On a field, _____ Chevrons composed of seven pieces on one side & six on the other, joined together at the top in such wise that each of the six bears against or is supported by & supports two of the opposite side the pieces of the chevrons on each side alternate red & white. The shield borne on the breast of an American Eagle on the wing & rising proper. In the dexter talon of the Eagle an Olive branch & in the sinister a bundle of Arrows. Over the head of the Eagle a Constellation of Stars surrounded with bright rays and at a little distance clouds. In the bill of the Eagle a scroll with these words E pluribus unum."

"The Escutcheon is composed of the chief & pale, the two most honorable ordinaries. The Pieces, paly, represent the several states all joined in one solid compact entire, supporting a Chief, which unites the whole & represents Congress. The Motto alludes to this union. The pales in the arms are kept closely united by the chief and the Chief depends upon that union & the strength resulting from it for its support, to denote the Confederacy of the United States of America & the preservation of their union through Congress."

"The Escutcheon is composed of the chief & pale, the two most honorable ordinaries. The Pieces, paly, represent the several states all joined in one solid compact entire, supporting a Chief, which unites the whole & represents Congress. The Motto alludes to this union. The pales in the arms are kept closely united by the chief and the Chief depends upon that union & the strength resulting from it for its support, to denote the Confederacy of the United States of America & the preservation of their union through Congress. The colours of the pales are those used in the flag of the United States of America; White signifies purity and innocence, Red, hardiness & valor, and Blue, the colour of the Chief signifies vigilance, perseverance & justice. The Olive branch and arrows denote the power of peace & war which is exclusively vested in Congress. The Constellation denotes a new State taking its place and rank among other sovereign powers. The Escutcheon is born on the breast of an American Eagle without any other supporters to denote that the United States of America ought to rely on their own Virtue."

"The pyramid signifies Strength and Duration: The Eye over it & the Motto allude to the many signal interpositions of providence in favour of the American cause. The date underneath is that of the Declaration of Independence and the words under it signify the beginning of the new American Æra, which commences from that date."

"I suppose you might call me the sophisticated type. I like to act with dialogue. Not with grunts."

"I really am a happy, amusing fellow at heart. Trouble is I seem the only one left."

"Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me."

"I often think my life has been a failure. But whenever I drop into a theater and hear women laugh at one of my films, I think, well, if I brightened their day before they went home and did the dishes, maybe my life wasn't wasted, after all."

"I do! I don't remember ever saying it in a movie, but now, every once in a while when I'm with friends, I say, "Judeeee, Judeeee, Judeeee," and everyone breaks up. Isn't that a good imitation of an imitation of an imitator?"

"My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between times, I occupy myself as best I can."

"On The Awful Truth we just clicked. She'd been a weepie star and comedy was strange to her. She'd do a bit and whisper to me, "Funny?" She was the sweetest smelling of my leading ladies and such a lady. If one of the crew cussed, she'd blush. She claims she was out shopping at Bullocks for a present for her husband and the saleslady said, "I don't think Mr. Grant would like that." In the minds of the public, we were married. Reunions became impossible because we both liked first billing. It's ladies first in rowboats but not in movies, I'm afraid. But I still see her at the races and she still smells wonderful, although it's not ."

"The film I most cared about was a flop. None But the Lonely Heart was the only time I played a character very near myself, a man unsure of himself, a drifter, a rake."

"I’m prepared. I have a gun and I know how to shoot, and whoever comes calling without an invitation will get it in the rear end."

"Do not blame others for your own mistakes. … YOU are Mother Nature. You have the power within you to be thin or fat, as you desire. … God is within you, and you can do and have anything you want. You must love yourself more. … and then … you can love your fellow man."

"Don’t go to extremes. Don’t hate too much and don’t love too much. Try to live somewhere in the middle. Hate destroys the hater. And if you love too much you get too involved and you cannot see too clearly. Love and hate are like night and day. They do exist together and you must accept them both, but you must also understand them and be in control of both emotions. It is peaceful in the middle. You won’t be hurt in the middle."

"It is the law of life that if you are kind to someone you feel happy. If you are cruel you are unhappy. And if you hurt someone, you will be hurt back."

"Anyone can do well … It’s all out there waiting for you to take. But first you must reach out and get it. You must work for your riches. You cannot expect it to fall into your lap."

"You must learn to live within yourself … You must establish the values by which you live. You must first recognize the need, and if it is right you will be amazed at how things will open up."

"When I’m married I want to be single, and when I’m single I want to be married."

"I never dwell on past mistakes… There is too much to plan for the future to waste time complaining. Elsie Mendl was a great friend of mine for many, many years. And I remember the creed by which she lived: Never complain, never explain. Just think of the people you know who are always explaining their mistakes. It merely rubs the whole thing in. You’re reminded again of the mistake. And no one believes the explanation anyway."

"I used to hide behind the façade that was Cary Grant … I didn’t know if I were Archie Leach, or Cary Grant, and I wasn’t taking any chances. … Another thing I had to cure myself of was the desire for adulation, and the approbation of my fellow man. It started when I was a small boy and played football at school. If I did well they cheered me. If I fumbled I was booed. It became very important to me to be liked. It’s the same in the theater, the applause and the laughter give you courage and the excitement to go on. I thought it was absolutely necessary in order to be happy. Now I know how it can change, just like that. They can be applauding you one moment, and booing you the next. The thing to know is that you have done a good job, then it doesn’t hurt to be criticized. My press agent was very indignant over something written about me not too long ago. “Look,” I told him. “I’ve known this character for many years, and the faults he sees in me are really the faults in himself that he hates.”"

"It always amazes me that those who fight for the luxuries of life, are the first to resent those who have them. Also, people seek targets for whatever hurts them, especially their own lack of success. Personally, I regard every knock as a boost."

"Archie Leach was ever so funny and fast."

"Clark Gable is an intensely realistic sexual presence; you don’t fool around with Gable. But with Grant there are no pressures, no demands; he’s the sky that women aspire to. When he and a woman are together, they can laugh at each other and at themselves. He's a slapstick Prince Charming. [. . .] Although Grant is a perfectionist on the set, some of his directors say that he wrecks certain scenes because he won’t do fully articulated passages of dialogue. He wants always to be searching for how he feels; he wants to waffle charmingly. This may be a pain to a scenarist or a director, but in his own terms Grant knows what he’s doing. He's the greatest sexual stooge the screen has ever known; his side steps and delighted stares turn his co-stars into comic goddesses. Nobody else has ever been able to do that."

"God for all anyone knows could be Cary Grant."

"I had written him inquiring as to whether he would be interested in narrating children's stories for a record album, and to my great surprise my secretary told me one day that Cary Grant was on the phone. Like Ms. Nelson, I couldn't believe it, but when I picked up the phone and heard his voice, I had no doubt it was Mr. Grant himself. He apologized about not being able to do the record album, as he was too busy, but that he was really flattered that I had thought of him for such a project. [...] He may have been one of the world's great personalities, but he stayed on the phone with me for at least half an hour, although I, realizing how busy he must have been, tried to make the conversation as brief as possible, but he was such a friendly individual and nice person that he seemed to enjoy chatting, and not rushing a conversation. Cary Grant is certainly someone I wish I had had the opportunity to know and call a friend."

"Love – that is a word you hear often when you are around Cary Grant. … It seems to me that the whole world is his friend. And he is a friend to everyone – when they need one. As Ingrid Bergman did at the time of her out-of-wedlock baby with Rossellini. Cary spoke out for her as he would speak out for anyone he admired, whether it was Ingrid, the President of the United States, or a scrubwoman. He is a potent force for good – for Hollywood, and for all of us. I am always delighted to see Cary Grant, and count myself lucky to be one of his friends."

"Who was her most talented leading man? "Cary Grant," she answers immediately. In 1964, she starred with Grant in the romcom Father Goose; Grant was 27 years her senior. "Cary was a complicated brain," she says, pointing to her head. "He was a remarkable performer. He was very instinctive, seductive, intelligent. But when he got mad he would get into a terrible state. He worried about money." Surely he had plenty of it? Yes, she says, but when you grow up poor you always think like a poor person."

"The first hundred thousand—that was hard to get; but afterwards it was easy to make more."

"Could I begin life again, knowing what I know now, and had money to invest, I would buy every foot of land on the island of Manhattan."

"With all their spies and detective agencies in every part of the world, the English government must be unable to get any really valuable information as to the movements of … Irish Republicans. Thousands upon thousands a year are spent upon secret police; and what is the result of it all? Explosions every other week."

"I proposed that it be called the "Phoenix National Literary Society" &ndash; the word Phoenix signifying that the Irish cause was again to rise from the ashes of our martyred nationality."

"We are the most cosmopolitan race in the whole universe; but Irishmen should have a country; they have a right to the country of their birth. By the use and aid of one steel &ndash; the pen &ndash; our committee have taken possession of that right, and as their title one day may be disputed, I trust they will be able and willing to prove it by the aid of another steel &ndash; the sword."

"This rooting out of the Irish people; this transplanting of them from their native home into a foreign land, may be all very well, so far as the young people are concerned; but for the fathers and mothers who have reared families in Ireland, it is immediate decay and death."

"The one enemy in the world that America has is England. But then, England is the great land of Christian civilization, and it may not be a thing to be much wondered at that our Americans whom we send to represent us in London become in a short time somewhat civilized, and learn to love those who hate them, bless those that curse them, and do good to those that persecute and calumniate them."

"It is in that English Parliament the chains for Ireland are forged, and any Irish patriot who goes into that forge to free Ireland will soon find himself welded into the agency of his country’s subjection to England."

"He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!"

"For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of and for paving the way for Socialism. They have not advanced the cause of Socialism by this propaganda, but have merely smoothed the way for Fascism in Italy, Germany and Austria by causing millions of people to forget that dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation. In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people. … What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of in Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted "necessity of dictatorship" is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and the peasants."

"I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal."

"The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms. The idea that all political and social events are but the result of given economic conditions and can be explained by them cannot endure careful consideration. That economic conditions and the special forms of social production have played a part in the evolution of humanity everyone knows who has been seriously trying to reach the foundations of social phenomena. This fact was well known before Marx set out to explain it in his manner. A whole line of eminent French socialists like Saint–Simon, Considerant, Louis Blanc, Proudhon and many others had pointed to it in their writings, and it is known that Marx reached socialism by the study of these very writings."

"Every process which arises from our physical being and is related to it, is an event which lies outside of our volition. Every social process, however, arises from human intentions and human goal setting and occurs within the limits of our volition. Consequently, it is not subject to the concept of natural necessity. … We are here stating no prejudiced opinion, but merely an established fact. Every result of human purposiveness is of indisputable importance for man's social existence, but we should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous conclusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events. It is doubtless the task of the historian to trace the inner connection of historical events and to make clear their causes and effects, but he must not forget that these connections are of a sort quite different from those of natural physical events and must therefore have quite a different valuation."

"However fully man may recognise cosmic laws he will never be able to change them, because they are not his work. But every form of his social existence, every social institution which the past has bestowed on him as a legacy from remote ancestors, is the work of men and can be changed by human will and action or made to serve new ends. Only such an understanding is truly revolutionary and animated by the spirit of the coming ages. Whoever believes in the necessary sequence of all historical events sacrifices the future to the past. He explains the phenomena of social life, but he does not change them. In this respect all fatalism is alike, whether of a religious, political or economic nature. Whoever is caught in its snare is robbed thereby of life's most precious possession; the impulse to act according to his own needs. It is especially dangerous when fatalism appears in the gown of science, which nowadays so often replaces the cassock of the theologian; therefore we repeat: The causes which underlie the processes of social life have nothing in common with the laws of physical and mechanical natural events, for they are purely the results of human purpose, which is not explicable by scientific methods. To misinterpret this fact is a fatal self-deception from which only a confused notion of reality can result."

"No thinking man in this day can fail to recognise that one cannot properly evaluate an historical period without considering economic conditions. But much more one-sided is the view which maintains that all history is merely the result of economic conditions, under whose influence all other life phenomena have received form and imprint. There are thousands of events in history which cannot be explained by purely economic reasons, or by them alone. It is quite possible to bring everything within the terms of a definite scheme, but the result is usually not worth the effort. There is scarcely an historical event to whose shaping economic causes have not contributed, but economic forces are not the only motive powers which have set everything else in motion. All social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes which, as a rule, can be clearly recognised but cannot be calculated according to scientific methods."

"The will to power which always emanates from individuals or from small minorities in society is in fact a most important driving force in history. The extent of its influence has up to now been regarded far too little, although it has frequently been the determining factor in the shaping of the whole of economic and social life."

"The view which sees in every capitalist only a profit machine may very well meet the demands of propaganda, but it is conceived much too narrowly and does not correspond to reality. Even in modern giant capitalism the power-political interests frequently play a larger part than the purely economic considerations, although it is difficult to separate them from each other... The morbid desire to make millions of men submissive to a definite will and to force whole empires into courses which are useful to the secret purposes of small minorities, is frequently more evident in the typical representatives of modern capitalism than are purely economic considerations or the prospect of greater material profit. The desire to heap up ever increasing profits today no longer satisfies the demands of the great capitalistic oligarchies. Every one of its members knows what enormous power the possession of great wealth places in the hands of the individual and the caste to which he belongs. This knowledge gives a tempting incentive and creates that typical consciousness of mastery whose consequences are frequently more destructive than the facts of monopoly itself."

"Because of his social position there are left no limits to the power lust of the modern capitalist. He can interfere with inconsiderate egoism in the lives of his fellowmen and play the part of Providence for others. Only when we take into consideration this passionate urge for political power over their own people as well as over foreign nations are we able really to understand the character of the typical representatives of modern capitalism. It is just this trait which makes them so dangerous to the social structure of the future."

"This Caesarean madness stops at no barrier. Without compunction it rides roughshod over those achievements of the past which have all too often had to be purchased with the heart's blood of the people. It is always ready to smother with brutal violence the last rights and the last liberties which might interfere with its plans for holding all social activities within the rigid forms set by its will. This is the great danger which threatens us today and which immediately confronts us. The success or failure of monopolistic capitalistic power plans will determine the structure of the social life of the near future."

"We have increased and developed our technical ability to a degree which appears almost fantastic, and yet man has not become richer thereby; on the contrary he has become poorer. Our whole industry is in a state of constant insecurity. And while billions of wealth are criminally destroyed in order to maintain prices, in every country millions of men live in the most frightful poverty or perish miserably in a world of abundance and so-called "overproduction." The machine, which was to have made work easier for men, has made it harder and has gradually changed its inventor himself into a machine who must adjust himself to every motion of the steel gears and levers. And just as they calculate the capacity of the marvellous mechanism to the tiniest fraction, they also calculate the muscle and nerve force of the living producers by definite scientific methods and will not realise that thereby they rob him of his soul and most deeply defile his humanity. We have come more and more under the dominance of mechanics and sacrificed living humanity to the dead rhythm of the machine without most of us even being conscious of the monstrosity of the procedure. Hence we frequently deal with such matters with indifference and in cold blood as if we handled dead things and not the destinies of men."

"To maintain this state of things we make all our achievements in science and technology serve organised mass murder; we educate our youth into uniformed killers, deliver the people to the soulless tyranny of a bureaucracy, put men from the cradle to the grave under police supervision, erect everywhere jails and penitentiaries, and fill every land with whole armies of informers and spies. Should not such "order," from whose infected womb are born eternally brutal power, injustice, lies, crime and moral rottennesslike poisonous germs of destructive plagues gradually convince even conservative minds that it is order too dearly bought?"

"The growth of technology at the expense of human personality, and especially the fatalistic submission with which the great majority surrender to this condition, is the reason why the desire for freedom is less alive among men today and has with many of them given place completely to a desire for economic security. This phenomenon need not appear so strange, for our whole evolution has reached a stage where nearly every man is either ruler or ruled; sometimes he is both. By this the attitude of dependence has been greatly strengthened, for a truly free man does not like to play the part of either the ruler or the ruled. He is, above all, concerned with making his inner values and personal powers effective in a way as to permit him to use his own judgment in all affairs and to be independent in action. Constant tutelage of our acting and thinking has made us weak and irresponsible; hence, the continued cry for the strong man who is to put an end to our distress. This call for a dictator is not a sign of strength, but a proof of inner lack of assurance and of weakness, even though those who utter it earnestly try to give themselves the appearance of resolution. What man most lacks he most desires. When one feels himself weak he seeks salvation from another's strength; when one is cowardly or too timid to move one's own hands for the forging of one's fate, one entrusts it to another. How right was Seume when he said: "The nation which can only be saved by one man and wants to be saved that way deserves a whipping!""

"For the machine, because of the way it is built, can work only in a given direction, no matter who pulls its levers."

"Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union. In place of the present state organisation with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions Anarchists desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interest and shall arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract."

"The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the outgrowth of the same political objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless machine of the political apparatus. Our modern social system has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up into hostile nations; and both classes and nations confront one another with open antagonism and by their ceaseless warfare keep the communal social life in continual convulsions."

"Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished. The stronger its supporters feel themselves, the more completely they succeed in bringing every field of social life into their service, the more crippling is their influence on the operation of all creative cultural forces, the more unwholesomely does it affect the intellectual and social development of any particular epoch."

"Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions, and social conditions. It is, therefore not a fixed, self enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historical development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to broaden its scope and to affect wider circles in manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is interfered with by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown."

"Every culture, if its natural development is not too much affected by political restrictions, experiences a perpetual renewal of the formative urge, and out of that comes an ever growing diversity of creative activity. Every successful piece of work stirs the desire for greater perfection and deeper inspiration; each new form becomes the herald of new possibilities of development."

"Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling. It was from the understanding of this that modern Anarchism was born and now draws its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives. Dreary compulsion has at its command only lifeless drill, which smothers any vital initiative at its birth and can bring forth only subjects, not free men. Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity."

"Ideas do not make a movement; they are themselves merely the product of concrete situations, the intellectual precipitate of particular conditions of life. Movements arise only from the immediate and practical necessities of social life and are never the result of purely abstract ideas. But they acquire their irresistible force and their inner certainty of victory only when they are vitalised by a great idea, which gives them life and intellectual content."

"Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance."

"Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above. Thus, in place of the creative Socialism of the old International, there developed a sort of substitute product which has nothing in common with real Socialism but the name. Socialism steadily lost its character of a cultural ideal, which was to prepare the peoples for the dissolution of capitalist society, and, therefore, could not let itself be halted by the artificial frontiers of the national states. In the minds of the leaders of this new phase of the Socialist movement the interests of the national state were blended more and more with the alleged aims of their party, until at last they became unable to distinguish any definite boundaries between them. So inevitably the labour movement was gradually incorporated in the equipment of the national state and restored to this equilibrium which it had actually lost before."

"For the Anarcho-Syndicalists the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society, it is the germ of the Socialist society of the future, the elementary school of Socialism in general. Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or create new worlds out of nothing. It therefore concerns us to plant these germs while there is still yet time and bring them to the strongest possible development, so as to make the task of the coming social revolution easier and to ensure its permanence. All the educational work of the Anarcho-Syndicalist is aimed at this purpose."

"For the state centralisation is the appropriate form of organisation, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity in social life for the maintenance of political and social equilibrium. But for a movement whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favourable moment and on the independent thought and action of its supporters, centralism could but be a curse by weakening its power of decision and systematically repressing all immediate action … Organisation is, after all, only a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its members and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the characteristic of all bureaucracies."

"It has often been charged against Anarcho-Syndicalism that it has no interest in the political structure of the different countries, and consequently no interest in the political struggles of the time, and confines its activities to the fight for purely economic demands. This idea is altogether erroneous and springs either from outright ignorance or wilful distortion of the facts. It is not the political struggle as such which distinguishes the Anarcho-Syndicalists from the modern labour parties, both in principle and in tactics, but the form of this struggle and the aims which it has in view. They by no means rest content with the ideal of a future society without lordship; their efforts are also directed, even today, at restricting the activities of the state and blocking its influence in every department of social life wherever they see an opportunity. It is these tactics which mark off Anarcho- Syndicalist procedure from the aims and methods of the political labour parties, all of whose activities tend constantly to broaden the sphere of influence of the political power of the state and to extend it in ever increasing measure over the economic life of society."

"Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being. This is not only true in private life, it has always been the same in political life as well. The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength."

"True intellectual culture and the demand for higher interests in life does not become possible until man has achieved a certain material standard of living, which makes him capable of these. Without this preliminary any higher intellectual aspirations are quite out of the question. Men who are constantly threatened by direst misery can hardly have much understanding of the higher cultural values. Only after the workers, by decades of struggle, had conquered for themselves a better standard of living could there be any talk of intellectual and cultural development among them. But it is just these aspirations of the workers which the employers view with deepest distrust. For capitalists as a class, the well-known saying of the Spanish minister, Juan Bravo Murillo, still holds good today:"We need no men who can think among the workers; what we need is beasts of toil.""

"Above all it is necessary to cure the labour movement of its inner ossification and rid it of the empty sloganeering of the political parties, so that it may forge ahead intellectually and develop within itself the creative conditions which must precede the realisation of Socialism. The practical attainability of this goal must become for the workers an inner certainty and must ripen into an ethical necessity. The great final goal of Socialism must emerge from all the practical daily struggles, and must give them a social character. In the pettiest struggle, born of the needs of the moment, there must be mirrored the great goal of social liberation, and each such struggle must help to smooth the way and strengthen the spirit which transforms the inner longing of its bearers into will and deed."

"We came from different worlds, worlds as unrelated and strange to each other as the little town of Slotopol in the Ukraine and the ancient city on the Rhine where I was born. As to how and why life brought us together, a whole story could be written about it without getting closer to the truth. The how may perhaps be explained; the why is as unfathomable as life itself...We found each other, and although each came from an entirely different world, we built a world of our own together. This, alone, was the essence of our union...I lived with her for fifty-eight years. We knew bitter privations and experienced many hardships, but none of them could destroy our quiet happiness. There was something in our life that can hardly be described, a hidden temple which we alone could enter...We had to endure many a malicious thrust of fate, but we also experienced many joyful hours, such as are granted to few and cannot be bought. When we were alone together in our free evenings, I would read aloud to Millie many of the world’s great books. Over the years we enjoyed hundreds of works by writers of every nationality and every period. A unique atmosphere pervaded then our home, exhilarating and purifying...We were never bored with each other, and always found that which was worth while and made life more beautiful. Had Milly been in accord with everything I said, this would not have been possible. But her native intelligence allowed her to form her own opinions on everything, and she was able to express them with skill. When, on such occasions, the discussion became heated, she would suddenly smile, put her arms around me and say: “We really are a funny couple.” At that we would both burst out into happy laughter. We never had to seek the blue bird of happiness afar; it was in our midst...When two people whom fate brought together share a companionship as long as ours, they gradually become inseparable. This happened with us, too. Whenever the name of one was mentioned, the name of the other was echoed. Thus we became the “romantic pair,” as our Spanish friend Tarrida del Marmol once called us in jest."

"Milly was a person with an inherent sense of responsibility, such as one seldom finds, and it is precisely for this reason that she was a truly free human being in everything she thought and did. When she arrived in London, a girl in her teens, she denied herself every extra penny’s worth of food until, after three years, she was at last able to bring her parents and her three sisters from Russia and provide a home for them. The effort required for this can only be appreciated by someone familiar with the unbelievable working conditions which existed in the London ghetto at that time. Doing things of this sort was to Milly a matter of course."

"Milly was a woman of rare stature and nobility who rejected all that was ugly and mean. She was like a mother to her younger friends and comrades; even in her later years she was always surrounded by young people, who loved and revered her. Wherever we lived our modest home was a gathering place for people of different races and nationalities and it was Milly to whom it owed its warmth and charm."

"Milly was a courageous woman who always stood up for her conviction. This she proved during the first World War as well as on numerous other occasions. When, during the war, the English government issued a decree compelling all Russian immigrants in England to enroll in the British army or face deportation to Russia, she immediately joined the protest movement and was promptly arrested. The defense lawyer who was placed at her disposal had, without consulting her, presented a plea in which he endeavored to absolve her of all guilt in the matter. Milly first learned of this statement when her case came up for trial. She immediately lodged a protest and declared: “I am grateful to my attorney for his good intentions but nevertheless declare that I will openly voice my convictions, come what may. I believe that the voice of one’s conscience is the only true forum of justice.” This forthright avowal resulted in her imprisonment for two and a half years, but even her judges had to respect her honesty and courage."

"It was inevitable that some day the hour should come when one of us would have to go. But this is sober logic which cannot lessen the pain of the bereaved. I only know that, with this wonderful woman, something was taken from me that no eternity can bring back. We have all lost her, for, with Milly, one of the last of the old guard has passed away, one who contributed sixty years of her life to a cause that will never die as long as men live on this earth."

"She died on November 23rd, 1955 and was cremated on the 27th in accordance with her wishes. Once when we happened to touch on the subject she said, half in jest: “Perhaps it is all the same to the dead what happens to them but I find it beautiful to be consumed by flames, for fire is a pure element. To be eaten up by worms in the brave is ugly and repugnant to my feelings.” She was right. We went to life together for almost sixty years and my ashes will mingle with hers when my hour comes."

"She opened a door in my heart which had been unknown to me before and which might never have been opened without her. Through the open door came sunshine, came joyous experience and inner peace without which life would be hopelessly distorted. That is why she will always be with me, my companion of so many fruitful and happy years. She stood undismayed through storm and stress and, at the same time was a tender mother to our child. She was a part, and surely the best part of my life. Death may separate us physically, it can never erase her image from my heart or dim the memories of the precious years we spent."

"Rudolph Rocker is known throughout the international revolutionary and Anarchist movement as one of our ablest and most devoted comrades. He is one the most beloved men in our ranks because of his truly beautiful and noble personality. We ourselves have known Rocker for many years and respect, admire, and love him, as indeed he is respected and loved by thousands of comrades in the Anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist movement who have been fortunate enough to meet Rocker as teacher, lecturer, comrade and friend."

"My friends Rudolf and Milly Rocker"

"You will be glad to hear Sasha dear that also Rudolf has started to work, at last: he actually begun to write his memoirs...Never before he was in such a state of spirit and how happy I am to see him in his present state. He is so absorbed by his work that I cannot get him away from the desk. A new spirit came over him, living through once more every phase of his youth. He has only done two chapters by now, but you can tell already that it is going to be a very interesting work, and I hope a valuable document."

"My very worst worries are Rudolf’s tours, they are killing us both. If only we could get along without lecture-tours we would both be happy. But alas, how should we exist? I don’t know how it was at your time here, now lecture tours are physical and mainly mental torture. Rudolf simply loaths it and he is the most miserable man in the world when he is on route. He never enjoyed speaking, but worst of all when he has to lecture in Yiddish or English. The tour begun very miserably, his mood is simply terrible. He was happy at his work, he lived in it, got young once more, and it was a pleasue to see him at his desk. Now he had to put it aside and take up work which instead of being a pleasure is a physical and mental torture, so you can imagine how he must feel."

"The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness."

"The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice."

"Among both the Northern and Eastern Hamites are to be found some of the most beautiful types of humanity."

"And we begin to understand that the goal of life is to die young — as late as possible!"

"The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health."

"Bigotry and science can have no communication with each other, for science begins where bigotry and absolute certainty end. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Let us never forget that tyranny most often springs from a fanatical faith in the absoluteness of one’s beliefs."

"The world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings."

"[C]ircumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society."

"The omelet called “race” has no existence outside the statistical frying- pan in which it has been reduced by the heat of the anthropological imagination."

"What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half."

"A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter."

"There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism."

"I guess I don’t subscribe to the twee school. I remember trying to lose our copy of Thomas the Tank Engine before I had to read it again. Life is a more dimensional and interesting affair than vestigially Victorian notions of childhood. I was trying to make something substantial, something to be read and reread."

"I became a philosophy major literally to understand why I should put up with this shit."

"I was asking the school shrink, 'Has anyone ever told you the top of your head looks like a penis?' I thought that was a really funny thing to tell a bald shrink."

"Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star."

"I never intended it to be for young adults, children, whatever. But over the years I’ve had to change my opinion. When I first got an award from the New York Public Library for best young adult book, I was annoyed, because I thought, “Thirteen years to make a book for adults, and here it is getting a young adult award.” And I’ve had to modify my position over the years because I’ve now met many, many children who have studied it in school, who found it on their own, who were given it by their parents, and it actually is received with a degree of real wisdom in their reading, based on the people I’ve talked to, the young people. So, I give up. Comics are for whoever can understand them."

"I didn't make Maus to teach anyone anything. I wasn't making "Auschwitz for Beginners." And I do not want Maus to ever be used as a recruiting poster for the Israeli army!"

"In his two "comic novels for adults" (not novels in comic book form), Maus and Maus II, he insisted on involving himself with small things, actualities, and remembered events, rather than reach for grand political statements. To present his parents' story and their history accurately and effectively, "it soon became clear that I had to engage myself with the specifically Jewish aspects of my parents' situation. Any universalizing could only be achieved through particulars." It might well be that in the end the most personal is the most gripping, the individual rather than the ideological, the idiosyncratic rather than the general, the specific situation rather than the imposed set of concepts. The popularity of Spiegelman's books does not reside in their curious format but in the thoroughness of the specific story they tell-that of his parents' survival."

"The ultimate goal of all visual artistic activity is construction! Architects, painters and sculptors must learn again to know and understand the multi-faceted form of building in its entirety as well as its parts. Only then will they of their own accord fill their works with the architectonic spirit they have lost in the art of the salon. Let us establish a new guild of craftsmen without the presumption of class distinctions building a wall of arrogance between craftsmen and artists. Together let us call for, devise and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form: architecture, sculpture and painting."

"Art itself cannot be taught, but craftsmanship can. Architects, painters, sculptors are all craftsmen in the original sense of the word. Thus it is a fundamental requirement of all artistic creativity that every student undergo a thorough training in the workshops of all branches of the crafts."

"The mind is like an umbrella - it functions best when open."

"A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy."

"Architecture begins where engineering ends."

"This is what has Gropius the director made the w:Bauhaus famous. Not its lamps or its furniture. They are all out of fashion already. But the way of approaching formal problems or material as such, that has made it famous. And the emphasis on material, especially its capacity is my contribution. That was never cleared between us teachers: Kandinsky did what he thought should be done. Klee developed an absolutely different method. Schlemmer developed absolutely something else."

"I believe in loyalty. When a woman reaches a certain age she likes, she should stick with it."

"What's the use of having a gorgeous outfit if you are not happy?"

"Again, there are other things associated with these matters, all bearing more or less upon the same points. When God selected Joseph Smith to open up the last dispensation, which is called the dispensation of the fullness of times, the Father and the Son appeared to him, arrayed in glory, and the Father, addressing himself to Joseph, at the same time pointing to the Son, said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.""

": December 31, 1876"

": Journal of Discourses 18:325-6"

"When Jesus sent forth his servants formerly he sent them to preach this Gospel. When the Father and the Son and Moroni and others came to Joseph Smith, he had a priesthood conferred upon him which he conferred upon others for the purpose of manifesting the laws of life, the Gospel of the Son of God, by direct authority, that light and truth might be spread forth among all nations."

": March 2, 1879"

": Journal of Discourses 20:257"

"None of them was right, just as it was when the prophet Joseph asked the angel which of the sects was right that he might join it. The answer was that none of them are right. What, none of them? No. we will not stop to argue that question; the angel merely told him to join none of them that none of them were right."

": Journal of Discourses 20:167"

"[A]s a commencement the Lord appeared unto Joseph Smith, both the Father and the Son, the Father pointing to the Son said, "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him" Here then, was a communication from the heavens made known unto man on the earth, and he at that time came into possession of a fact that no man knew in the world but he, and that is that God lived, for he had seen him, and that his Son Jesus Christ lived, for he also had seen him."

": January 4, 1880"

": Journal of Discourses 21:65"

"Fuck Dacre. Publish."

"After all, we are in the entertainment business."

"News — communicating news and ideas, I guess — is my passion. And giving people alternatives so that they have two papers to read (and) alternative television channels."

"Can we change the world? No, but hell, we can all try."

"In this country, Fox News has gotten a big, big audience that appreciates its independence. There's passion there, and it's pushed. … It has taken a long boot time, but it has now changed CNN because it has challenged them — they've become more centrist in their choice of stories. They're trying to become, using our phrase, more fair and balanced."

"I have to admit that until recently I was somewhat wary of the [global] warming debate. But I believe it is now our responsibility to take the lead on this issue."

"The greatest thing to come out of this [the war in Iraq] for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."

"Well, except for ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, the Washington Post, and about another 100 newspapers, I find little evidence of liberal bias in the media."

"Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O'Reilly. He's done certain things to Bill O'Reilly that I believe were way over the line. I think that's bad behavior. But it's okay for him to criticize Bill. And Bill shouldn't be so sensitive. He should ignore that."

"They’ve started it. We’ve had bitter, personal attack on some of our people. They tried to destroy our credibility as a network. But it is only natural that the people can stand who were personally attacked and their children were personally attacked should fight back and I support them. I support my people completely."

"While it's impossible to be completely prepared for a downturn of this magnitude, we began priming ourselves for a weakening economy earlier last year. We have implemented strict cost cutting measures across all our operations. We have reduced headcount in individual businesses where appropriate and we've scaled back on capital expenditures. Even in plush times, we have never been a company that tolerates fat. So in times like these, we are better positioned to weather this cycle than our competitors."

"People are reading news for free on the web, that's got to change."

"Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic."

"What a fucking idiot."

"The current American political debate is profound, whether about education or welfare or economic opportunity. It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate, but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past. The past is the past, and the country is now in a contest to define the future."

"I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I'm happy"

"We're both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together"

"Media conglomerates like Murdoch’s News Corp. are among the most powerful corporations on the planet. His papers beat the drums for war while distracting with gossip and glitz."

"Murdoch runs his media empire in the US as an unvarnished political operation."

"I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. "That's easy", he replied. "When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.""

"It seems hard to believe today, but as recently as 2008, tackling climate change still had a veneer of bipartisan support, even in the United States...in 2007, Rupert Murdoch-whose Fox News channel relentlessly amplifies the climate change denial movement-launched an incentive program at Fox to encourage employees to buy hybrid cars (Murdoch announced he had purchased one himself). Those days of bipartisanship are decidedly over."

"Rupert Murdoch, a right-wing billionaire, is one of the most powerful people on the planet. His News Corporation owns enormous amounts of media throughout the world, including the major newspapers on three continents-North America, Europe, and Australia. In the United States, Murdoch's major holdings include Fox television, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, TV Guide, and Barron's. At a time when scientists speak in an increasingly urgent tone about the planetary crisis of climate change, Murdoch works in tandem with the fossil fuel industry in rejecting science."

"Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama's birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump's rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems."

"When I was in hospital I found I could hardly read or writ. In these circumstances I began to write poems. I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. One night I dreamed I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine gun fire. The next morning I wrote it out , Carentan O Caretan, and as I wrote I realized it was not a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire"

"Where is the Mississippi panorama And the girl who played the piano? Where are you, Walt? The Open Road goes to the used-car lot."

"All that grave weight of America Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome. The future in ruins! JH Honesty seems to me to be the best legacy I can leave the world."

"It's complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem."

"For people may not know what they think about politics in the Balkans, or the vexed question of men and women, but everyone has a definite opinion about the flavour of shredded coconut."

"I did not wish to protest against war. My object was to remember. I wanted people to find in my poems the truth of what it had been like to be an American infantry soldier. Now I see I was writing a memorial of those years, for the me I had known, who were silent."

"People are always dying in the Times who don't seem to die in other papers, and they die at greater length and maybe even with a little more grace."

"Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news."

"The rising power of the United States in world affairs … requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism.... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side in the present world struggle but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities of the changing and convulsive world in which American policy must operate."

"In foreign policy you have to wait twenty-five years to see how it comes out."

"He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them."

"Governments are the only vessels that leak from the top"

"I wonder when I hear people scoffing at the four freedoms and wondering whether wars, after all, ever really settle anything. Do we, even now, understand the revolutionary nature of this war? Are we putting everything to the test; will it help win the war? Are we clear on the enormity of our task? Do we realize the size of the stakes?"

""We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Could anything be more in conflict with the fundamental philosophy of the totalitarian states? These states do not agree that there are any truths in this paragraph; they deny most vehemently and have taken up the sword to prove that all men are not created equal, but that they, the master races, have the right and duty to dictate to the lesser men of the world; they do not concede that man has any "unalienable Rights" except his right to bear arms and carry out the will of the God-state; and they deny him not only his liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but his life as well."

"The second paragraph of the Declaration continues: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." This clearly is the very antithesis of the totalitarian belief. Those governments were not instituted to secure these individual rights for their people. Neither the Nazis nor the Japanese militarists nor the Fascists of Italy derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," and their concentration camps and common graves are full of people who even dared to suggest that the people had any right to criticize let alone to alter or abolish, the existing regimes."

"These are the thing we are really talking about when we speak of "our way of life"; and these are precisely the things that are at stake in this war. For the Germans have denied every democratic and Christian principle that has been handed down to us and preserved and developed in this great republic. The Greeks gave us the idea of intellectual liberalism, Plato the conception of reason, yet the Nazis deny their right to exist. Christ gave us the doctrine of love and mercy, but the Germans scorn Christ as a Jew and scoff at love and mercy. The French confirmed our faith in democracy with their cry of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," yet the Germans dismiss this as a hypocritical slogan to be opposed, as Hitler's pal Hans von Bülow has said, by their "Prussian realities of Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery." The Romans and British gave us our conception of the "rule of law and the sanctity of treaties," and we have known for years what the totalitarians thought of these fundamental virtues. We in the United States have given all these honorable things a worthy home and have proved to the world what can be done by heroic men whose minds are free to question and experiment, to seek truth according to their own conscience, and to listen sympathetically to the most unorthodox views."

"But we must understand that these are not permanent things. Democracy is no heirloom to be possessed and passed on like a Governor Winthrop desk. It is "an endowment like life that must be purchased in every generation." Sympathy and reason and true democracy can be destroyed overnight. They can be destroyed by a conqueror, as in Norway; they can be taken from us by our own selfishness, as in France. Every bureaucrat who tampers with freedom of the press, every newspaper publisher who willfully suppresses or distorts or minimizes the truth; every unreasonable citizen who nurses his own prejudices and refuses to listen sympathetically to the other fellow's point of view, is, we must clearly understand, endangering these principles for which we are fighting. Never before in the history of the republic has it been so important that we understand this fact, for in time of war these principles are often threatened at the top by a small minority of officials who would curtail our freedom to know, and at the bottom by a number of people who, even in the face of the enemy, cannot shelve their own prejudices or abandon the interests of their particular groups."

"The root of the trouble lies, I think, in the military situation. We do not like this unprecedented parade of bad news; we don't like to get shoved around all over the world; so we are complaining bitterly about almost everything. But neither do the British like it, and neither do the Russians, nor the Chinese, nor the Dutch, who have had to take a lot more than we have. Adverse criticism of our allies will not help our military situation. It does no good to complain now about Singapore; that milk has been well and truly spilt. It does even less good to meditate on King George III, or the last World War, or the war debts, or the unfortunate accents and manners of certain officials sent out here from Whitehall. I have not read any adverse criticism in the British press about Pearl Harbor (what would we have said if they had got caught like that at Alexandria or Gibraltar or Scapa Flow?); I have heard no attacks in the House of Commons on our naval dispositions or on the size of our expeditionary forces; I have heard of very few recriminations about our failure to be ready for war despite our years of criticizing British unpreparedness."

"Why, then, all the sniping over here? We are not doing anybody any favors in this war. This is no exercise in knight-errantry. The Russians and the British are doing just as much for us as we are doing for them. They need our weapons and what men we can send; we need their help, and we need it desperately if we are ever to win this war. If most of the people who are doing most of he complaining had their own way with our foreign policy, we might not have had any allies today, and unless we had wanted to connive with the Japs at the destruction of China, the Netherlands Indies, and the British Empire, we should still have been attacked at Pearl Harbor. There was only one honorable course on December 7, and we chose it; there is only one honorable course now, and that is to be helpful or to be quiet."

"I have heard it often- that if the conquered peoples of Europe do not like our democracy the way it is, they can go fly a kite. It is absolutely true that a great majority of us found the old life very comfortable and would like to go back to the "normality" that produced it; but... we destroyed that "normality" trying to save our lives and cannot now go back to it any more than we can turn 1943 back into 1938. Nor can we tell the conquered peoples of Europe to go fly a kite if they do not like our democracy, because we need their help and will need it desperately before the war is over, and in order to get it we shall have to remove the doubts that are in their minds. That means that the people of America must look forward and not backward. That means that we must prove that our democracy is just as efficient as the totalitarian creed of our enemies. That means that we must make democracy live up to its promises. "Most governments," said Abraham Lincoln, "have been based on the denial of the equal rights of men; ours began by affirming those rights. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us. Look at it- think of it." The democracy of Lincoln is not dead. It has not lost its revolutionary fervor. It has not lost its appeal to the men of the world. Our problem is to prove that we really believe in it."

"A great number of people in this country do not even take the Atlantic Charter seriously. They think it is some jiggery-pokery trumped up by Roosevelt and Churchill to propagandize their meeting at sea in 1941. They do not see it for what it should be: an extension of the Rights of Man, and another logical step in the fulfillment of the purpose of this nation. The scornful conception of the Atlantic Charter and of all other attempts to state our purpose will not do. For unless the spirit of the people is behind these declarations, they will have no true value. The essence of patriotism is in believing in the principles of America. Either you believe in the equalitarian idea behind this republic or you do not. Either you believe in Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" or you do not. Either you believe in liberty, justice, and right, or you do not. If you do, then our appeal to the revolutionary spirit of the world will be heard, but if you do not, all the Atlantic Charters in the world will not inspire the conquered nations to fight for principles that we proclaim but do not follow."

"A special target of examination ought to be how societies differ in making room for pauses in the midst of life, for it is during such pauses that individuals are able to appraise the meaning of what they have undergone."

"In contrast to the flux and muddle of life, art is clarity and enduring presence. In the stream of life, few things are perceived clearly because few things stay put. Every mood or emotion is mixed or diluted by contrary and extraneous elements. The clarity of art—the precise evocation of mood in the novel, or of summer twilight in a painting—is like waking to a bright landscape after a long fitful slumber, or the fragrance of chicken soup after a week of head cold."

"America is a much newer experiment in human living, one with moral concerns at its core. In this respect it differs from Europe, which has preferred sophistication and worldly wisdom to "righteousness," and resembles China, which saw the universe itself as essentially a moral order. However materialistic Americans may be in their economic pursuits, their ceremonies emphasize the material far less than European societies have. America has imposing official architecture. Washington, D.C., boasts a radial baroque stateliness. Yet one of its most important buildings, the White House, is a modest dwelling, its scale far smaller than that of the palaces of Europe and Asia."

"Young children distinguish between good people and bad people, but, unless explicitly taught, they do not distinguish between foreigner and native."

"...the Oxford system, which did not require students to take set courses or be tested except at the end of three years, encouraged them to read widely, attend public lectures on all sorts of subjects, and above all, talk to one another in small gatherings until dawn breaks or until they ran out of shillings to put in the gas meter. Without knowing it I acquired a well-rounded, if undisciplined, liberal arts education."

"Unlike a small village, the city speaks loud and clear of history, of being the terminus of a long, cumulative process."

"Children learn early in life that they cannot always count on their parents’ attention much less their smiles, a lesson in human unpredictability that has to be learned over and over again."

"for humans, no matter what the warmth and duration of human contact and what the size of the group, a periodic sense of isolation is inescapable; it is no less than the human condition."

"The ease with which a man can lose his sense of self-worth and fall into the pit of self-abasement is a deeply disturbing psychological fact. Asymmetry of power doesn’t have to be extreme for it to happen. All that is required is for it to seem implacable."

"Only God creates ex nihilo. Humans can only create out of something that already exists, which means there has to be an earlier destruction phase."

"Ideally, society is a dance, and every society has its own choreography that is passed down the generations."

"At the highest level of achievement, classical music has the feel of an intimate conversation between two individuals and a mass celebration of our common humanity."

"Stars define civilization, as no single natural feature on Earth--tree, rock, stream, or mountain--can be said to define cultures."

"Words designate, but they also evoke a sense of something, and, when they do, they function as metaphors. ...Metaphors enrich life, making it more vivid."

"We may speak loosely of a ‘sense of time,’ but there is no such sensory organ. Time is something we experience and construct. Time is experienced--is felt--when we wait, expect, or hope."

"To forgive is to erase a past, depriving it of its power to stain the present."

"We have no trouble naming the basic physical needs of food, shelter, and sex, nor the basic social needs of care, respect, and love. Can there also be a spiritual need that goes beyond even love as it is commonly understood to something for which the words that most readily come to mind are goodness, the Good, or God? Absent food, shelter, and sex, we die. Absent care, respect, and love, we live--barely. Absent that deep and insatiable spiritual yearning for the Good that certain stories and fables prefigure? We live, and indeed we may live well, in full, societal approbation and self-congratulatory glow, except, perhaps, in those uncanny moments--the sudden chill in the air, a pinched feeling in the heart, or even a stumble over the curb that reminds us of the abyss beneath the pavement on which we so unconcernedly walk."

"People who have ‘music’ in their souls are fun to be with."

"If each person can achieve greatness, so can each fall into baseness."

"Experience takes time and calls for patience."

"We think of the house as home and place, but enchanted images of the past are evoked not so much by the entire building, which can only be seen, as by its components and furnishings, which can be touched and smelled as well: the attic and the cellar, the fireplace and the bay window, the hidden corners, a stool, a gilded mirror, a chipped shelf."

"The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires, and cramped when it frustrates them."

"Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act."

"The word routine suggests the humdrum and the inconsequential; however, unlike the routines of workplace and office, those of home are not inconsequential for they're dictated by the cyclical requirements of biological life."

"The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination."

"In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions."

"The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it."

"To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed."

"It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it."

"National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills."

"It must never be forgotten, however, that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment. Back of the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of an appeal to reason by all the peaceful means for gaining access to the mind. It was in order to avert force and explosions due to restrictions upon rational modes of communication that the guarantee of free speech was given a generous scope. But utterance in a context of violence can lose its significance as an appeal to reason and become part of an instrument of force. Such utterance was not meant to be sheltered by the Constitution."

"Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize."

"Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess."

"The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines."

"No court can make time stand still."

"A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas."

"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards. And the effective administration of criminal justice hardly requires disregard of fair procedures imposed by law."

"One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic."

"Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?"

"After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything."

"In any event, mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent."

"A free press is vital to a democratic society because its freedom gives it power. Power in a democracy implies responsibility in its exercise. No institution in a democracy, either governmental or private, can have absolute power. Nor can the limits of power which enforce responsibility be finally determined by the limited power itself. See Carl L. Becker, Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life (1945). In plain English, freedom carries with it responsibility even for the press; freedom of the press is not a freedom from responsibility for its exercise. Most State constitutions expressly provide for liability for abuse of the press' freedom. That there was such legal liability was so taken for granted by the framers of the First Amendment that it was not spelled out. Responsibility for its abuse was imbedded in the law. The First Amendment safeguarded the right. [...] The press does have the right, which is its professional function, to criticize and to advocate. The whole gamut of public affairs is the domain for fearless and critical comment, and not least the administration of justice. But the public function which belongs to the press makes it an obligation of honor to exercise this function only with the fullest sense of responsibility. Without such a lively sense of responsibility, a free press may readily become a powerful instrument of injustice."

"The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation."

"It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end."

"If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process."

"In law also the emphasis makes the song."

"The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals."

"It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation."

"Decisions of this Court do not have equal intrinsic authority."

"If one starts with the assumption that, in the absence of specific Congressional authority, a fixed rule of law precludes contracting officers from providing in a Government contract terms reasonably calculated to assure its performance even though there be no money loss through a particular default, there is no problem. But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one."

"If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors.""

"After all, this is the Nation's ultimate judicial tribunal, nor a super-legal-aid bureau."

"The indispensable judicial requisite is intellectual humility."

"A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will."

"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late."

"Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity."

"There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men."

"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people."

"It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals."

"The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind."

"[It is anomalous] to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach."

"The process of education has naturally enough been the basis of hope for the perdurance of our democracy on the part of all our great leaders, from Thomas Jefferson onwards. To regard teachers—in our entire educational system, from the primary grades to the university—as the priests of our democracy is therefore not to indulge in hyperbole. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion. Teachers must fulfill their function by precept and practice, by the very atmosphere which they generate; they must be exemplars of open-mindedness and free inquiry. They cannot carry out their noble task if the conditions for the practice of a responsible and critical mind are denied to them."

"The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them."

"A license cannot be revoked because a man is redheaded or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which redheadedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids."

"Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light."

"While it is not always profitable to analogize "fact" to "fiction," La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach."

"Lincoln's appeal to "the better angels of our nature" failed to avert a fratricidal war. But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln's first and second inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable."

"Time and experience have forcefully taught that the power to inspect dwelling places, either as a matter of systematic area-by-area search or, as here, to treat a specific problem, is of indispensable importance in the maintenance of community health; a power that would be greatly hobbled by the blanket requirement of the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts."

"Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body."

"Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth."

"In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives."

"Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate."

"The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs."

"In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one."

"Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship."

"No judge writes on a wholly clean slate."

"It is true of opinions as of other compositions that those who are seeped in them, whose ears are sensitive to literary nuances, whose antennae record subtle silences, can gather from their contents meaning beyond the words. All this presupposes, of course, a grasp of the nature of the Supreme Court's functions — the scope and limits of its constitutional authority — and often, as well, familiarity with the record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion is under scrutiny."

"The words of the Constitution … are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life."

"What becomes decisive to a Justice's functioning on the Court in the large area within which his individuality moves is his general attitude toward law, the habits of the mind that he has formed or is capable of unforming, his capacity for detachment, his temperament or training for putting his passion behind his judgment instead of in front of it. The attitudes and qualities which I am groping to characterize are ingredients of what compendiously might be called dominating humility."

"One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero."

"The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort."

"I came into the world a Jew, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Jew, I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Jew. I don’t want to … turn my back on a great and noble heritage."

"All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them."

"As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard."

"For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule."

"Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today."

"I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School."

"Morals are three-quarters manners."

"Holmes said Emerson had a beautiful voice, and, of course, Holmes had one of the most beautiful voices the Lord ever put into a throat."

"Emerson said to him, "Young man, have you read Plato?" Holmes said he hadn't. "You must. You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'" Holmes said, "That's the lesson of independence." So off he went and read Plato for a few moths or a year, and then wrote a piece doing in Mr. Plato in one of those ephemeral literary things at Harvard. He laid this, as it were, at the feet of Mr. Emerson and awaited the next morning's mail, hoping to get a warm appreciation from Emerson. And the next day and the next and the next — no sign of life. No acknowledgment from Mr. Emerson. Holmes didn't see him again for about a year. When he saw him, this, that, and the other thing was again talked about. Emerson said, "Oh, by the way, I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him." Holmes said, "That was the second great lesson — humility.""

"I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling."

"In shape, it is perfectly elliptical. In texture, it is smooth and lustrous. In color, it ranges from pale alabaster to warm terra cotta. And in taste, it outstrips all the lush pomegranates that Swinburne was so fond of sinking his lyrical teeth into."

"Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught."

"The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams."

"The beauty of “spacing” children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones — which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones."

"An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run."

"Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder — and turn quickly to my typewriter."

"The principal difference between love and hate is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. All the fearful counterfeits of love — possessiveness, lust, vanity, jealousy — are closer to hate: they concentrate on the object, guard it, suck it dry."

"The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion."

"The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war."

"A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably excuses himself to himself by saying, "I'm only human, after all.""

"When I hear somebody sigh that "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?""

"Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."

"A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future."

"We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.”"

"People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault."

"Everyone admits that "the truth hurts" but no one applies this adage to himself — and as soon as it begins to hurt us, we quickly repudiate it and call it a lie. It is this tendency toward self-deception (more than any active sin) that makes human progress slow and almost imperceptible."

"Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us."

"Young people know less than we do, but they understand more; their perception has not yet been blunted by compromise, fatigue, rationalization, and the mistaking of mere respectability for morality."

"There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself."

"Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason; because, though rational argument may take us to the edge of belief, we require a "leap of faith" to jump the chasm."

"Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest,” but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is."

"Superior people are only those who let it be discovered by others; the need to make it evident forfeits the very virtue they aspire to."

"The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.""

"Work and play are an artificial pair of opposites, because the best kind of play contains an element of work, and the most productive kind of work must include something of the spirit of play."

"Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure."

"The most worthwhile form of education is the kind that puts the educator inside you, as it were, so that the appetite for learning persists long after the external pressure for grades and degrees has vanished. Otherwise you are not educated; you are merely trained."

"Freud's prescription for personal happiness as consisting of work and love must be taken with the proviso that the work has to be loved, and the love has to be worked at."

"A general practitioner is a doctor who treats what you've got; a specialist is a doctor who finds you've got what he treats."

"We are just beginning to learn that our same old habits, like the exploitation of nonrenewable resources, may make us at one with the auk and the dodo."

"Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify. Some people have easy temperaments and weak characters; others have difficult temperaments and strong characters. We are all prone to confuse the two in assessing people we associate with. Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable. Of course, the optimum for a person is to possess both an easy temperament and a strong character, but this is a rare combination, and few of us are that lucky. The people who get things done tend to be prickly, and the people we enjoy being with tend to be accepting, and there seems to be no way to get around this. Obviously, there are many combinations of character and temperament, in varying degrees, so that this is only a rough generalization — but I think it is one worth remembering when we make personal judgments."

"The core in the mystery of what we call personality resides in the individual mix between character and temperament. The most successful personalities are those who achieve the best balance between the strict demands of character and the lenient tolerance of temperament. This balance is the supreme test of genuine leadership, separating the savior from the fanatic. The human Jesus is, to my mind, the ultimate paradigm of such psychic equilibrium. He was absolutely hard on himself and absolutely tender toward others. He maintained the highest criteria of conduct for himself but was not priggish or censorious or self-righteous about those who were weaker and frailer. Most persons of strength cannot accept or tolerate weakness in others. They are blind to the virtues they do not possess themselves and are fiercely judgmental on one scale of values alone. Jesus was unique, even among religious leaders, in combining the utmost of principle with the utmost of compassion for those unable to meet his standards. We need to understand temperament better than we do and to recognize its symbiotic relationship to character. There are some things people can do to change and some things they cannot do — character can be formed, but temperament is given. And the strong who cannot bend are just as much to be pitied as the weak who cannot stiffen."

"The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph."

"Most have simply washed their hands of the problem, claiming that the bigotry or bias on Wikipedia is just an unfortunate side-effect that we have to accept. But this is not a trivial unintended consequence of an open source system; bias goes against the very principle of Wikipedia and must be addressed. I have to deal with this bias and misinformation every time a journalist interviews me and references my Wikipedia article. I need to spend the first 30 minutes of interviews to correct all the misleading information from my Wikipedia article... Most of the skeptic editors on my article believe me to be a very dangerous man — and believe that it is Wikipedia’s responsibility to warn the world of how dangerous my ideas are."

"Reagan was on the rise, the anti-war movement had sunk to a low ebb, and the New Age was barely christened when The Aquarian Conspiracy appeared in 1980. Overnight Marilyn Ferguson’s book became famous and sold in the millions. I was a young doctor who had just learned to meditate when I picked up a dog-eared paperback copy at a Catskill spiritual retreat. Ferguson’s message shot through me like electricity: a “benign conspiracy” was bringing about the greatest shift in consciousness in the twentieth century. In one stroke Ferguson unified a movement that seemed like small, isolated outposts on the fringes of respectable society. Ferguson was a uniter and a futurist. By showing feminists what they shared with environmentalists, New Age spiritual seekers with peace activists, her book inspired a movement that didn’t define the future in terms of technology. She was a one-woman movement for hope. She promised every voice in the wilderness that there were a thousand other voices like theirs."

"It’s time to rescue "intelligent design" from the politics of religion. There are too many riddles not yet answered by either biology or the Bible, and by asking them honestly, without foregone conclusions, science could take a huge leap forward."

"To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn't make you a Christian fundamentalist. Einstein said as much, and a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle has been seriously considered by Stephen Hawking, among others."

"Laughter is Humanity's mechanism to escape suffering."

"Buddha didn’t teach that life hurts because of pain; it hurts because the cause of suffering hasn’t been examined."

"Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. The past is closed and limited; the future is open and free."

"To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions."

"At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover."

"In the case of Chopra, our analysis need not be very profound: he is a spiritual businessman, and will never take a principled stand if it comes in the way of his business success. A soft and conformistic stance gives him easier access to the Western audience, as well as to a large chunk of the Hindu diaspora. The factor “inferiority complex” plays a part too. It makes Hindu Gurus suddenly feel superior when they have exchanged Hindu Dharma for the American mainstream. But mainly it is a pragmatic calculation. They don’t expect most of the kind of people they attract to be very interested in the intricacies of philosophy. Most of them have run away from Christianity, which is not just irrational, it is also demanding, morally and to an extent even intellectually. So they want something that is not too complicated nor too demanding. What they ultimately get is what they had wanted upon entry: an easy, watered-down version of Hindu Dharma."

". . . the Negro in Africa had reared mighty empires, and astonishingly advanced achievements are linked with his race in the annals of mankind."

". . . You have discovered the class struggle, or rather its reflection, in the ranks of the party."

". . . The imperialism of the bureaucratic-collectivist states is different from that of the capitalist states. But the economic motive forces behind the one are no less powerful than in the case of the other. Only ignoramuses – people who know nothing about history and nothing about Lenin's theory of imperialism – can conceive of imperialism as a phenomenon unique to capitalist society."

". . . Neither Washington nor Moscow but the Third Camp of Independent Socialism!"

"I will only make pictures that I won't be ashamed to have my children see."

"You know how I'm smart? I got people around me who know more than I do."

"The number one book of the ages was written by a committee, and it was called The Bible."

"Don't make these pictures any better. Just keep them the way they are."

"The best part of being on the stage was that I didn't have to go back to that mean Mr. Mayer after he tried to ruin my career."

"The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan gave us the Taliban. The American occupation of Saudi Arabia gave us bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon gave us Hezbollah. Let us see what the American occupation of Iraq is going to give us."

"I have lived half of my life in "Western society" and never encountered those principles [listed by the NYT as "Western" ]. What is wrong with me. … So Mr. Bush stands for "gender equality, religious freedom, scientific inquiry and the rule of law" and I have never noticed?"

"Paris Hilton gets more coverage than Congo, Darfur, Palestine, and Nahr Al-Barid combined."

"The left hand of creation"

"The Infinite has to be a relative concept. Go any distance: an infinite space means that there is more to be explored."

"Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke."

"Science is paramount, but presents no challenge to a creed that rests on faith-based belief."

"The beauty of science and the nature of scientific revelations constitute part of the modern theologian's perspective and toolbox."

"Four predictions of the Big Bang Theory have now been verified - surely enough to quench even the most biased critics."

"One can always find inflationary models to explain whatever phenomenon is represented by the flavour of the month."

"Nowadays, cosmology seems rather unexciting."

"I've kind of made Jack a hero that I would like to have looked up to as a little boy because as a little boy, I knew I was gay but I didn't know what it was. Didn't know who to talk to about it. … I wanted kids to like him, and I wanted women, men, I wanted everyone to like him. But first I wanted people to hate him. I wanted them to think he was arrogant and pushy and too sure of himself. And I wanted them to follow the arc of the change he went through in the final episodes of Doctor Who."

"Cher had just been to see Sunset Boulevard. She hunted me down the next day through management to ask me out to dinner. I wouldn't break my first date with Scott which felt like the chance of a lifetime, so after a pause she said, "Fine, bring him." I drove my car, Scott rode his bike. Scott parked his bike down the street. And we all met up, and we had dinner with Cher, and we had a fab time. At the end of the evening she said to me: "Walk me to my car, you'll love it." As we're walking to the car arm in arm, the photographers just come out of… the bushes, you name it. And we walk to the car and she leanes over and she goes "When I get in the car, give me a kiss." And I'm like "Fine." – What gay man wouldn't want to give Cher a kiss? So we kiss and they catch it just at that moment. The next day in the tabloids I was her new toyboy. But little did they know that the boy with the bicycle who walked out after us went and unhooked his bike, I put her in the car, went off, got my Jag, opened the trunk, put his bike in the trunk and I took him home. That would've been the story! —And he stayed. For 18 years now."

"You can be in the public eye all the time and still have a private life, but the important thing is to keep in touch with the people who put you there."

"Two men as two women and as a man and a woman can have a loving relationship and make a commitment. And that's what marriage is about."

"It's taken me 30 years to get this way, and I don't intend to let go. I work hard, but I play hard, too, and that's the one part of me that nobody sees. But I intend to be around for a long time yet."

"You have to work hard in the industry. I didn't come into the industry and into the business and to do what I do to become famous. But I knew in the back of my head that if fame came along with it, that was a blessing. I love when someone recognizes me or wants an autograph. But for me it was about working rather than being a "star"."

"Personally, in my home life it's the same, but professionally it's different. I'm not having to fight or push as much to get in to be seen for TV shows or for films. The calls are coming in. Also the fans are great. I love them and I am one myself."

"I would love to lecture to women on men. I'd tell them everything about men: gay, straight, bi, how we're all the same, how we're all bastards."

"I would wish that people would accept people for who they are, not be judgemental, allow people to live their lives and enjoy themselves and that would be my wish for people."

"When I first came into the industry I thought, why do you need to know if I'm gay? Why do you need to have a definition of somebody before you find out who they are and what they are as a person and what they can do in the performance of their job? What they do in their bedroom or who they love does not define who they are as an individual or human being! Because we all love different people. There are so many young men and women in society at the moment who have that struggle. But not they are tormented inside; it is because of what they are hearing around them. And these people who claim to be Christians are telling these young men and women that they are wrong. That they are evil. That they should not love. That they were not made this way. How dare you make that judgement? It hurts me and it upsets me when I hear people who say they are Christians who aren't saying very nice things about other people"

"I love Christmas. I work in Pantomime over the christmas period. On christmas eve I always say to the audience: "Let's celebrate the birth of a child and the start of a new beginning. Let's all sing Silent Night." And we all start singing and halfway through it everybody on the stage is just in tears. Calm comes across everybody. And there is no judgement, there is no anger. It is everybody sitting and thinking about one tiny thing but thinking about it all together and being one with each other. It's just incredible."

"Jodie Prenger: We are still in a generation where people are scared of who they really want to be. And the way John is just proud and so comfortable in himself, I think is great. I think it is giving people total inspiration to be who they are. He is genuinely just your regular guy with a big heart that loves doing what he does."

"Myleene Klass: You've got to be incredibly, incredibly brave to be yourself — that's what's great about John. He can sing, he can dance, he can act, he can do it all. He's got this sort of cheeky persona, he knows how to laugh, he knows how to enjoy life. But I think that stems from somewhere a lot deeper, and that's his real closeness to his family. And that becomes apparent immediately. He is such a positive person and it's infectious."

"Bernard Cribbins OBE: He's a bit like Tigger. He bounces around a lot [laughs]. I first met him in Anything Goes in 1989. All I saw were teeth on this very tall good-looking young man, and this broad Glaswegian accent."

"David Tennant: It was great when John came on set because he's John! In all honesty, having John around is always enormous fun. He's a constant… he's like a Roman candle of effervescent life. And that goes back to a story I am not telling you as well since there's children in the room."

"Willa Holland: Most of the time you've just got to sit back and watch John do John 'cause it's just one of the most amazing things you could ever witness in your life. And then a lot of times he brings you into it and you can't say no. It's kind of 50/50 at the end of each take. But regardless, every time we work together it's pretty hard to focus on the job at hand. For example, when we were shooting the scene where I actually was shooting him, we did a few rehearsals and I can't remember exactly what he was doing but it was kind of the look on his face and just this weird smile that he would give to me and I just could not take it seriously. It's kind of amazing. I mean, just picture John."

"Stephen Amell: It's not that he pulls pranks. He's not like a prankster. It's not like all of a sudden I go put on the Arrow suit and it's filled with A535 or something like that. Although that would be pretty funny. It's more that there's just… You know, you've been to a panel? John's panels typically are called Anything Goes. Anything goes! Anything! John Barrowman gets away with more stuff than I've ever seen anyone get away with just because there's never a filter. So the expectation is: he really could be behind me right now. Would anybody be surprised? Exactly. He can always be around the corner. That's how I live my life. Barrowman is always standing behind me waiting to strike. Yeah, he's just a good guy. To pick your favourite thing or the funniest thing that John Barrowman has done is like picking your favourite flavour of ice cream. You can… but they're all so good! Why would you want just one? And to that end I've learned a lot of lessons from John. And I mean principally… I mean A) How to be the lead of a show. You know, he was the first guy that I really got to… I got to pick his brain. God, there's nothing I can say about him that can't be turned into something filthy. I hadn't been the lead of a show, so to hear about his experiences on Torchwood and then just in general to watch the way that he carries himself, to watch the level of respect he has for the crew, to watch the fact that his energy never changes, right? If they held a camera on John and we were on stage, I want you to tell me: is it ten o'clock on monday morning or is it four o'clock on friday morning? Tell me. You can't! 'Cause he's always the same. He always brings that same level of energy and professionalism and just joy to work and he carries that through with, you know, he and I hanging out in Palm Springs or we have these Con weekends. It's just great. I love John. I miss him."

"Eve Myles: He walks into a room and he demands attention without doing a single thing. He's an incredible singer, he's a wonderful dancer, he's a wonderful actor. That, and he's a smashing presenter 'cause he's great with people. It's not work to John. […] John Barrowman is always going to be an entertainer in some form or another. He was going to be either on the stage, or the screen, or a presenter, or a writer… something that allows him to make other people feel good. […] His family are everything to him. And he'd be the first person to say, if someone would say something that wasn't true or that was upsetting him or somebody that he cared for or loved, he'd be the first one there."

"James Marsters: I love John Barrowman. I think he's a great guy. He saved my ass more than once. Really, properly saved my job on that show one time: On the first episode during that kissing/fighting scene I blew a gag. When we went through the glass, I took the wrong angle and I got cut. But I didn't want anyone to know that I blew the gag because if you blow the gag, they're gonna send a stuntman in and you'll never get back on the set. So, the next day comes and I'm still bleeding through the costume. And John spots it and he comes up and he goes, "Dude, go to your trailer. I'll get you a doctor. Just go. Go, go, go." And the director is like "Where are you going?" so John goes to talk to him. Then he got his own personal physician to come and stitch me up, helped me take the stain out of my costume, get me back on set – no one knew anything. So, John is the man! In all honesty, I'd rather kiss John than anybody else I ever had to kiss 'cause I trust that man. I really don't feel sexy when I'm filming a love scene, it's always quite surgical because of the lighting and camera angles and it's just a very strange situation especially for me. Because if someone says "Okay, kiss him!" and then shouts "Action!" and you are getting paid for it, what is your profession? […] So for me it really is a very uncomfortable day whenever you shoot that stuff. And so what you really want is someone that you trust and feel comfortable with and someone who you really think has your back as a friend. Some people like to pull pranks and make fun of you in these situations. […] Now, on the other end of it you get John Barrowman: Usually John is exactly that prank kind of guy – on my very first day on the set we were in the meeting room at the [BBC] headquarters and I watched him just being all over the female members of the cast who to me seemed really annoyed. And I remember thinking, Holy shit! If he comes on to me like that tomorrow, I'm gonna clock him. And then I'm gonna lose my job! Okay, I'm gonna have to communicate this right now. So I went over to Naoko and showed her some self-defence moves I know – like hitting the solar plexus or stamping on those beautiful little bones we all have at the top of the foot. And they all – the whole cast, including Naoko – turned to me like "Who let this stupid, immature, homophobic American in our world?" I just was instantly embarrassed, oh my god. And so I was really not looking forward to going to work the next day just because I'd made such an ass of myself, you know. And John comes up to me that day and he was like "Hey, man, how're you doing? So, uh, most of this is fight anyway but, you know, as far as the kiss is concerned, do you want to save it for the day and keep it fresh or do you want to rehearse it? What are you most comfortable with, man?" —He was totally there for me. To make me comfortable, to make sure everything worked. He just completely changed gears because he understood what my needs were. That guy is a real leader. Apparently his dad used to run a factory and he would go watch his dad be a factory leader every day and he always wanted to be like his dad. He really is. I mean, I don't know his dad, so this is far out. But as far as being able to lead a group of people, that's John. So, the short answer being: I'd rather kiss John than probably most of the actresses I've kissed in my life! However, a little note for all you guys: shave! It hurts. You kiss a guy with a good beard and he's got a little stubble, even a little bit of stubble, and it's like sandpaper! So, yeah, I'm thinking of waxing."

"Fern Britton: He is famously straight-talking. What you see is what you get and he's not afraid to fight for what he believes in. And behind the showbiz manier he's a man who absolutely believes in practicing what he preaches. He has no conflict in having a faith and being gay. Despite encountering prejudice, he still has a great energy and appetite for life. He's a man now equally comfortable as West End star, quiz show host, worrier of small animals, friend to aliens, talent show judge, and sometime companion to the world's most famous time traveller. You could be forgiven to think that this love affair with fame and the fiercely ambitious drive that took John from a theme park in the States to a saturday night staple on BBC1 means that John must have a ruthless side. But, breaking news, John Barrowman really is the nicest man in television and it's his parents and their Christian values that he has to thank for that. He is such an exuberant and energetic performer, who's faith underpins his zest for life. Behind this much-loved showbiz performer there's a man with a heart of gold."

"Carole E. Barrowman: The one thing that will send John over the edge, even in public, is if he sees someone being rude or mean or just being disrespectful to an elderly person. Definitely this relationship [with his grandmother Murn] has been a defining one, I think, in his life. […] You cannot underestimate how big a fan of Doctor Who John was when he got that part. He heard about it in Covent Garden when he was with my daughter Claire and he literally ran up a wall."

"Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. This resentment may be incurable. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic, and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others. U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. [..] A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto [in 1970], his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?"

"It’s hard to know how to deal with liberalization in cultures that have been repressed for a long time, that don’t have strong civil societies. But for the United States, of all countries, to be talking about human rights just rings very, very hollow in light of all the objections to our policy in Israel — the perception that we’re hard on one side and not on the other, and that we don’t contest the settlements or human-rights abuses committed by Israeli soldiers, and so on. Plus the fact that we have turned our back on international treaties and not been a global citizen, I think, makes people, even democrats, the leading lights in these repressed societies, very squeamish about being associated with the United States."

"Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued.... America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive."

"Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death."

"Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom."

"When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases."

"Doubt is the brother of shame."

"Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness."

"All world-images are apt to become corrupt when left to ecclesiastic bureaucracies. But this does not make the formation of world-images expendable. And I can only repeat that we deny the remnants of old-world images at our own risk, because we do not overcome them by declaring them — with all the righteousness of skepticism — something of a secret sin. They are not less powerful for being denied."

"In Freud's view, development is largely complete by adolescence. In contrast, one of Freud's students, Erik Erikson (1902–1994) believed that development continues throughout life. Erikson took the foundation laid by Freud and extended it through adulthood and into late life."

"I feel bad about the whole thing but all good things must come to an end sometime. I've got many pleasant memories, especially those two Stanley Cups."

"You don't have to be crazy to be a goalie, but it helps!"

"There was no one in the world quite like Plante. I learned more from him in two years with the Leafs than I did in all my other hockey days. He taught me a great deal about playing goal both on the ice and in my head off the ice. He taught me to be aggressive around the goal and take an active part in play instead of waiting for things to happen. He showed me how I kept putting myself off-balance by placing my weight on my left leg instead of on my stick side. He taught me how to steer shots off into the corner instead of letting them rebound in front of me. That old guy made a good goalie out of me."

"By the time he's 31, he'll never have to work another day unless he wants to."

"The electrification of the automobile is inevitable."

"People who fear losing their jobs start lying"

"The amazing thing about Jeep is that no one thinks of it as an American brand—it’s nationally neutral"

"When I confessed my sins, I labored to remember the time when and the place where I committed them. And when I had confessed them, I cried to God to know if my confession was accepted; and by crying to God continually I traveled out of my loss."

"The first step of obedience that any of you can take is to confess your sins to God before his witnesses."

"If you confess your sins, you must confess them to God; we are but his witnesses."

"I can freely forgive you, and I pray God to forgive you. It is God that forgives you; I am but your fellow-servant."

"Put your hands to work and give your hearts to God."

"You ought never to speak to your children in a passion; for if you do, you will put devils into them."

"Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live; and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow."

"You can never enter the kingdom of God with hardness against any one, for God is love, and if you love God you will love one another."

"Be diligent with your hands, for godliness does not lead to idleness."

"You ought not to cross your children unnecessarily, for it makes them ill-natured."

"You ought to dress yourself in modest apparel, such as becomes the people of God, and teach your family to do likewise. You ought to be industrious and prudent, and not live a sumptuous and gluttonous life, but labor for a meek and quiet spirit, and see that your family is kept decent and regular in all their goings forth, that others may see your example of faith and good works, and acknowledge the work of God in your family."

"It is now spring of the year, and you have all had the privilege of being taught the way of God; and now you may all go home and be faithful with your hands. Every faithful man will go forth and put up his fences in season, and will plow his ground in season, and put his crops into the ground in season; and such a man may with confidence look for a blessing."

"We are the people who turned the world upside down."

"Mother Ann Lee, in her personal appearance, was a woman rather below the common stature of woman; thick set, but straight and otherwise well proportioned and regular in form and features. Her complexion was light and fair, and her eyes were blue, but keen and penetrating; her countenance was mild and expressive, but grave and solemn. Her natural constitution was sound, strong and healthy. Her manners were plain, simple, and easy. She possessed a certain dignity of appearance that inspired confidence and commanded respect. By many of the world who saw her without prejudice she was called beautiful; and to her faithful children she appeared to possess a degree of dignified beauty and heavenly love which they had never before discovered among mortals."

"She possessed remarkable powers and faculties of mind in nature, which were greatly enlarged and strengthened by the gift of God. At times, when under the power and operation of the Holy Ghost, her countenance shone with the glory of God, and her form and actions appeared divinely beautiful and very angelic. The power and influence of her spirit, at such times, was great beyond description; and no one was able to gainsay or resist the authority by which she spoke. Tho her words were few, yet they always seemed adapted to the occasion, and it did not appear that she ever spoke in vain. Her whole soul appeared to be always engaged in the work of God, and the Spirit of God seemed to breathe through all her words and actions. She inspired into the hearts of her faithful children the greatest fear of God, and excited their highest admiration, love and respect. But in reproving sin and sinners, the power of her spirit seemed irresistible, and often struck terror into the souls of every one present. Her admonitions were sharp, powerful and penetrating; yet while she struck at that which was evil, she seemed always anxious to separate and preserve the good."

"She never learned to read or write. Aside from her strictly religious teachings, she appears to have inculcated upon her followers the practical virtues of honesty, industry, frugality, charity, and temperance."

"Following the doctrines put forth by Ann Lee, and elaborated by her successors, they hold:"

"The bell just rang in the Tropical Atlantic... Hello Dolly..."

"I hope there will be no more surprises."

"After considerable and sometimes animated in-house discussion of the demise of Ivan..."

"On Hurricane Epsilon in 2005"

"There are no clear reasons, and I am not going to make one up, to explain the recent strengthening of Epsilon."

"I heard that before about Epsilon... haven't you?"

"As you can see...I ran out [of] things to say."

"Since neither I nor the [forecast] models are good enough to precisely know if Ernesto will have an intensity of 64 knots at landfall...which is the border between hurricane and tropical storm intensity and 4 knots above the forecast...a hurricane watch has been issued for a portion of the coast."

"If some of the dynamical models have their way...Juliette could meet her less-than-Shakespearean demise sooner than indicated in the official forecast."

"Bertha HAS to weaken and begin to become extratropical...famous last words."

"As soon as I hit it, I knew it was gone. I was happy to move on. It was great. I've been trying so hard the past three weeks just to get it done. It finally came, and I'm happy. I'm proud of myself and all the things that I accomplished. So now I can go and have fun."

"Especially every time you'd get out of the hotel, everybody would say, 'Hey, when are you going to hit it?' I'm just happy that everything is done so now I can go be myself and have fun."

"That's why they call it Red Sox Nation. They follow us everywhere. Everywhere we go, we get big support."

"I cried. I was so happy. I can't wait to see him and give him a big hug. It was so exciting. It was like a weight lifted off our shoulders. He had all those expectations. It's amazing. I'm shocked. He's very confident. We knew it would happen, but there was all those expectations from everybody."

"You really feel very happy for him. He acted like a little kid. He just hit it, and you could feel the relief he felt. From now on, I'm telling you, he might get into the place he was early in the season, where he becomes very, very dangerous."

"I deny any government, elected or not, the right to kidnap my children and ship them off to a battlefield to kill or be killed. I accept to pay taxes and that's the sum total of my debt to my government. In every other respect, my government owes me, not the other way around.Conscription is the most fundamental denial of liberty, on a par with slavery.I am not a pacifist and I support a professional army. But I oppose the draft even in times of war. If your country cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself when attacked, then it's not worth defending."

"The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it."

"We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too."

"The travel writer seeks the world we have lost — the lost valleys of the imagination."

"A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience."

"No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein."

"There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend."

"No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul."

"Cockburn’s personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing – debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin’s gulags, claiming that ‘the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class’, when aspects of his father’s convictions can be glimpsed."

"Alex kept the radical faith, steadily, constantly, going to the ends of the earth to cover the next story of revolt and revolution, going to the far corners of the United States to uncover the news that Americans were not taking it anymore. If a crowd had gathered, and if they were raising the red flag, or any flag of protest, that was enough for Alex. He would report their struggle, usually in The Nation, but also in the pages of The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Esquire, the Village Voice and (for a brief period as remarkable as it was ironic) the Wall Street Journal."

"Love and knowledge have one and the same goal, for both strive to overcome the separation in the elements of being and return to the point of their original unity.… To know an object means to negate the distance between it and consciousness; it means, in a certain sense, to become one with the object: cognitio nihil est aliud, quam Coitio quaedam cum suo cognobili. [Knowledge is nothing else than a kind of union with what is known.]"

"Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging."

"No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astonishingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material.... Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity."

"The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element."

"Science is the last step in man's mental development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture."

"I studied your treatise thoroughly and with very much interest and admired, above all, how securely you master the essence of relativity theory. I made brief comments in the margin where I was not completely in agreement. E.g., I could not accept your opinion about the Kant-Newton relationship with reference to space and time. Newton’s theory requires an absolute (objective) space in order to be able to attribute real meaning to acceleration, which Kant does not seem to have recognized."

"I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world."

"1919...Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres."

"We meet neath the sounding rafter, And the walls around are bare; As they shout back our peals of laughter It seems that the dead are there. Ho! stand to your glasses steady! 'T is all we have left to prize. A cup to the dead already,— Hurrah for the next that dies!"

"Who dreads to the dust returning? Who shrinks from the sable shore, Where the high and haughty yearning Of the soul can sting no more?"

"The net of law is spread so wide, No sinner from its sweep may hide. Its meshes are so fine and strong They take in every child of wrong. O wondrous web of mystery ! Big fish alone escape from thee !"

"A brave endeavor To do thy duty, whate'er its worth, Is better than life with love forever And love is the sweetest thing on earth."

"The love of man and woman is as fire To warm, to light, but surely to consume And self-consuming die… But comrade-love is as a welding blast Of candid flame and ardent temperature: Glowing more fervent, it doth bind more fast; And melting both but makes the union sure. The dross alone is burnt—till at the last The steel, if cold, is one and strong and pure."

"I 'd rather be handsome than homely; I 'd rather be youthful than old; If I can't have a bushel of silver I'll do with a barrel of gold."

"All loved Art in a seemly way With an earnest soul and a capital A."

"You ask me what's happened in my life, why and how I did this and that. And I think and tell, but it's never true story, because everything is so much more complicated, and also I can't even remember how things happened. Whole process is boring. Also false, but mostly boring."

"The minute plane set down, the minute I stepped again on Latvian ground, I realized this was never my home. My heart didn't even skip one beat."

"Children being left, it's not always like books of Charles Dickens. When you lose your parents in childhood, it's a fact of life, and, you know, human beings are extraordinary powerful survivors. My mother commit suicide. I was lucky it was not in front of me. O.K.? Which is truth, and Father was confused, and we never had any relationship, serious relationship. I never knew my father, in a way. But what? It's made me different? No, I mean. I blame for every fuckups in my life my parents? No. [Pause] I got lucky. I fell in love with dance."

"You know, I never planned to leave. I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. You know, I played their game, pretending, of course. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB... Horrifying."

"I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience. Then you arrive in the States and it is $150 to go to an opera. Ridiculous. We have so much young talent on the streets, but because everything is commercial they finally drift away from their dream of their life."

"The more injuries you get, the smarter you get."

"He’d be a ruin by now, both physically and mentally. Physically because of the bottle. . . . Mentally because of that mixture of impotence and cynicism that corrodes everyone there — the stronger you are the worse it is."

"To encourage children into Rock Music is to place them into the white hot arms of Molech and the beat and power behind the music will drown out the cries of your child as occultic powers consume him and drag him into the fires of hell!"

"Behold, the atheists' nightmare. Now if you study a well-made banana, you'll find, on the far side, there are three ridges. On the close side, two ridges. If you get your hand ready to grip a banana, you'll find on the far side there are three grooves, on the close side, two grooves. The banana and the hand are perfectly made, one for the other. You'll find the maker of the banana, Almighty God, has made it with a non-slip surface. It has outward indicators of inward contents — green: too early; yellow: just right; black: too late. Now if you go to the top of the banana, you'll find, as with the soda can makers have placed a tab at the top, so God has placed a tab at the top. When you pull the tab, the contents don't squirt in your face. You'll find a wrapper which is biodegradable, has perforations. Notice how gracefully it sits over the human hand. Notice it has a point at the top for ease of entry. It's just the right shape for the human mouth. It's chewy, easy to digest and its even curved toward the face to make the whole process so much easier. Seriously, Kirk, the whole of creation testifies to the genius of God's creation."

"When I look at a building, how can I know there was a builder? Can't see him, hear him, touch him, taste him or smell him, so how can I know there was a builder? Well, the building is absolute proof there was a builder. I couldn't want better proof that there was a builder than to have the building as evidence. I don't need faith to believe in a builder, all I need is eyes that can see and a brain that works. Now the same deep, rich, scientific principle works with paintings and painters.... And the same principle works with God. When I look at Creation how can I know there was a creator? Well, creation is absolute proof there was a creator. I don't need faith to believe in a creator, all I need is eyes that can see and a brain that works."

"I don't blame Bill Maher for mocking religion. [...] I can see why he took the trouble to make the movie. In one sense, it's overdue."

"Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half."

"I do admit to mocking atheists, because mockery is a legitimate form of debate according to my rule Book. God Himself mocks evil men who refuse His moral government (see Proverbs 1:26-27)."

"Scott quoted a famous geneticist, who said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." I would like to drop one word, so that the quote is true. It should read, "Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution." For example, evolution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery."

"The Bible says that the earth is immovable. It cannot be moved. So now is your chance to prove your point. Run outside and move the earth. Perhaps you and your friends could jump on it, or find a rocky outcrop and push it together. Maybe after that little experiment you will concede that the earth is immovable."

"So, I'm not the only one who believes that there is such a thing as "the law of gravity," and if it's a law, it can be violated. If you hit the ground at 120 mph from 1,000 feet, you will suffer the consequences of violating what physics.about.com calls the law of gravity."

"Imagine how wicked society would be if the fear of God and the fear of civil law were both completely removed. Imagine if a man could rape and murder, with no concerns about being punished? That’s when we would see the true heart of humanity, and that’s where we as a nation are slowly heading."

"We have turned our backs on God, and given Him lip-service by maintaining a belief in His existence and at the same time embracing that which is abhorrent to Him; things such as homosexual marriage, abortion, adultery, fornication, pornography, lying, theft and blasphemy. Few have any fear of God, which the Bible says is the ‘beginning’ of wisdom. A wise man once said, ‘Most I fear God. Next I fear him who fears Him not.’ When someone doesn’t fear God, they give themselves to evil."

"There is absolutely no point in being healed in our bodies, then dying in our sins and spending an eternity in hell. It would be better to die of cancer and go to heaven because of that cancer, than to live in perfect health and end up in hell."

"… you should never take medicine to relieve pain. You should never consult a doctor or go to a hospital for treatment, because you would be interfering with the work of God in your life. If Cancer is the chastening tool of God, then doctors who are fighting cancer are fighting against the work of God. If a preacher or a Christian believes the sickness is a means of chastening, then he should never pray for relief from the sickness, but rather pray that the cancer will continue to grow until the chastening is completed."

"[Referring to Luke 10:13-17] If doctors were asked to diagnose that woman's case, not one spine specialist in the world would say "Satan has bound her". Doctors would call it arthritis of the spine, or vertebrae out of place, or some other medical term, and they would be right as far as medical terms are concerned. But if you get to the real source of the trouble you will discover that source is Satan."

"We can not gaze into space and understand that space has no end. There is no brick wall at the end of space, because if there was, what would be behind the brick wall? It just goes on and on……never ending. The thought of infinity hurts my brain – I can not understand it. The Bible teaches us that God is eternal, without beginning and without end. We being finite, can not understand a world without time. Time is just a dimension that God has created and subjected man to Eternity and infinity are too much for our tiny brains to comprehend."

"True we can not see God, but we can see the genius of God by works for His hands. We can see by the order of creation that a Creator must exist; reason, logic and common sense point to that conclusion. It is the epitome of foolishness to say our world with its seasons, weather patterns, trees, flowers, birds etc…was the result of some explosion in space of which our earth was a part. How can we say that the human body “just happened” with no intelligent creator behind it? The motive for saying there is no God is deeper than just ignorance."

"Why does God allow evil? – quite simply, because if He punished it immediately I’m sure we would have been snuffed out the moment we were born. God says our very thoughts are an abomination to him. If He punished sin immediately, there would be no one left."

"Ten thousand people a day die of starvation, according to a United Nations survey. Thousands more die from disease daily: we have earth-quakes, floods. droughts and pestilence. These are only a few of the evidences which show us that something is drastically wrong with our relationship with our creator. All of humanity’s problems stem from rebellion to The Word of God. Since mans rejection of God we have lived in this fallen state, where our weather patterns are chaotic, animals devour each other, our crops are diseased, and multitudes are suffering and dying from sickness and disease. These are stark reminders that what The Word of God says is true."

"It has been said that God always answers prayer. Sometimes He says “yes” sometimes he says “no” and sometimes He says “wait a while”. Sometimes God will answer a prayer in a different way than we have first anticipated. The fact is, many of us pray for things that God knows would only hinder our walk with Him so for our own good He withholds them from us."

"When we are first born into God’s kingdom we generally get our prayers answered immediately, but as we grow God teaches us patience by letting us wait."

"Nowhere in the Word of God does God promise that living for Him will be easy. The fact is, Christians do have problems, they do get sick, but God heals us when we are sick and takes us through our problems. The non-Christian suffers in vain, the Christians with a purpose."

"Show me one [mistake in the Bible], I bet you can’t; in fact I’ll give you $100 if you can prove to me there is one mistake in the word of God. There are plenty of seeming contradictions, but no mistakes. I not only believe it is infallible, but I believe every word of it, literally - for example about Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale etc. I believe it because I understand that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise."

"If there is ever conflict between Science and Scripture, the problem must be on the science side."

"There is no authority in the Bible for a woman to have a place of supremacy in the church. When she takes it she steps out of her right place. She goes against the plain teaching of The Bible when she takes the place of the authoritative teacher in the church."

"My own mother is always telling us how well behaved our children are, but little does she know how we got them that way! She would turn grey if she knew, I cane her perfect grandson, but she loves the result."

"The Word of God says that if a father provides all other necessary things to raise a child and yet fails to discipline him, the child is a bastard and may as well not have a father."

"To withhold the rod is to put your child in the hand of Satan and co-operate with him in sending your child to hell!"

"If, then, faith so evidently surrounds us, why should it be so offensive? It is simply because faith is as essential to the spiritual realm as oxygen is to the natural realm. The professing atheist thinks that if he can get rid of any thought of faith he can get rid of Christianity. In trying to do so, he saws through the branch he is sitting on. His own faith in the erroneous information he has makes him think he is atheistic in his beliefs."

"Let's say that you have an incredible one percent of all the knowledge in the universe. Would it be possible, in the ninety-nine percent of the knowledge that you haven't yet come across, that there might be ample evidence to prove the existence of God? If you are reasonable, you will be forced to admit that it is possible."

"To say categorically, "There is no God," is to make an absolute statement. For the statement to be true, I must know for certain that there is no God in the entire universe. No human being has all knowledge. Therefore, none of us is able to truthfully make this assertion."

"When I look at creation, how can know that there was a Creator? I can't see Him, hear Him, touch Him, taste Him, or smell Him. How can I know that He exists? Why, creation proves, beyond the shadow of the smallest doubt, that there is a Creator."

"If you can't believe in things that you've never seen, how then do you know you have a brain? You've never seen it. If you can look at this miraculous Creation and insist that there's no Creator, then you'd also have to say there's no evidence that your brain exists."

"No one in his right mind wants to die. That cry is God-given. The Bible tells us that God has put eternity in our hearts."

"Try having a relationship with someone and see if you can establish any sort of friendship without faith. Walk up to a woman and introduce yourself. When she tells you her name, say, "I don't believe you."... Carry on like that for a while, and before long you may be nursing a black eye. Your lack of faith in her is a strong insinuation that she is a liar."

"Such reasoning [that God cannot be falsified] is absurd. Why would anyone try to prove that God doesn't exist when it can be proven that He does? Creation proves scientifically and absolutely to any sane mind that there is a Creator. His existence is axiomatic."

"Each day, most of the 4 billion chicken brains do what modern man's brain can't. They make eggs and chickens. Is the chicken more intelligent than man? Probably not. Therefore, something far superior to man must have made the chicken. "Accident" is the alternative."

"Without getting into blushing territory, think how in almost all of creation the male and female are made for each other. From dogs and elephants, to birds and bees, to man, each is designed for reproduction. Like a nut and a bolt, they are made to fit together perfectly."

"It would be far more logical to say that the epic movie BEN HUR happened by accident than to say that there is no God."

"[Saying that humans are related to apes is] an insult to apes. Experts say that violence is unknown among the creatures. They are generally gentle. They don't need to be continually policed so that they don't rape and murder like progressive man."

"If you are a believer in evolution, answer this. Did the first fish that crawled out of the ocean to become an animal have lungs or gills? If he had lungs (which were needed to breathe while on land), why did they evolve while he was underwater? If he had only gills (which were needed to survive while underwater), he wouldn't survive on land for more than two minutes."

"Here's an interesting experiment: Empty your garage of every piece of metal, wood, paint, rubber, and plastic. Make sure nothing is there. Nothing. Then wait for ten years and see if a Mercedes evolves. Try it. If it doesn't appear, leave it for 20 years. If that doesn't work, try it for 100 years. Then try leaving it for 10,000 years."

"Cain simply married a distant sister."

"God is not just one great piece of benevolent jelly. He is not smiling at the human race. In fact, the Bible says that He is full of fury. The day is coming when He will "render His anger with fury, and His rebuke with flames of fire" (Isaiah 66:15)."

"[The spider of sin] sleeps quietly, unseen by the human eye. How do we then bring him into the light? The answer is the stick of God's Law. It is the only means of revealing him. If we open up the Moral Law, it will cause his ugly head to appear... Later, if you are willing, we will lure him out into the open and with the help of God, spray him with the "gospel spray" of the blood of Jesus Christ."

"Men will mock the signs of the end of the age by saying, "These signs have always been around." This will be because they fail to understand that God is not subject to the dimension of time (2 Peter 3:44)."

"Israel will never have lasting peace until she obeys God. If she will obey His statutes and keep His commandments, He will give her rain in due season, an abundance of food, freedom from fear, victory over the enemy, and peace within the land (Leviticus 26:1-13)."

"Perhaps you see nothing wrong with believing the theory of evolution, even if it can't be substantiated. But remember - your information will govern your actions... If you believe evolution is true, and from that premise believe that the Bible is false, then you won't repent... If your faith is placed in evolution and not in God's promises, you will find that the object to which you have tied yourself will be your eternal downfall."

"Just between you and me, have you ever been wrong? Are you divinely infallible? Are you different from the rest of us? Human nature is prone to error; the person who invented the pencil eraser knew that."

"Being wrong is a blow to the proud human ego."

"Imagine buying a toy for a child's pleasure and having him love the toy more than he loves you. Yet, isn't that what you've done with God?... Isn't it true that you have been guilty of ingratitude?... Have you ever humbly thanked God for the gift of life?"

"Don't lose patience. Wait on the Lord... He knows what is best for you. Obey His Instruction Book and "trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5). Don't trust your judgements or your emotions."

"Repitition is the mother of knowledge. To help our children retain God's Word, we repeated a verse six times with them, then gave them a reward (a candy bar) when they had memorized ten verses. I have calculated that we had around six thousand family devotions with our children. The three of them made it through their teenage years without an ounce of rebellion."

"Rid yourself of secular prejudice. For instance, those with the "Women's Liberation" mentality believe that the biblical husband-wife relationship is one of a master and a well-trained dog. They couldn't be further from the truth. The Bible does not speak of women as the "weaker vessel," which is true physically. However, the biblical order is: as a strong thorny stem upholds the tender, easily bruised, sweet-smelling rose, so should the husband uphold, love, and respect his wife."

"Society has been hoodwinked into accepting many lies, and one of the greatest is that homosexuals are "born that way." If that is true, we were all born homosexuals. As we developed, we all had the capacity to be a homosexual."

"If you are a woman, dress modestly. If the average girl knew how the average guy thought, she would dress with a little more discretion. The length of some Christian girls' dresses reveals their naivete. Girls, get this straight - there are only two sorts of men: depraved and depraved who are forgiven. Show me a normal man (outside of Jesus Christ) who says he has never lusted, and I will show you a liar."

"If you have made it through this publication and you still don't have peace with God, then your blood will be upon your own head. On Judgement Day, I will be free from your blood. I have poured out my heart to you. I have reasoned with you. I have pleaded with you - and you will have no one to blame but yourself for refusing to receive God's forgiveness."

"[The atheist's] faith is much greater than mine. I could never for a moment believe that all these things happened by chance. Never in a million years. But the believing atheist does, and he amazingly looks down intellectually on those that maintain that all this incredible creation wasn't an act of an incredible creator."

"When someone becomes a Christian, he immediately cares about those around him. He cares about those unwanted in society - the poor, the bad, and the ugly (those who lack what society esteems). This is because God put His love within him the moment that he repented and trusted the Saviour."

"It is because of God's love that I care about the fate of atheists. When an atheist says he sees no evidence that God exists, I take the time to reason with him about creation not being an accident, even though it is intellectually demeaning to have to do so (atheism is the epitome of stupidity). It's an intellectual embarassment. But I have done so thousands of times, and will do so until my last breath... thanks alone to the love of God that dwells in me."

"Atheists don't hate fairies, leprechauns, or unicorns because they don't exist. It is impossible to hate something that doesn't exist. Atheists — like the painting experts hated the painter — hate God because He does exist."

"Calling a Christian 'religious' is like calling an African-American the n-word."

"It wasn't the Christian Church that arrested Gallileo, it was the Roman Catholic Church, which is a non-Christian religion based on tradition and not the Bible."

"… the Catholic Church didn't get their information from the Bible (it was a banned Book)."

"There are only two choices: Either no one created everything out of nothing, or Someone - and intelligent, omnipotent, eternal First Cause - created everything out of nothing. Which makes more sense?"

"Evolution swings open a door to do whatever the evolutionist pleases, as long as what he does is within the bounds of a civil law he is ever expanding to accommodate his sinful desires."

"So were our ancestors apes, pigs, or dogs? That's up to you and your imagination, if you believe in evolution."

"Only humans have the ability to know that God exists, yet still deny His existence."

"I've been looking into the issue for more than thirty years, and I have never seen a hint of genuine evidence of species-to-species transitional forms in the fossil record. The theory stands or falls on the supposed links between species. Even if you came up with what you believe is evidence, time would prove it to be another hoax, as it has so often in the past."

"If (as is commonly accepted) the natural phenomenon of evolution had no end in mind when it created all living things, it is incredibly intelligent, but it forgot that they would go spinning into space without the law of gravity."

"The suffering in the world is due to our living on a planet polluted by sin - not God's hatred or neglect. Humans choose to murder when God gave us the intellect to cure disease. Humans choose to pollute when God gave us a pure planet rich in every resource we need."

"The conscience is a dilemma for the believer in evolution. He doesn't know why it exists. Neither do the experts. Why would evolution create something that tells us that it's wrong to lie, to steal, to kill, and to commit adultery? Was primitive man committing these sins before he evolved a conscience? If he wasn't, why didn't his conscience evolve? If he was, why did the conscience evolve?"

"… the reason your conscience has nothing to say about your atheism is that atheism is not a moral issue. It's an intellectual issue."

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at this amazing creation and see the genius of the Creator. A child can know that. Your stumbling block isn't intellectual as you maintain... it's moral."

"We humans have an implicit responsibility to the One Who gave us so much. We owe Him our worship, and obedience to His Law - that is why atheists hate Him so vehemently. Atheists want to be free from all moral or spiritual responsibilities, but their God-given conscience tells them deep down that they can't."

"… stop pretending to be good, and realize that doing good will do you no good on Judgement Day. Instead, repent and trust the Saviour, and then live a good life - not to impress anyone or bribe God, but out of gratitude to Him for His mercy."

"Most people think of themselves as good, and many are good by human standards, but not by God's standards. Humans may consider blasphemy or lying or adultery to be relatively minor transgressions but, under God's law, they warrant the death sentence."

"The thought that merely thinking could be a crime does seem absurd. Absurd, that is, until you realize that if you are caught thinking about killing the president of the United States, you will find yourself in serious violation of civil law. You don't have to do the act. You simply have to be thinking about it."

"It amazes me that anyone would dare point to Jesus Christ in moral judgement. You had better have clean hands and a pure heart before you point a finger at the Son of God... Jesus never sinned once, in thought, word, or in deed. He never lied, stole, hated, lusted, coveted, murdered, or dishonoured his parents. Let's now turn the mirror back on you. When was the last time you burned with unlawfully sexual fantasies? You don't need to reply to that. God knows the answer... So take a little advice from a fellow sinner - stop pointing your sin-stained finger at perfection, and instead look at your own self-righteous and duplicitous heart, before it's too late."

"I don't see my Father as a tyrant because Scripture gives me extra information that tells me that He is just and holy, and that all His judgements are righteous and true altogether."

"If the skeptic still wants to complain that God killed women and children in the Old Testament, he should realize that He did more than that. He proclaimed the death sentence on the entire human race - every man, woman, and child. We will all die because we have sinned against God."

"On Judgement Day, those who think such talk is 'fear mongering' will find out that it's not. It is simply the truth, and they will wish to God (understatement) that they had obeyed the Gospel."

"Such craziness [in not believing in God] makes me want to throw up my hands in despair, and then wash them of anything to do with atheism. But I can't. Compassion won't let me. I thank God for the love and concern that He places in those who trust Him. Without it, I'm not sure I would even care about the salvation of anyone but myself and my immediate family and friends."

"[God] puts a new spirit within [homosexuals], and gives them a new heart with new desires. Thousands of ex-gays attest to the power of God to change lives."

"No enjoyment on this sad old earth has come even close to the unending pleasures that God has prepared 'for those that love Him.' This is the teaching of the Bible. And you are going to miss out, simply because you refuse to change your mind, repent, and trust the Saviour."

"… if you look around the Christian faith, you won't find many of those proud people who are puffed up in their own 'fleshly' wisdom."

"Can you make honey, from nothing? How about a glass of milk, from nothing? How about a living leaf? Can you make a living frog, or a cat, a horse or a cow, from nothing? How about an eye? Make me a fully functioning eye, using no materials. Can you? Of course you can't. You don't even have an intelligent answer for how those came about. You would probably say that evolution is responsible for everything, but that it didn't make it from nothing. It made it from gases in space. Then where did the gases come from? You have to keep saying that there was something in the beginning, because basic science says that nothing can come from nothing."

"Yep, you can't make a piece of sand from nothing. You don't know where we came from, why you are here, or what's going to happen after you die. You don't know much at all. So, if it's true that 'God likes 'em dumb and ignorant,' you sure qualify to be liked by Him."

"Remember, early Christians weren't converted by the Scriptures. Instead, they were saved by a spoken message. Most couldn't read anyway. The New Testament hadn't been compiled. There was no such thing as the printing press."

"There are two ways you can read the Bible. One is with the light off. By that I mean that you can read it with a proud heart, looking for mistakes, marking seeming contradictions, believing you are intellectually superior to what you are reading. The second way is with the light on. By that I mean with a humble heart, believing that you don't know everything, and that you could gain knowledge by studying the world's greatest-selling book of all time."

"So, a talking parrot, three hundred people flying through the sky in a big tin can called a 747, a human being growing inside another person, and men walking on the moon don't contradict logic?"

"All [atheists] have seen is the inside of a dead Catholic church or the hypocrisy of the money-hungry 'prosperity gospel' version of Christianity we find all over the airwaves and all across bookstore shelves today."

"You have a dilemma that is even greater than the one you think you have of not knowing which is the right God. It's the dilemma of 'guilt'. Everyone has it. You can drown it in booze or say it doesn't exist, or insist that you don't feel guilt, but it is still something you have. This is because it's not a feeling; it's a condition."

"There are two important truths to understand here. First: God will not 'torture' anyone. He will give them 'justice'. A criminal may believe that his being thrown into a cold prison because he viciously raped three teenage girls is torture. The judge rather knows better. He calls it 'justice'. Sinners are not God's children. The Bible makes that clear. We are children of Satan, and it's his will we gladly run to do. Isn't it true that we love the darkness and hate the light (see John 3:19)?"

"Jesus is without question the most eloquent man who ever lived. Those who heard Him said, 'Never a man spoke like this Man.' The most eloquent of philosophers sits at His feet and marvels at both His words and His life. To those who disagree, I would simply challenge you to read the Gospel of John, and see for yourself. Never did any man speak like this Man."

"You may claim that [Paul] merely saw a vision of Jesus. Not so. He met the Lord and came 'to know Him, and the power of His resurrection.'"

"Here's what any skeptic will find hard to swallow. The Lord Jesus Christ owned that donkey. He created every hair on its little head (see John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16), and you can't steal what you own. The temporal 'owner' was in reality just taking care of it for Him. How incredible that the Lord had need of a little donkey. But He did. He chose to be carried into Jerusalem on a lowly donkey. God has also chosen lowly creatures like us to carry the Savior to this sinful world. How incredible."

"Don't believe all the absurdity that skeptics say about bats not being birds, other untruths such as the Bible saying that the world is flat, and the mockery of Israel's judicial system. Every one of these weak arguments has rational explanations for those who are prepared to soften their hearts and listen."

"If you still want to paint the Old Testament God as being mean and the New Testament God as being nice, please realize that the God of the New Testament proclaimed the death sentence on every man, on every woman, and on every child of the human race."

"Reptiles don't turn into birds no matter how long you leave them."

"Just as a biplane and a jet share common features of wings, body, tires, engine, controls, etc.,... does not require that one must have evolved from the other naturally, without a maker. They argue it’s more reasonable to conclude that similar design indicates a common, intelligent designer. An architect typically uses similar building materials for numerous buildings, and a car manufacturer commonly uses the same parts in various models. So if creation had a common designer, we could expect to find a similar “blueprint” used in many different creatures."

"Which do you think came first—the blood or the heart—and why? Did the heart in all these different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolve before there were blood vessels throughout their bodies? When did the blood evolve? Was it before or after the vessels evolved? If it was before, what was it that carried blood to the heart, if there were no vessels? Did the heart beat before the blood evolved? Why was it beating if there was no blood to pump? If it wasn’t beating, why did it start when it had no awareness of blood? If the blood vessels evolved before there was blood, why did they evolve if there was no such thing as blood? And if the blood evolved before the heart evolved, what was it that caused it to circulate around the body? The marvelous human body (and the bodies of all the other creatures) consists of so many amazingly interdependent parts: a heart, lungs (to oxygenate the blood), kidneys (to filter wastes from the blood), blood vessels, arteries, blood, skin (to protect it all), etc. The intricate codependence of just the respiratory system and the circulatory system—not to mention all the other bodily systems—is difficult to explain."

"If you find it hard to believe that there was an Intelligent Designer, give this some thought. Man, with all his genius, can’t make a rock, a leaf, a flower, a living singing bird, a croaking frog, or even a grain of dead sand from nothing. We can recreate, but we can’t create anything material from nothing, living or dead. Not a thing. Did you realize that if we could simply make one blade of grass without using existing materials, we could solve the world’s hunger problem? If we could make a blade of grass, we could then create a lot more grass, feed the green material through a machine that does what the common cow does, and have pure white full cream milk, then smooth cream, delicious yogurt, tasty cheese, and smooth butter. But we can’t make even one blade of grass from nothing, let alone giving it the ability to reproduce after its own kind, as regular grass does. We have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating. If that’s true, how intellectually dishonest is it to say that this entire incredible creation in which we live, came into existence with no Intelligent Designer?"

"Darwin's racism has nothing to do with the credibility of the theory of evolution.... However, after much research, I do concede that you won't find anything in Darwin's writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color."

"Darwin believed that women were not as competent as men, and less intelligent than men, but they were better than a dog."

"Adolf Hitler took Darwin's evolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusions."

"The legacy of Darwin's theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion."

"You know that the law of gravity will kill you when you jump."

"The fury of Almighty God against evil is evidence of his goodness. If he wasn’t angered, he wouldn’t be good. We cannot separate God’s goodness from his anger. Again, if God is good by nature, he must be unspeakably angry at wickedness. But his goodness is so great that his anger isn’t confined to the evils of rape and murder. Nothing is hidden from his pure and holy eyes. He is outraged by torture, terrorism, abortion, theft, lying, adultery, fornication, pedophilia, homosexuality, and blasphemy. He also sees our thought-life, and he will judge us for the hidden sins of the heart: for lust, hatred, rebellion, greed, unclean imaginations, ingratitude, selfishness, jealousy, pride, envy, deceit, etc. Jesus warned, “But I say to you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.”"

"The religion of hinduism says that if you’ve been bad, you may come back as a rat or some other animal. If you’ve been good, you might come back as a prince. But that’s like someone saying, “when you jump out of the plane, you’ll get sucked back in as another passenger. If you’ve been bad, you go down to the Economy Class; if you’ve been good, you go up to First Class.” It’s an interesting concept, but it doesn’t deal with your real problem of having sinned against God and the reality of hell."

"Amazingly, the religion of Buddhism denies that God even exists. It teaches that life and death are sort of an illusion. That’s like standing at the door of the plane and saying, “I’m not really here, and there’s no such thing as the law of gravity, and no ground that I’m going to hit.” That may temporarily help you deal with your fears, but it doesn’t square with reality. And it doesn’t deal with your real problem of having sinned against God and the reality of hell."

"Interestingly, Islam acknowledges the reality of sin and hell, and the justice of God, but the hope it offers is that sinners can escape God’s justice if they do religious works. God will see these, and because of them, hopefully he will show mercy—but they won’t know for sure. Each person’s works will be weighed on the Day of Judgment and it will then be decided who is saved and who is not—based on whether they followed Islam, were sincere in repentance, and performed enough righteous deeds to outweigh their bad ones. So Islam believes you can earn God’s mercy by your own efforts. That’s like jumping out of the plane and believing that flapping your arms is going to counter the law of gravity and save you from a 10,000-foot drop. And there’s something else to consider. The Law of God shows us that the best of us is nothing but a wicked criminal, standing guilty and condemned before the throne of a perfect and holy Judge. When that is understood, then our “righteous deeds” are actually seen as an attempt to bribe the Judge of the Universe. The Bible says that because of our guilt, anything we offer God for our justification (our acquittal from His courtroom) is an abomination to Him, and only adds to our crimes. Islam, like the other religions, doesn’t solve your problem of having sinned against God and the reality of hell."

"In Christianity, God Himself provided a “parachute” for us, and His word says regarding the Savior, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Just as a parachute solved your dilemma with the law of gravity and its consequences, so the Savior perfectly solves your dilemma with the Law of God and its consequences! It is the missing puzzle-piece that you need. How did God solve our dilemma? He satisfied His wrath by becoming a human being and taking our punishment upon Himself. The Scriptures tell us that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. Christianity provides the only parachute to save us from the consequences of the Law we have transgressed."

"To receive the gift of eternal life, you must repent of your sins (turn from them), and put on the Lord Jesus Christ as you would put on a parachute— trusting in Him alone for your salvation. That means you forsake your own good works as a means of trying to please God (trying to bribe Him), and trust only in what Jesus has done for you. Simply throw yourself on the mercy of the Judge. The Bible says that He’s rich in mercy to all who call upon Him, so call upon Him right now. He will hear you if you approach Him with a humble and sorrowful heart. Do it right now because you don’t know when you will take that leap through the door of death. Confess your sins to God, put your trust in Jesus to save you, and you will pass from death to life. You have God’s promise on it."

"I thought it strange that medical science spent billions of dollars trying to find a cure for the common cold, and it did nothing to try to stop the aging process. It seemed insane that we were all going to die and nobody talked about it, asked why, or even looked for an answer to it."

"I would never say that God used Hitler to punish the Jews. If God treated any of us justly and punished us according to our sins, we would all be in Hell in an instant. I'm Jewish and I am as guilty as any Gentile of violating His law. However, you and I get to stay alive for a time because God is rich in mercy, is filled with what the Bible calls "lovingkindness," and He particularly lavished this loving-kindness upon the Jewish nation. If you study the Scriptures, you will see that He promised them that if they loved and obeyed Him He would give them long life, health, prosperity, and protection from their enemies. But He also warned that if they disobeyed Him, His hand of protection would be removed."

"Right now the Jews are still surrounded by enemies who are sworn to their death as a nation. Their only hope is to turn to God with their whole heart, and if they obey Him, they will have victory. Only time will tell us if they have learned anything from history."

"You think that God should somehow prevent evil. He should actually stop the murderer and the rapist. This is because you (understandably) consider those two acts to be evil. How about the liar and the thief, the fornicator, pornographer, blasphemer, and the adulterer? Do you think that they are evil and should be stopped? God considers them to be extremely evil. But that's where conversion comes in (the new birth spoken of in John 3). God miraculously removes the hatred from the heart. He changes us on the inside so that we want to stop doing all evil. So how sincere are you in your desire to see evil stopped? Are you prepared to start with yourself?"

"Aron, if I said to you 'Imagine there's no New York, it's easy if you try,' I'm not saying New York doesn't exist, I'm saying it does exist, but imagine that it doesn't, and that's what John Lennon is saying."

"[If I had literally heard the voice of Jesus] I'd check myself in to see a psychiatrist. I don't hear voices and anyone who does should really see a psychiatrist and get some help."

"Hey, you're gonna have to keep it simple for us folks! Keep the words simple so we can understand what you're talking about."

"I know God exists, I'm not stupid."

"Aron, you do not have faith in your wife, you do not know your wife, you cannot demonstrate it to me, she does not exist, period... How would you prove me your wife exists?"

"We don't need faith to believe in God because the whole of Creation, the whole of nature, is ordered. It isn't a semblance of order, it has order, from the atom through to the universe, we see the genius of God's creative hand."

"I don't believe you're an ape: You're made in the image of God, with the knowledge of right and wrong."

"… I think I'm a pig: Pigs have got eyes, pigs have got mouths, pigs have got teeth, I've got friends who eat like pigs, I sound like a pig when I sleep."

"I think the greatest oxymoron on the face of this earth is to use the word 'science' along with 'evolution'. Evolution's a fairy tale for grown ups... It's unprovable, it's not been proved."

"Dogs and cats came from a common ancestor, can you explain that?... Can you explain it now, what animal you're talking about that dogs and cats came from... It was arboreal?... What do you mean by 'arboreal'?"

"He accepts scientific findings, on the same grounds we do, unless those findings challenge or refute his existing beliefs – at which point he labels them faith-based, and rejects them. Yet while claiming he won’t believe things on faith, the entire justification for his closed-minded certainty about the existence of god is predicated on faith…faith that his perception of the experience he attributes to a god are actually reliable. This is not only hypocritical, it’s a particularly nefarious bit of self-deception that results in some of the most painful examples of cognitive dissonance that I’ve ever seen. In any other area, Ray seems to grasp that independent confirmation is a grand tool for increasing the accuracy of our perceptions of reality, but on the subject of the biggest questions – his own experience not only needs no independent verification, it trumps all information to the contrary."

"[Comfort's indtroduction] says very little about “The Origin of Species” per se, limiting itself to familiar creationist canards about the complexity of the human eye and the absence of “transitional forms” from the fossil record. (It’s hard to lend much credence to the scientific arguments of a guy who thinks chimpanzees are monkeys.) There’s a brief biographical section on Darwin’s life, most of which has been plagiarized from a short text by Dr. Stan Guffey, as some bloggers have demonstrated. The rest has been plagiarized from Brian Regal’s introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition of “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,” except for a timeline, which was plagiarized from an online resource. Nearly half of the introduction isn’t even about evolution at all, and consists of a hodgepodge of strained sky-diving metaphors and horror stories about pedophiliac killers. Lastly, although Comfort claimed in advance that “not one jot or tittle” of the text of “The Origin of Species” would be missing from his edition, four entire chapters were omitted. Comfort said that this was an error limited to the first printing, but his critics have claimed that these sections were intentionally left out because they contain strong evidence for Darwin’s theory."

"The Living Waters Web site reveals Comfort to be obsessed with goading atheists, specifically Richard Dawkins, who is featured in almost as many of the site’s videos as Comfort is and whom Comfort has challenged to a public debate."

"Ray Comfort is probably the very bottom of the creationist barrel. He's the worst of the bunch, and I've listened to Kent Hovind talk! So when I say Ray Comfort is really, really stupid, I'm saying something."

"Your greatest strength, Ray, and possibly your only strength, is in pretending that you don't understand simple things."

"If we go to his blog and extend an invitation, he will simply delete it, thus enabling himself to continue claiming that we just aren’t inviting him, or maybe we’re scaaared of him, or whatever sustains the deluded fiction upon which he has constructed his life. Ray Comfort is a liar. The proof’s in the proverbial pudding."

"Ray lives in a curious alterna-reality in which he claims everything is the product of divine design, which prompts the question of how he knows (other than the Bible told him so), what frame of reference he is using to distinguish design from non-design. I wonder if Ray has ever looked at those grains of sand he keeps bringing up under a microscope, though. When you do, do you know what you see?... No two are alike. No two have precisely the same chemical or mineral composition. Ray would, no doubt, insist that God is so awesome that he literally can design each and every individual grain of sand as lovingly as a work of art. That in his omnipotence, God can effortlessly lavish such loving attention on even the smallest thing. And that’s the problem when you argue with someone about their imaginary magical friend. There are no rules in magical thinking. If sand grains were designed, wouldn’t you expect to see more uniformity?"

"I'm a free person; I feel terribly free. They could put me in chains and I still would be free because my thoughts would be mine - and that's all I want to have."

"Yes, I am very lucky, but I have a little theory about this. I have noticed through experience and observation that providence, nature, God, or what I would call the power of creation seems to favor human beings who accept and love life unconditionally, and I am certainly one who does with all my heart."

"Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me; music is me. I feel what people get out of me is this outlook on life, which comes out in my music. My music is the last expression of all that."

"We don't know happiness without unhappiness, gaiety without sadness, and happiness can only be felt if you don't set any conditions."

"...In his fingers he has more skill than any of the rest of us."

"God bless him. He will be remembered forever."

"Just meeting Rubinstein was a thrill for any pianist. He was a real link to tradition in western piano music. He was a friend of Rachmaninoff and he knew Debussy. The man was an inspiration to three generations of pianists."

"Rubinstein was wonderful. For three days he spent hours playing the piano in my room, and then asking me what I thought of this and that. After a while he told my mother that I had talent and he thought I should be a musician."

"I liked him [Rubinstein] as a pianist. He was a good musician and had a fantastic repertoire. He never had a great technique, but certain things he played well. I heard him play some of the Chopin etudes, the easier ones with great panache and I told him I had never heard them played better. He said, "Do you mean it?" and I said, "Yes, I do mean it.""

"Rubinstein was jealous of anybody who had a great success. He was jealous of the Beatles and kept on talking about their tremendous success. When Toscanini died there was a big service in St. Patrick's Cathedral presided over by Cardinal Spellman. Then after a month the body was sent to Milan where there was another big funeral. Rubinstein could not get over it. "Like a king!" he told me and Wanda. "He had two funerals!" He didn't like Paderewski, he didn't like Rachmaninoff, he was always criticizing everybody."

"Rubinstein was a marvelous pianist, but entirely different than Horowitz. Rubinstein needed a piano where he would feel some resistance in the action, and which had a much warmer or broader sound, or a deeper, darker sound. A Horowitz piano is much more focused; the sound is much more brilliant."

"My father, good or bad, mistakes or no, had a direct line from his heart to the music to the people, to the audience. He played with logic and his own inner truth."

"Arthur Rubinstein once said to me that he couldn't think when he played, that something else took over. I also don't think when I play - something happens through me, but I am motivated by what I have thought before."

"Others may be regularly more flashy, though few can dazzle so dependably; and none can match him for power and refinement. He plays very loudly and very beautifully, very softly and thoroughly clean, straightforwardly, elegantly, and with a care for both the amenities of musical discourse and the clear transmission of musical thought. He is a master pianist and a master musician. There has not been his like since Busoni."

"Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions."

"Shall an invention be patented or donated to the public freely? I have known some well-meaning scientific men … to look askance at the patenting of inventions, as if it were a rather selfish and ungracious act, essentially unworthy. The answer is very simple. Publish an invention freely, and it will almost surely die from lack of interest in its development. It will not be developed and the world will not be benefited. Patent it, and if valuable, it will be taken up and developed into a business."

"In this country all a man need to do is to attain a little eminence and immediately he begins to talk. … But the American people are willing to listen to any one who has attained prominence. The main fact is that we've heard a man's name a great many times; that makes us ready to accept whatever he says."

"When it comes to scientific matters the ready talkers simply run riot. There are a lot of pseudo-scientists who with a little technical jargon to spatter through their talk are always getting in the limelight by making startling predictions of what the future has in store, using as their text the most recent discovery or invention."

"We don't know the why of anything. On that matter we are no further advanced than was the cavedweller. The scientist is contented if he can contribute something toward the knowledge of what is and how it is."

"In a mathematical sense, space is manifoldness, or combination of numbers. Physical space is known as the 3-dimension system. There is the 4-dimension system, there is the 10-dimension system."

"Scientific theories need reconstruction every now and then. If they didn't need reconstruction they would be facts, not theories."

"There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions."

"Money is a stupid measure of achievement, but unfortunately it is the only universal measure we have."

"At the People's College in Fort Scott, Kansas, my mother met Arthur Le Sueur, who with Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, and Charles Steinmetz had founded the greatest workers' school in the country. Thousands of farmers and hillbilly men, miners, and other workers took correspondence courses in workers' law and workers' English and workers' history."

"He doesn't believe a trumpet and a megaphone are part of a scientist's equipment."

"Wie steht es bei dem Kreisen der sogenannten Elektronen um ihren zentralen Kern? Was ist hier wirklich unmittelbar wahrgenommen worden? Nichts von den bewegten Teilchen; was vielmehr beobachtet wurde, sind Erscheinungen, welche auf den ersten Blick mit der Bewegung von Körpern gar nichts zu tun haben. Alles übrige, was zum Atommodell geführt, ist eine lange Kette von Schlüssen."

"In principio it is impossible to prove from experiments that something is non-existent."

"We completely ignore the human value of the information. A selection of 100 letters is given a certain information value, and we do not investigate whether it makes sense in English, and, if so, whether the meaning of the sentence is of any practical importance. According to our definition, a set of 100 letters selected at random (according to the rules of Table 1.1), a sentence of 100 letters from a newspaper, a piece of Shakespeare or a theorem of Einstein are given exactly the same informational value."

"With Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the fundamental role of experimental errors became a basic feature of physics."

"Both the uncertainty principle and the negentropy principle of information make Laplace's scheme [of exact determinism] completely unrealistic. The problem is an artificial one; it belongs to imaginative poetry, not to experimental science."

"The laws of classical mechanics represent a mathematical idealization and should not be assumed to correspond to the real laws of nature. … We now have to realize that errors are inevitable (..) a discovery that makes strict determinism impossible."

"The first thing Bohr said to me was that it would only then be profitable to work with him if I understood that he was a dilettante. The only way I knew to react to this unexpected statement was with a polite smile of disbelief. But evidently Bohr was serious. He explained how he had to approach every new question from a starting point of total ignorance. It is perhaps better to say that Bohr's strength lay in his formidable intuition and insight rather than erudition."

"Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite. Every one of the many major advances … created sooner or later, more often sooner, new problems. These confusions, never twice the same, are not to be deplored. Rather, those who participate experience them as a privilege."

"A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies..."

"To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were initially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was."

"Today we live in the midst of upheaval and crisis. We do not know where we are going, nor even where we ought to be going. Awareness is spreading that our future cannot be a straight extension of the past or the present … The century now approaching its end has been one of indiscriminate violence, it has been perhaps the most murderous one in Western history of which we have record. Yet I would think that what will strike people most when, hundreds of years from now, they will look back on our days is that this was the age when the exploration of space began, the microchip was invented, revolutions in transport and communication virtually annihilated time and distance, transforming the world into a "global village," and relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and the structure of the atom were discovered, in brief that this has been the century of science and technology."

"Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?"

"A new man appears abruptly, the ‘suddenly famous Doctor Einstein.’ He carries the message of a new order in the universe. He is a new Moses come down from the mountain to bring the law and a new Joshua controlling the motion of heavenly bodies..."

"I made a discovery, perhaps known to others but new to me: I need not put myself center stage but can rather place myself at the side, like a Greek chorus. As the curtain rises, I can walk to the center and can speak as follows: I wish to tell you of happenings in the twentieth century, as I witnessed them and reflected upon them. You will see me return to center stage, but only occasionally. Once that imagery had gotten hold of me, I went back to Ida and said yes, I shall try."

"Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text."

"I lived altogether in nine different places while in hiding, because whenever something happened, either someone betrayed the place or something happened to someone who knew where I was, I had to move. The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move."

"One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then. I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane."

"One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you."

"I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it."

"I was lucky because the same week that I went to prison the Americans crossed the Rhine and cut off the northern part of Holland, so there was no longer any possibility of being shipped out to a concentration camp. The rail lines were cut. So I was in prison in Amsterdam during the very last days of the war. We were sent to the men's prison and the girls were sent to a women's prison in a different place."

"On the day we were caught, Lion and I had been talking about writing a memorandum on the fate of the Jewish war children living in hiding or among Dutch families … we were the representatives of the Zionist youth organization. … Lion who had been taking notes of the discussion, put these papers in his jacket pocket when he took a break from lunch. When the Germans caught us they discovered his notes. If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences."

"For several months I was incapable of feeling anything, completely inaccessible to my feelings — I did not laugh, I did not cry. The second thing was this amazing trauma, where I forgot the names of everyone I knew. That was very strange. I knew who everyone was: this was a friend from high school, this was my cousin, but I had to relearn every name. It was quite striking, that very strong reaction that I had. They have a name for it, I think: posttraumatic stress syndrome. I don't sit here conquering great resistance to talk. It is not my way. I don't suffer the reliving of these memories with tremendous pain. It's very odd, but it's finished for me. That, of course, is never quite true. It isn't finished. I am like all of my generation; we are marked people. But I don't suffer; I can talk to you about it. Most of my family was killed. All of my father's and mother's sisters and brothers and their children, my sister and my old grandfather, they're all gone. Four out of five Jews in Holland never came back after the war — 80 percent."

"One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think."

"The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move."

"To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery."

"Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane"

"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter."

"A series of powers are at work within the great stream of Expressionism who have no outward similarity to one another but a common direction of thrust, namely the intention to give expression to things of the psyche [Seelisches] through form alone."

"One rainy day in Cologne on the Rhine, the catalogue of a teaching aids company caught my attention. It was illustrated with models of all kind – mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, paleontological, and so forth- elements of such a diverse nature that the absurdity of the collection confused the eye and mind, producing hallucinations and lending the objects depicted new and rapidly changing meanings. I suddenly felt my 'visionary faculties' so intensified that I began seeing the newly emerged objects against a new background. To capture it, a little paint or a few lines were enough, a horizon, a sky, a wooden floor, that sort of things. My hallucination had been fixed. Now it was a matter of interpreting the hallucination in a few words or sentences Such as: 'Above the clouds midnight passes. Above midnight glides the invisible bird of day..'"

"A banal fever hallucination, soon obliterated and forgotten; it didn't reappear in M's memory until about thirty years later (on 10 August 1925), as he sat alone on a rainy day in a little inn by the seaside, staring at the wooden floor which had been scored by years of scrubbing, and noticed that the grain had started moving of its own accord (much like the lines on the [imitation] mahogany board of his childhood). As with the mahogany board back then, and as with visions seen between sleeping and waking, the lines formed shifting, changing images, blurred at first but then increasingly precise. Max {Ernst] decided to pursue the symbolism of this compulsory inspiration and, in order to sharpen his meditative and hallucinatory skills, he took a series of drawings from the floorboards. Letting pieces of paper drop at random on the floor, he rubbed over them with a black pencil. On careful inspection of the impressions made in this way, he was surprised by the sudden increase they produced in his visionary abilities. His curiosity was aroused. He was delighted, and began making the same type of inquiry into all sorts of materials, whatever caught his eye – leaves with their ribs, the frayed edges of sacking, the strokes of a palette knife in a 'modern' painting, thread rolling off a spool, and so forth. To quote 'Beyond Painting' These drawings, the first fruits of the frottage technique, were collected under the title 'Histoire Naturell'."

"Looking at them [the metaphysical paintings of De Chirico, c. 1919] I had the sense of rediscovering something I had always known, just as when some event already seen opens up to us a whole realm of our own dream world, one that we have failed to see or comprehend, owing to a kind of censorship."

"What is a forest? A marvelous insect. A drawing-board, what do forests do? They never go to bed early. They are waiting for the tailor. What is the high season of the forests? It is the future.."

"But it is of the past, it seems to me. Perhaps.. .Man and the nightingales were in the most favourable situation for imagining: for them the forest was a perfect dream-conductor.."

"What is a dream? You ask too much of me: it is a woman cutting down a tree. What are forests for? For making the matches one gives children to play with. Is the fire in the forest, then? The fire is in the forest. What do plants feed on? On mystery. What day is it today? Shit.."

"Are there still forests over there? They are, apparently, wild and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, full of ant-hills, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent and kindly, without yesterdays or tomorrows. From one island to another, above the volcanoes, they play cards with inmatched packs. Naked, they are decked only in their majesty and their mystery."

"The 2nd of April (1891) at 9:45 a.m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest and which the bird had brooded for seven years."

"Max Ernst died the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time."

"I saw a shady forest and therein a crowd of nightingales. The nightingales as to their breast were rough and hairy, and as to their feet some were like calves, some like panthers, and some like wolves, and they had beast's claws instead of toes."

"A picture that I painted after the defeat of the Republicans in Spain [in 1936, Max Ernst was a resolute opponent of the Spanish dictator General Franco, who was supported by Germany's Nazi regime] is 'The Fireside Angel'. This is, of course, an ironic title for a rampaging beast that destroys and annihilates anything that gets in its way. This was my idea at the time of what would probably happen in the world, and I was right."

"Studies in painting: Non. He learned to express himself by means of art in the same way as the child learns to talk. No teaching is needed for the one who is born an artist, and even the expression 'self-taught' is a phony, he thinks."

"A painter may know what he doesn't want. But woe be to him if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself."

"Woman's nakedness is wiser than the teachings of the philosophers. [the title of his essay]"

"Two artists can suggest two different subject matters and two completely different pictures by using the same spot. Every picture demonstrates certain aspects from the inner life of the painter who made it. For this reason, the orthodox Tachist is wary of letting himself be influenced by Leonardo's famous wall.. .I grant the painter the right to speak, to laugh, to take a stand and to draw upon all his hallucinatory faculties. But I absolutely refuse to live like a Tachist."

"A painter may know what he does not want."

"The painter"

"Laymanship"

"Art has nothing to do with taste, art is not there to be 'tasted'. Yet a certain mayor believes that art exists to be 'judged', and the most modern art to be 'judged from a business point of view'. That such an original thought could emerge from a mayor's brain! What the mayor wants is exactly what the critics of the large and small dailies actually do. They set out to judge art. That is a very pleasant occupation, because no matter how wrong a judgment may be, you never have to revise it. The art judges talk about 'ability' and complain that the 'younger generation' has lost this ability. Sometimes their complaints are even seriously intended. But, gentlemen, do you really know what that is — ability? No, you don't."

"Mixed feelings when he [Max Ernst frequently writes about himself in the third person] enters the forest for the first time: delight and oppression. And what the Romantics spoke of as 'being at one with Nature'. Wonderful joy in breathing freely in an open space, but also anxiety at being encircled by hostile trees. Outside and inside at the same time, free and trapped."

"First contact with occult, magical and enchanting forces. One of his best friends, a very intelligent and affectionate pink cockatoo, died in the night of 5 January. It was a terrible shock for Max when he found the dead bird in the morning, at the same moment as his father told him of the birth of his sister, Loni. The boy's consternation was so great that he fainted. In his imagination, he linked the two events and made the baby responsible for extinguishing the bird's life. A series of psychological crises and depressions followed. A dangerous amalgamation of birds and human beings became firmly established in his mind and later found expression in his paintings and drawings."

"Quote of Paul Éluard, his poem on Max Ernst in 'Capitale de la douleur', 1926; as cited by Edward Quinn in Max Ernst, Barcelona, Poligrafa, 1984, p.132"

"He had the ears of an oyster"

"Quote of Benjamin Péret, (1926), in 'Cahiers d'art', 1937, p. 60; as cited by Edward Quinn in Max Ernst, Barcelona, Poligrafa, 1984, p.140"

"Reader, when you cross the threshold of Max Ernst's world abandon all hope of receiving help from the outside.. ..you will have to walk alone"

"The Dada movement was an anti-movement which corresponded to a need born of the first World War.. .Max Ernst's activities in Cologne in 1917 made him the foremost representative of the Dada painters. Between 1919 and 1921 his paintings, drawings and collages depicting the world of the subconscious were already a foretaste of Surrealism.. .In fact his previous achievements had certainly influenced, to a great extent, the literary Surrealist exploration of the subconscious."

"Max Ernst is above all an artist in the limited sense-a man who paints with taste and sensibility. He used these gifts to convey his vision-his symbolic vision-just as Blake used his poetic sensibility to convey his symbolic vision. After a century or so we have arrived at the point of accepting the genius of Blake; in the same mood we should be able to accept instantly the comparable genius of Ernst."

"[Max] Ernst continued - as he himself said - the tradition of what the German Romantics called 'inner landscapes'. Few statements encapsulate the mindset of this Surrealist artist as aptly as these words by Caspar David Friedrich, the ultimate Romantic painter: 'The painter should not just paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees in himself. If he sees nothing in himself, however, then he should forebear to paint what he sees before him.'"

"How sweet Japanese woman is! All the possibilities of the race for goodness seem to be concentrated in her."

"Whatever doubts or vexations one has in Japan, it is only necessary to ask one's self: "Well, who are the best people to live with?""

"Japanese affection is not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice; it is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness."

"My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter – with infinite subtlety – spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go, – and tell stories of me to people whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet; – and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them."

"Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio."

"They are hideous Golgothas, these old intermural cemeteries of ours. In other cities cemeteries are beautiful with all that the art of the gardener and sculptor can give....There the horror is masked. Here it glares at us with empty sockets. The tombs are fissured, or have caved in, or have crumbled down into shapeless bricks and mortar...[and] crawfish undermine the walls to feast upon what is hidden within."

"With the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, old forms of thought crumbled; new ideas everywhere arose to take the place of worn-out dogmas; and we now have the spectacle of a general intellectual movement in directions strangely parallel with Oriental philosophy. The unprecedented rapidity and multiformity of scientific progress during the last fifty years could not have failed to provoke an equally unprecedented intellectual quickening among the non-scientific. That the highest and most complex organisms have been developed from the lowest and simplest; that a single physical basis of life is the substance of the whole living world; that no line of separation can be drawn between the animal and vegetable; that the difference between life and non-life is only a difference of degree, not of kind; that matter is not less incomprehensible than mind, while both are but varying manifestations of one and the same unknown reality – these have already become the commonplaces of the new philosophy."

"After the first recognition even by theology of physical evolution, it was easy to predict that the recognition of psychical evolution could not be indefinitely delayed; for the barrier erected by old dogma to keep men from looking backward had been broken down. And today for the student of scientific psychology the idea of pre-existence passes out of the realm of theory into the realm of fact, proving the Buddhist explanation of the universal mystery quite as plausible as any other. "None but very hasty thinkers," wrote the late Professor Huxley, "will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its roots in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of supplying.”"

"With the massacre of Shimabara ends the real history of the Portuguese and Spanish missions. After that event, Christianity was slowly, steadily, implacably stamped out of visible existence. It had been tolerated, or half tolerated, for only sixty-five years: the entire history of its propagation and destruction occupies a period of scarcely ninety years. People of nearly every rank, from prince to pauper, suffered for it thousands endured tortures for its sake - tortures so frightful that even three of those Jesuits who sent multitudes to useless martyrdom were forced to deny their faith under the infliction;* and tender women, sentenced to, the stake, carried their little ones with them into the fire, rather than utter the words that would have saved both mother and child. Yet this religion, for which thousands vainly died, had brought to Japan nothing but evil disorders, persecutions, revolts, political troubles, and war. Even those virtues of the people which had been evolved at unutterable cost for the protection and conservation of society, - their self-denial, their faith, their loyalty, their constancy and courage, - were by this black creed distorted, diverted, and transformed into forces directed to the destruction of that society. Could that destruction have been accomplished, and a new Roman Catholic empire have been founded upon the ruins, the forces of that empire would have been used for the further extension of priestly tyranny, the spread of the Inquisition, the perpetual Jesuit warfare against freedom of conscience and human progress. Well may we pity the victims of this pitiless faith, and justly admire their useless courage: yet who can regret that their cause was lost? ... Viewed from another standpoint than that of religious bias, and simply judged by its results, the Jesuit effort to Christianize Japan must be regarded as a crime against humanity, a labour of devastation, a calamity comparable only, - by reason of the misery and destruction which it wrought, - to an earthquake, a tidal-wave, a volcanic eruption."

"The religion of the Jesuits could never have adapted itself to the social conditions of Japan; and by the fact of this incapacity the fate of the missions was really decided in advance. The intolerance, the intrigues, the savage persecutions carried on,~-all the treacheries and cruelties of the Jesuits may simply be considered as the manifestations of such incapacity; while the repressive measures taken by Iyéyasu and his successors signify sociologically no more than the national perception of supreme danger. It was recognized that the triumph of the foreign religion would involve the total disintegration of society, and the subjection of the empire to foreign domination. Neither the artist nor the sociologist, at least, can regret the failure of the missions. Their extirpation, which enabled Japanese society to evolve to its type-limit, preserved for modem eyes the marvellous world of Japanese art, and the yet more marvellous world of its traditions, beliefs, and customs. Roman Catholicism, triumphant, would have swept all this out of existence. The natural antagonism of the artist to the missionary may be found in the fact that the latter is always, and must be, an unsparing destroyer. Everywhere the developments of art are associated in some sort with religion; and by so much as the art of a people reflects their beliefs, that art will be hateful to the enemies of those beliefs. Japanese art, of Buddhist origin, is especially an art of religious suggestion,—not merely as regards painting and sculpture, but likewise as regards decoration, and almost every product of aesthetic taste. There is something of religious feeling associated even with the Japanese delight in trees and flowers, the charm of gardens, the love of nature and of nature's voices,—-with all the poetry of existence, in short. Most)assuredly the Jesuits and their allies would have ended all this, every detail of it, without the slightest qualm. Even could they have understood and felt the meaning of that world of strange beauty.—result of a race-experience never to be repeated or replaced,—-they would not have hesitated a moment in the work of obliteration and effacement. To-day, indeed, that wonderful art-world is being surely and irretrievably destroyed by Western industrialism. But industrial influence, though pitiless, is not fanatic; and the destruction is not being carried on with such ferocious rapidity but that the fading story of beauty can be recorded for the future benefit of human civilization."

"It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives."

"Any idealism is a proper subject for art."

"The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can."

"But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness of being truly loved."

"Mr Hearn began really to count as a writer only when his Hellenic qualities of mind, stunted at first by the conditions of life in North America, were at last developed among a people distinguished by somewhat of that instinctive feeling for beauty which formed an incomparable element in the genius of ancient Greece. His æsthetic sense luxuriated in a land where fineness of taste is still a common characteristic. Through the gate of their art he entered, not only into the ways of life of the Japanese, but into their moods and their religion."

"To denounce Hearn is the same thing as a denunciation of Japan. Lafcadio Hearn was as Japanese as haiku."

"He is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm."

"Your information is based on the meagre translations of our immense literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travellers. It is rarely that the chivalrous pen of a Lafcadio Hearn or that of the author of "The Web of Indian Life" enlivens the Oriental darkness with the torch of our own sentiments."

"If you can’t reduce a difficult engineering problem to just one 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper, you will probably never understand it."

"Simple calculations based on a range of variables are better than elaborate ones based on limited input."

"Indeed, in my judgment, the simplest measurements are always the best because they have the least possibility for error and the greatest likelihood of survival."

"The most fruitful research grows out of practical problems."

"We must expect that these German scientists, once they get here, will continually try to defend the actions of Germany before and during the war. Their background and education wiil have supplied them with the necessary arguments. The rocket specialists have at times tried to convince us that they worked on rockets only for the purpose of scientific research. The German atomic scientists, who failed in their attempt to make a bomb, planned to deny that they wanted to make one."

"I did all the problems a little different from the rest of the class."

"... I don't like the history of physics, I have always been against the way in which the historians wrote about it in earlier days. Nowadays it is better, someone like Martin Klein, that is real, he brings something new. But the earlier historians always described physics as if it had been done by three and four people and they forgot that these famous people could only do their work because of the many others who also made contributions. ..."

"In my study hangs a fine old horse shoe, which I found in an abandoned Western ghost town. I don't believe in superstitions, but it is supposed to work even for a nonbeliever2. It hasn't so far."

"In short, we knew very little about the German uranium project, and what little we knew we almost invariably interpreted in their favor. In the long run, this was probably all to the good, since it accelerated our own work enormously. But in those days, before the invasion of Europe, we would have given a great deal to know more."

"If only we could get hold of a German atomic physicist, we felt, we could soon find out what the rest of them were up to. To us physicists the problem seemed very simple. Even those of us who were not working on the atom bomb project knew pretty well what was going on over here. No amount of military security could have prevented us from knowing, difficult as it was for the military to understand this. Active scientists engaged in the same general field of research inevitably form a kind of clan; they work closely together and know all about each other's specialities and whereabouts. You can't take a group of key scientists from their accustomed haunts and have them disappear in some remote place in New Mexico, together with their families, without their colleagues who are left behind wondering about it and deriving the right conclusions. The same thing, we knew, would be true of the Germans."

"Secrecy, it was impressed upon us at the outset, was imperative, despite the fact that our code name, ALSOS, seemed a give-away, being the Greek translation for Groves. Since General Groves was in complete charge of all Army activities relating to the atom bomb project, the inference did not take too much imagination. To make it even more obvious, the Mission's vehicles had license plates bearing the Greek letter Alpha."

"Goudsmit stumbled to fame in 1925. For more than a decade, Niels Bohr and others had been trying to develop a quantum theory of the atom, mostly by studying atomic spectra. These consist of the energies (specific to each element) of the quanta of light, or photons, that an atom’s electrons can absorb or emit. Physicists had been struggling to make sense of anomalies that appeared in spectra when atoms were immersed in a magnetic field: some spectral levels mysteriously split into two or more. Goudsmit and his friend George Uhlenbeck, both graduate students at Leiden University in the Netherlands, had an idea. They proposed that the splitting could be explained if the electron had an intrinsic ‘spin’ that could assume one of two directions: clockwise or anticlockwise. Other physicists had discarded this idea, seeing it as marred by conceptual difficulties. ... Soon, researchers including Paul Dirac explained away the conceptual difficulties. Quantum spin was born."

"… one of the most detrimental (and least discussed) effects of the crisis in science education in the world today is that we are creating a population increasingly unable to think skeptically about a wide range of issues."

"I believe that an understanding of our place in the wider universe and the methods of science are part of the birthright of everyone living on our planet."

"If you are thinking of ending your life because you are depressed, or cannot cope with the pressures of this difficult world, do not use this book. &hellip; Please respect the true intentions of Final Exit: the right of a terminally ill person with unbearable suffering to know how to choose to die."

"Frequently I am asked if I will take my life when I have a terminal illness. My answer is: "I'll wait and see." If my dying is bearable, the pain well managed, and my self-control and dignity are not damaged, then I shall hang on and die naturally. But if I am one of the unlucky few who suffer abysmally, then I shall make a quick exit. This book is intended for readers who think much the same as me."

"I tend to choose a doctor in the forties age range, male or female, in general preference to an older one. &hellip; They understand the full implications of modern medical technology a great deal better than their elders, are more open to new ideas, and usually are keenly aware of today's medical controversies, including law and ethics."

"If you have to help a person die, say nothing. Let the police do their own sleuthing."

"Too soon is to waste the good aspects of life, and perhaps unkind to those who love and need you. Too late means you might lose control."

"Ugh! The plastic bag! Agreed. Not very aesthetic, but not so bad with a little a little prior practice to become accustomed to it."

"It was amazing how quickly the silence fell on the crowd. It went from being so loud that you could barely hear the guys 20 feet away on the on-deck circle, to hearing my own footsteps loud and clear as I rounded the bases…that's never happened to me before."

"I consider myself a line drive hitter with power. I just try to put my best swing on the ball every time."

"Preparation is very important. The pitcher is going to do his job and prepare for you so you as a hitter must do the same. I always watch videotape of pitchers before the game and even sometimes during."

"My wife Deidre bought the game for my son A.J. and he's loved it ever since. So when we had the opportunity to become a part of it, I couldn't say no."

"I learned to play (baseball) on the streets in the Dominican Republic when I was 8 yrs old."

"Christ's method is divine. His words have the charm of antiquity with the freshness of yesterday; the simplicity of a child with the wisdom of a God; the softness of kisses from the lip of love, and the force of the lightning rending the tower. His parables are like groups of matchless statuary; His prayers like an organ peal floating round the world and down the ages, echoed by the mountain-peaks and plains into rich and varied melody, in which all devout hearts find their noblest feelings at once expressed, sustained, refined. His truths are self-evidencing. They fall into the soul as seed into the ground, to rest and germinate. He speaks, and all nature and life become vocal with theology."

"They take inadequate views of Christ's prophetic character, who think Jesus came only to utter discourses, parables, and prayers. Suppose all He ever said to be found in the writings of Jewish rabbis and heathen philosophers, His great function would still be an orginal one, to show us the Father."

"God's beloved Son, leaving the echoes of His cries upon the mountains and the traces of His weary feet upon the streets, shedding His tears over the tombs and His blood upon Golgotha, associating His life with our homes, and His corpse with our sepulchres, shows us how we, too, may be sons in the humblest vale of life, and sure of sympathy in heaven amid the deepest wrongs and sorrows of earth."

"All other great men are valued for their lives; He, above all, for His death, around which mercy and truth, righteousness and peace, God and man are reconciled; for the cross is the magnet which sends the electric current through the telegraph between earth and heaven, and makes both Testaments thrill, through the ages of the past and future, with living, harmonious, and saving truth."

"The world cannot bury Christ. The earth is not deep enough for His tomb, the clouds are not wide enough for His winding-sheet; He ascends into the heavens, but the heavens cannot contain Him. He still lives — in the church which burns unconsumed with His love; in the truth that reflects His image; in the hearts which burn as He talks with them by the way."

"In His discourses, His miracles, His parables, His sufferings, His resurrection, He gradually raises the pedestal of His humanity before the world, but under a cover, until the shaft reaches from the grave to the heavens, whenHe lifts the curtain, and displays the figure of a man on a throne, for the worship of the universe; and clothing His church with His own power, He authorizes it to baptize and to preach remission of sins in His own name."

"The enthronement of Christ over the minds of men is steadily going forward. His kingdom embraces the princes in the realm of mind. It embraces the nations of highest civilization. They are all beneath the cross. It is maintained by simple authority. Other mental monarchs rule by logic; Christ's word is law — it is satisfying to His subjects. His truth in the handsof His disciples, like the bread He broke upon the mountains, is an ample supply for the millions that gather at His table."

"You may be a dreadful failure. Christ is a Divine success. "Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth.""

"Go to the family where darkness and suspicion and jealousy and disorder reign, and if they will but receive Christ, mark how light and confidence and order and peace spring up. Go to the regions of superstition and idolatry, and see what transformations are effected by Jesus."

"Christ is a rock in a weary land, a covert from the tempest of Divine justice, receiving through the ages the snows of Divine mercy, and melting them for the green pastures and still waters of God's peaceful flock — a rock against which wicked men and devils have breathed their empty curses in vain, for eighteen hundred years."

"Go to Dahomey, Ashantee, Caffraria, Malaisia, — anywhere; search out the rudest people on earth; draw a picture of its vices and cruelties, make it as black as you can, and we will parallel it by pictures of Greece under Pericles and of Rome under Cicero."

"Give us more and more of real Christianity, and we shall need less of its evidences. Act upon the supposition that Christ is a Divine Teacher, and you will soon have a demonstration of its truth."

"The Lamb is, indeed, the emblem of love; but what so terrible as the wrath of the Lamb? The depth of the mercy despised is the measure of the punishment of him that despiseth. No more fearful words than those of the Saviour. The threat- enings of the law were temporal, those of the gospel are eternal. It is Christ who reveals the never-dying worm, the unquenchable fire, and He who contrasts with the eternal joys of the redeemed the everlasting woes of the lost. His loving arms would enfold the whole human race, but not while impenitent or unbelieving; the benefits of His redemption are conditional."

"The longer men sin, the more easily they can; for every act of transgression weakens conscience, stupefies intellect, hardens hearts, adds force to bad habits, and takes force from good example. And, surely, there is nothing in such associations; as wicked affinities will insure to the sinner in the future state, to incline him to repentance."

"O, to have the soul bathed all day long in this thought, " as the pebble in the willow brook " until the words come like the tears, because the heart is full, and we cannot help it; to feel, in the darkest hour, that there is an unseen Spectator whose eyes rest on us like morning on the flowers; and that in the severest sorrow, we can sink into a presence full of love and sympathy, deeper than ever breathed from earth or sky or loving hearts— a presence in which all fears and anxieties melt away as ice-crystals in the warm ocean. This is heaven."

"Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context."

"If you really look at it, I was trying to sell a dream … There was very little I could put in concrete to tell these people it was really real."

"Get it straight, I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."

"I don't care about political parties. I went down to the Greenback parties, to the Populist party, in fact I went through them all. I found some of the parties most powerful weapons, but money interest prostitutes them all. Nowhere have you elected a man in this last election that represents your interests. I do not care what political party you put in power because we are of the economical power. We have the power to do and we will do it! They are not going to fool us there. It was not the political party that gained the eight hour day for the railroad man."

"Look at this watch of mine. Two hands there, nice looking, but let me take the hands out and it will be no good. It would be useless to, and your two hands are like unto the hands of the watch. You are the tool that move the nation. The Salvation Army, the Y.M.C.A. we build their institutions, pay for them, feed the people and everything. We are going to change that. The page is turned. The world is a moving magnet; a new civilization is coming; the pendulum is swimming as it has never swung before. It behooves to do our duty."

"The old condition is passing away. The new dawn of another civilized nation is breaking into the lives of the human race."

"If you ever saw a policeman with a club in his hand, I want to ask you, did you ever see that policeman club a millionaire? But it is "Get out of here, damn you, go on to jail, damn you," if it is a working man."

"No matter what your fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies."

"If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I would shout, 'Freedom for the working class!'"

"Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. It's an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!"

"And why were these things done? Because a group of men had demanded an eight hour day, a check weighman and the abolition of the scrip system that kept them in serfdom to the mighty coal barons. That was all. Just that miners had refused to labor under these conditions. Just because miners wanted a better chance for their children, more of the sunlight, more freedom. And for this they suffered one whole year and for this they died."

"When I get to the otherside, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!"

"I could have settled it in twenty-four hours… I would make the operators listen to the grievances of their workers. I would take the $650,000 spent for the militia during this strike and spend it on schools and playgrounds and libraries that West Virginia might have a more highly developed citizenry, physically and intellectually. You would then have fewer little children in the mines and factories; fewer later in jails and penitentiaries; fewer men and women submitting to conditions that are brutalizing and un-American."

"I refer to the United States, the union of all the states. I ask then, if in union there is strength for our nation, would there not be for labor! What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union. What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow."

"The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win."

"Organized labor should organize its women along industrial lines. Politics is only the servant of industry. The plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity."

"I knew it was useless to tell the governor about conditions as I found them. I knew he would be neither interested nor would he care. It wasn’t election time."

"I do not believe that iron bars and brutal treatment have ever been cures for crime. And certainly I feel that in our great enlightened country, there is no reason for going back to middle ages and their form of torture for the criminal."

"Human flesh, warm and soft and capable of being wounded, went naked up against steel; steel that is cold as old stars, and harder than death and incapable of pain. Bayonets and guns and steel rails and battleships, bombs and bullets are made of steel. And only babies are made of flesh. More babies grow up and work in steel, to hurl themselves against the bayonets, to know the tempered resistance of steel."

"Christ himself would agitate against them. He would agitate against the plutocrats and hypocrites who tell workers to go down on their knees and get right with God. Christ, the carpenter’s son, would tell them to stand up on their feet and fight for righteousness and justice on earth."

"In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, in spite of labor’s own lack of understanding of its needs, the cause of the worker continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to read and to think. Slowly, his standard of living rises to include some of the good and beautiful things of the world. Slowly the cause of his children becomes the cause of all. His boy is taken from the breaker, his girl from the mill. Slowly those who create wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands."

"The Greatest woman agitator of our time was Mother Jones. Arrested, deported, held in custody by the militia, hunted and threatened by police and gunmen-she carried on fearlessly for 60 years. I first saw her in the summer of 1908, speaking at a Bronx open-air meeting. She was giving the "city folks" hell. Why weren't we helping the miners of the West? Why weren't we backing up the Mexican people against Diaz? We were "white-livered rabbits who never put our feet on Mother Earth," she said. Her description of the bullpen, where the miners were herded by federal troops during a Western miners' strike, and of the bloodshed and suffering was so vivid that, being slightly dizzy from standing so long, I fainted. She stopped in the middle of a fiery appeal. "Get the poor child some water!" she said, and went on with her speech. I was terribly embarrassed."

"The next winter I saw Mother Jones again in Chicago at a meeting in Hull House of the Rudewitz Committee, to which I was a delegate from Local 85, IWW. I heard her hot angry defiant words against the deportation of a young Jewish worker on the vile pretext of "ritual murder." (Jane Addams and others saved him from certain death by their spirited defense). Mother Jones was dressed in an old-fashioned black silk basque, with lace around her neck, a long full skirt and a little bonnet, trimmed with flowers. She never changed her style of dress throughout her lifetime. She may sound like Whistler's Mother but this old lady was neither calm nor still, breathing fearless agitation wherever she went... She was put out of hotels. Families who housed her in company towns were dispossessed. She spoke in open fields when halls were closed. She waded through Kelly Creek, West Virginia, to organize miners on the other side. Tried for violating an injunction, she called the judge a "scab" and proved it to him. She organized "women's armies" to chase scabs-with mops, brooms and dishpans. "God! It's the old mother with her wild women!" the bosses would groan. In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, when a group of women pickets with babies were arrested and sentenced to 30 days, she advised them: "Sing to the babies all night long!" The women sang their way out of jail in a few days to the relief of the sleepless town. She was asked at Congressional hearing: "Where is your home?" and she answered: "Sometimes I'm in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota. My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong. In 1903 she led a group of child workers from the textile mills in the Kensington district of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to confront President Theodore Roosevelt with proof of child labor. In Colorado, after the Ludlow massacre in 1914, she led a protest parade up to the governor's office. In West Virginia, time after time, she led delegations to see various governors and "gave them hell," as she said...When she was a very old lady, she warned the rank and file against leaders who put their own interests ahead of labor. Until her death she stoutly affirmed her one great faith: "The future is in labor's strong, rough hands!"... She inspired me a great deal when I first heard her in New York and Chicago in those early days, though I confess I was afraid of her sharp tongue. But when I reminded her of the meeting in the Bronx and told her I had lost my baby, she was very sympathetic and kind. Her harshness was for bosses, scabs and crooked labor leaders."

"The UMWA had a number of big personalities and tough-talking bruisers at its disposal, but one of its most effective agitators was an old Irish woman in a black dress who prowled the picket lines and struck fear into the hearts of the corporate elite. This "John Brown (abolitionist) in petticoats" was a militant socialist who breathed class war like a dragon and doted on her members as if they were her own children. The woman who would become Mother Jones lived an entire life's worth of pain, struggle, and tragedy before she found her calling: organizing the working class, lifting up the unheard, and unseating those who would gladly earn their money by grinding the poor's bones to dust. A dressmaker by trade, left widowed with four deceased children in the 1871 yellow fever epidemic, Jones reinvented herself as a labor organizer and self-proclaimed hell-raiser...She grew famous for her signature billowing black dress, replete with lace collar, a severe white bun, and a pair of tiny eyeglasses perched on her fierce countenance. A century before Johnny Cash donned his all-black getup to symbolize his allegiance with the poor and downtrodden, Jones reached for widow's weeds to illustrate her status as the grandmother of a movement. She cultivated a matriarchal, sometimes impish image, fondly referring to grizzled miners and favored politicians alike as "my boys" and crusading against child labor. Only some of that came naturally; the rest was a theatrical flourish, cooked up to emphasize Harris's age and gravitas and add to her stature as the one and only Mother Jones, the bane of the coal bosses and a fighter to the core...Unlike many labor figures of her day, Jones did not discriminate against women or Black workers (though her single-minded focus on building working-class power at all costs left some of her views shortsighted at best, in particular her silence as the American labor movement went on the offensive against Chinese immigrant workers). During labor clashes, her greatest weapon was the womenfolk. She was known for actively encouraging women and families to get involved in strikes and organizing wives into "mop and bucket" battalions to fight alongside their husbands on the picket lines and hold down the home front."

"At the time [1903], 18 percent of American workers were under the age of sixteen, and as Jones herself once said, "The American people were born in strikes, and now in the closing days of the nineteenth century, even the children must strike for justice.""

"hailed in labor circles as "the miner's angel""

"I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones"

"In these tours of the Ohio minefields I often met Mother Jones. Our paths had crossed many times before, especially in the early 1900's in the Pennsylvania mining fields, and we were good friends. Mother Jones became interested in the labor movement after the death of her husband, who had been a soldier in the Civil War. She herself was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1830. She was an instinctive fighter against the capitalist class and spent her time organizing the miners into the U.M.W.A...In later years Mother Jones came under the wrong influences, and was sometimes made use of to play a reactionary role. She always retained great prestige among the miners, who would do almost anything she asked. I can remember time after time when a caucus in the A. F. of L. prepared to make a demonstration of strength against Gompers, she would come in at the last moment and say, "Stick to your old Sammy, boys, stick to your old Sammy!" and they would vote for him again. But just the same Mother Jones was an historical figure, a fine woman and a fine courageous fighter. I met this remarkable woman many more times, since a great deal of my work in the Socialist Party was spent among the miners, and we often held meetings together. Mother Jones died in December, 1930, at the age of 100. The last major strike in which she participated was the great steel strike of 1919, but she was in touch with things and spoke at meetings until 1923, when she was in her nineties. After that she went to stay with a Socialist family who took care of her until the end."

"Mother Jones came to Washington and told a Congressional committee about the terror in the West Virginia coal regions. I pictured her, and wrote that it was not easy to portray that "benign and yet so belligerent" face. When she was held captive by the West Virginia authorities she said to them: "You can stand me up against that wall and riddle me with bullets, but you can't make me surrender.""

"Mother Jones had a delightfully extensive profane vocabulary and did not hesitate to use it in conversation...Whenever Mother Jones came to New York she would let me know. She was moving toward the century mark, but she still had fire in her eye. For hours at a time I would talk with her in her room in the old Union Square Hotel. With a pail of beer on the table, she liked to tell me all about "my boys" (the miners), her experiences in jails, and what happened during strikes."

"In her seventies (and I guess this was one of the reasons she was called Mother, because she was old enough to be the mother of almost everybody who was working), she was organizing miners in West Virginia, and then Colorado. She was so colorful and so dramatic, and she looked like a schoolteacher, wearing her bonnet over her white hair. She was a fiery speaker. She did very dramatic things, like bringing the children of striking miners in Pennsylvania on a march to New York, to Theodore Roosevelt's house, to demand an end to child labor. They were carrying signs saying WE WANT TIME TO PLAY…She was jailed many times. Nothing daunted her. She was brought into courts and she would defy the judge. She inspired miners and other workers all over the country."

"The man who receives five thousand dollars a year wants six thousand dollars a year, and the man who owns eight or nine hundred thousand dollars will want a hundred thousand dollars more to make it a million, while the man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day."

"We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession."

"What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures."

"So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service, we have sustained our forward progress, and we have made our labor movement something to be respected and accorded a place in the councils of the Republic. Where we have blundered into trying to force a policy or decision, even though wise and right, we have impeded if not interrupted the realization of our own aims."

"No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion. If we seek to force, we but tear apart that which united, is invincible. There is no way whereby our labor movement may be assured sustained progress in determining its policies and its plans other than sincere democratic deliberation until a unanimous decision is reached. This may seem a cumbrous, slow method to the impatient, but the impatient are more concerned for immediate triumph than for the education of constructive development."

"The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit."

"What does labor want? We want more school houses and less jails. More books and less guns. More learning and less vice. More leisure and less greed. More justice and less revenge. We want more … opportunities to cultivate our better natures."

"There are about 8,000,000 negroes in the United States, and, my friends, I not only have not the power to put the negro out of the labor movement, but I would not, even if I did have the power. Why should I do such a thing? I would have nothing to gain, but the movement would have much to lose. Under our policies and principles we seek to build up the labor movement, instead of injuring it, and we want all the negroes we can possibly get who will join hands with organized labor."

"And what have our unions done? What do they aim to do? To improve the standard of life, to uproot ignorance and foster education, to instill character, manhood and independent spirit among our people; to bring about a recognition of the interdependence of man upon his fellow man. We aim to establish a normal work-day, to take the children from the factory and workshop and give them the opportunity of the school and the play-ground. In a word, our unions strive to lighten toil, educate their members, make their homes more cheerful, and in every way contribute an earnest effort toward making life the better worth living."

"The Soviet scheme of compulsory labor is being applied on such a broad scale and is so boldly presented as a ‘proletarian’ scheme that it constitutes the gravest danger that has confronted labor for centuries."

"As far as is possible under the ruthless tyranny the organized labor of [Soviet] Russia is everywhere in a state of full revolt."

"In many instances the conduct of colored workmen, and those who have spoken for them, has not been in asking or demanding that equal rights be accorded to them as to white workmen, but somehow conveying the idea that they are to be petted and coddled and given special consideration and special privilege. Of course that can't be done."

"[The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves..."

"We feel as if we were hard labor convicts where everything but our feeding has been made subject to iron rules. We have become lost as human beings, and have been turned into slaves."

"The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish."

"The reactionaries were not the only element responsible for the patriotic orgy. Sam Gompers handed over the American Federation of Labor to the war baiters."

"Gompers, the Bosses’ Friend."

"The unionization of women, even in occupations like the needle trades where they predominated, had scarcely yet begun. Equal opportunities, equal pay, and the right to be organized, were the crying needs of women wage-earners then and unfortunately these demands remain with us today. Many union leaders, like Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, did not consider women workers organizable or dependable. "They only work for pin mon-ey" was the usual complaint. An outside job was considered by the woman worker herself as a temporary necessary evil-a stop-gap between her father's home and her husband's home. Fathers and husbands collected women's wages, sometimes right at the company office. Women did not have a legal right to their own earnings. There was no consideration for the special needs and problems of working mothers, though they were numerous and pressing. Even the clothes of women hampered them-the long skirts that touched the ground, the big unwieldy sleeves, the enormous hats. You were still "a girl" if your skirt was above your shoe tops."

"(Today labor is often looked at as merely an arbiter for wages and benefits. Do you think labor leaders today have defined the mission of the labor movement too narrowly?) That is not new, that was started under Samuel Gompers who said that the purpose of the labor movement was "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." But you can't separate the worker and the community."

"Anti-Chinese associations sprang up and were supported by labor leaders like Workingmen's Party leader Denis Kearney and AFL president Samuel Gompers, who blamed Chinese immigrants for lowering wages and labor standards. Foreshadowing the rhetoric that would later be used against Mexican and Latin American immigrants, these lions of labor used their platforms to rail against the "Chinese invasion" for snatching jobs away from white American workers (though in fact, Chinese laborers generally performed the most hazardous jobs and were paid less than white workers because white employers knew they could get away with it)."

"Employers welcomed the influx of cheap, exploitable labor, but labor organizations like the AFL, then led by xenophobic president Samuel Gompers (who had also lobbied for the Chinese Exclusion Act), resisted what they saw as an invasion of low-skilled competition for (white) American jobs. The AFL ceased its work with majority-Latino unions in the Southwest, and refused to organize Latino workers for decades afterward. Thanks to pernicious anti-immigrant rhetoric echoing out from politicians, unions, and the media, Mexican workers were met with racism, xenophobia, and violence, scorned for "taking American jobs," and enthusiastically exploited by employers."

"Subsequently I learned from the Free Federation officials that the last outside speaker from the American Federation of Labor at a convention had been Samuel Gompers, in 1914. They showed me a copy of his address. It was a masterly exposition of conditions-clear-cut, militant. With only a change of date, what Gompers said in 1914 would have applied equally to the situation in 1934. I was sorry I had not seen that speech before-I would have asked leave to read it to the convention. It was as fundamental, I thought, as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address."

"Jack Reed and I went to Chicago to cover the trial of the I.W.W. leaders before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. They, too, stood accused of interfering with enlist- ment. Bill Haywood and 100 other "Wobblies" were the defendants-speakers, organizers, editors, corralled by a dragnet covering many states. One of the offenses of this organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, was that it had persisted in striking for decent wages and better working conditions even in war-time-while the American Federation of Labor, headed by Samuel Gompers, had in effect called a truce in its conflicts with employers and had tamely gone with the wind of war propaganda."

"You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage."

"A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking."

"Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification."

"A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes — so check your value to the community."

"Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool"

"A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions."

"Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice."

"Don't despise empiric truth. Lots of things work in practice for which the laboratory has never found proof."

"Facts are not science — as the dictionary is not literature."

"Here's good advice for practice: go into partnership with nature; she does more than half the work and asks none of the fee."

"The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty — not marble floors and foundations."

"The specialist is a man who fears other subjects."

"None of the great discoveries was made by a "specialist" or a "researcher"."

"Research has been called good business, a necessity, a gamble, a game. It is none of these — it's a state of mind."

"There is only one reason why men become addicted to drugs — they are weak men. Only strong men are cured, and they cure themselves."

"When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors."

"Whenever ideas fail, men invent words."

"What is scarce is money. The lack of money to spend on goods is what keeps the unemployed resources from producing more goods. Work, moreover, instead of being a curse, is desired more than anything else because the alternative is not enjoyment of leisure but the suffering of unemployment and deprivation. Of course, if people could get income without they would not object too much (although their self-respect in feeling they are useful members in society who are earning their income is too easily underestimated). But it is only by finding work they can obtain the necessary income they need."

"The central idea is that government fiscal policy, its spending and taxing, its borrowing and repayment of loans, its issue of new money and withdrawal of money, shall be undertaken with an eye only to the results of these actions on the economy and not to any established traditional doctrine what is sound and what is unsound ...Government should adjust its rates of expenditure and taxation such that total spending is neither more or less than that which is sufficient to purchase the full employment level of output at current prices. If this means there is deficit, greater borrowing, "printing money," etc., then these things in themselves are neither good or bad, they are simply the means to the desired ends of full employment and price stability."

"The scholars who understand it hesitate to speak out boldly for fear people will not understand. The people, who understand it quite easily, also fear to speak out while they wait for the scholars to speak out first. The difference between our present situation and that of the story is that it is not the emperor but the people who are periodically made to go naked and hungry and insecure and discontented - a ready prey to less timid organizers of discontent for the destruction of the civilization."

"Economics has gained the title Queen of the Social Sciences by choosing solved political problems as its domain"

"Peg o' my heart I'll love you don't let us part. I love you I always knew it would be you Since I heard your lilting laughter It's your Irish heart I'm after Peg o' my heart."

"On State Street, that great street, I just want to say They do things they don't do on Broadway They have the time, the time of their life I saw a man, he danced with his wife In Chicago, Chicago my home town."

"It is known that very distant nebulae, probably galactic systems like our own, show remarkably high receding velocities whose magnitude increases with the distance. This curious phenomenon promises to provide some important clues for the future development of our cosmological views. It maybe of advantage, therefore, to point out some of the principal facts which any cosmological theory will have to account for. Then a brief discussion will be given of different theoretical suggestions related to the above effect. Finally, a new effect of masses upon light will be suggested which is a sort of gravitational analogue of the Compton effect."

"To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole."

"I myself can think of a dozen ways to annihilate all living persons within one hour."

"A cluster of galaxies gave the first hints of dark matter (in the modern sense). In 1933, F. Zwicky inferred from measurements of the velocity dispersion in the Coma cluster, a mass-to-light ratio of around 400 solar masses per solar luminoisity, thus exceeding the ratio in the solar neighborhood by two orders of magnitude."

"Zwicky became the darling of reporters everywhere. ... Though the idea of exploding stars may have been floating around, it was Zwicky who made the concepts, and the name supernova, as familiar as relativity. He always had a way with the tart phrase, as well as the boldness necessary to force it into public use, even on the rare occasion, when these attempts failed. His term for black holes—"Objects Hades"—was a much more colorful term that manages to convey both the uniqueness of the objects and the hellish conditions that prevail inside them. Despite his repeated usage, however, that name never caught on. Popular magazines noted his birthday along with those of movie stars. He even made into the funny papers."

"Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to becoming mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a thousand little indulgences that sets us apart from others."

"For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability."

"The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another."

"We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests."

"In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distributions, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."

"A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity."

"Talent is not universal but it is widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge."

"Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory."

"The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers."

"The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits."

"For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is."

"In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king. (Chris Anderson quoting Rob Reid)"

"Broadly, the Long Tail is about abundance. Abundant shelf space, abundant distribution, abundant choice."

"Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all."

"Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air."

"We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing."

"Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating."

"This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation."

"Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions."

"Intemperance weaves the winding-sheet of souls."

"One of those poor fellows that had become a Christian was badgered by his companions; and one of them said, "How do you know that Jesus Christ has forgiven your sins? " The man turned at once and said, "How do you know when you have got sugar in your tea?""

"If the Bible is God's word, and we believe it, let us handle it with reverence."

"A man is what he is, not what men say he is. His character no man can touch. His character is what he is before his God and his Judge; and only himself can damage that. His reputation is what men say he is. That can be damaged; but reputation is for time, character is for eternity."

"A man's enemies have no power to harm him, if he is true to himself and loyal to God."

"What you learn from bad habits and in bad society, you will never forget, and it will be a lasting pang to you. I tell you in all sincerity, not as in the excitement of speech, but as I would confess and have confessed before God, I would give my right hand if I could forget that which I have learned in bad society."

"It may be a very little thing for you to say to a young man the few words that turn him from the way of ruin, and win him back to life and hope. It may be a very little thing to you; but it is every thing to the young man."

"Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind."

"If I cannot offer some relief to our world, if I cannot inspire our generation to join me, then I feel I am a complete waste of space. This constant fear of feeling irrelevant in our society has been the catalyst behind all my efforts and passions for as long as I can remember."

"Acting is not a lofty performance; it is simply the source of becoming and existing transparently. Acting, I find, is the art of frothing to the surface every raw and honest emotion. The moment an actor pretends, he loses his audience forever"

"When pursued with a pure heart, acting is an entirely selfless profession."

"Our nature as sensitive beings is far too complex to break apart, re-examine and reshape in a poem."

"So we remain, forever more, Immortal and Found."

"Every one of us strives to be a better person; and if I am to contribute one thing of myself, it would be compassion."

"It is the show that keeps giving. Every night it offers something to society, and it offered something to every one of us. It brought us all together for a lifetime.""

"I feel it is our inherent duty as a humane society, above any intangible responsibility, to invest in our world's children’s potential, passion and confidence."

"My children's books are written on the belief that every child has a talent and a passion. Each story unfolds into an adventure of nurturing that confidence until a passion blooms."

"My mother's only wish was to start a life in America because America was the cradle of every promise and opportunity."

"There’s a condensed softness about the Albanian people, and I’ve witnessed examples of their hospitality. Albanian blood runs through my veins and I am proud to call myself Albanian."

"I was an unassuming, skinny little girl."

"Although I was quiet as a child, I had this resistless passion inside of me–this need and hunger to create my own world. Poetry filled that void, and its words fed that vital necessity of ownership."

"It came about like a typical audition where the actress doesn’t know a soul in the room, and exposes her heart and vulnerability in hopes of winning a handful of strangers’ affection."

"I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I’m not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for attention is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress."

"All three elements of storytelling carry one vital philosophy– to offer universal insight, and many instances, hope and therapy to those who absolutely need it. To illuminate a combined and universal purpose, whether it be through the written word, the spoken word, or both elements incorporated into another element of truth. All exist to tell a story to the world."

"I would like to see from women in this industry what I have had the privilege of witnessing for a decade now. Strength, conviction, and unapologetic sensitivity for the healing of souls."

"While some mothers sing lullabies to their children, my mother read me poetry. And to this day, I associate my strongest and most insistent feelings with words lyrically organized on a page."

"I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration."

"In the end we're all searching for our home, that one place where we belong."

"The soul that rides deep through our veins, Our red rivers, and smiles. This darling soul, as endearing As dead poets and countries. This restless soul that neighbors our hearts. A perfect torch that guides our flames To immortality."

"Charity befriends the children— From us, through us, in us. Behind this door, Charity waits. Alone. Tolerant. With a smile as deep as your core."

"If I could I would kiss his wrists. If I had half the courage to face his pain."

"You have marked your loyal entrance through water and sky, I cannot quite reach you, but by me you lie."

"Sing your song, unforgiving siren, Part the curtain clouds with your faithful entrance, And clear your voice. Pour your song of milk onto this land of yours."

"Masiela was a soft-spoken, gentle, and ethereal little girl with absolutely no tincture of rebellion in her make-up."

"I have always had one answer for Communists-kill them all."

"Without establishing national laws, how can you suppress the rebellion?"

"one of my soldiers can handle three Communist soldiers"

"I see myself more as an ambassador of the game. And I hope to bring chess to a higher level in the United States. Making bigger tournaments, more interesting events. Making it a respectable profession for young people to be able to pursue in the future."

"There's so many lessons I get from chess, it's incredible, but I think the biggest thing for me has always been is that losing is learning."

"African continent GMs do exist; but, according to the system of racial classification, I am the first Black GM in history...it matters, and doesn't matter, all at the same time."

""Most amateurs hate Chess 960 because it makes them feel stupid, but most Grandmasters love it because it makes them feel like amateurs again. It’s a chance for the chess elite to explore brand new worlds of wonderment and discovery." — Twitter September 2022"

"Maurice is a born fighter; he’s tricky and aggressive. Maurice confidently contests the sharpest lines of any opening without worrying about whether his opponent will know it better or come up with a novelty. To earn the GM title, Maurice had to go past his natural talents and work hard on raising his positional and endgame play to the GM standard."

"Maurice Ashley is not only a chess grandmaster, but he is a grandmaster at story-telling. He knows how to get to get kids hooked on the strategies and complexities of chess. In an age where kids too often play video games that are like junk food for the brain, Maurice is getting kids to sharpen their minds and build their character through the ancient game of chess."

"Maurice's street savvy gives him instant credibility with children of all ages. I never tire of watching a room full of kids who have absolutely no interest in chess light up as Maurice tells his story. His ideas change lives and needs to be heard. Invest in your child's future; buy this book today."

"As the first (and only) African American International Grand Master, Maurice Ashley is an historical figure. He is also a superb writer and a compelling teacher who makes learning even the most difficult aspects of chess appear possible. He shows us how chess can be used to put our young people on the path to success."

"Chess improves strategic thinking, attention span, patience, camaraderie and sportsmanship. Maurice Ashley is not only an international grand master as a player but also as a teacher and activist."

"Maurice Ashley has been like a brother to me since I was twelve years old. I know the man, I know the competitor, I know the artist, and I know the teacher."

"We physicians who shepherd human life from birth to death have a moral imperative to resist with all our being the drift toward the brink. The threatened inhabitants on this fragile planet must speak out for those yet unborn, for posterity has no lobby with politicians."

"Summits like those in Geneva promote hope. But hope without action is hopeless. Our enthusiasm for the positive spirit in these deliberations must not blind us to the absence of genuine progress toward disarmament. Twenty-four nuclear bombs are being added weekly to world arsenals."

"We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction. We protest the ongoing increase in overkill. We protest the expansion of the arms race to space. We protest the diversion of scarce resources from aching human needs. Dialogue without deeds brings the calamity ever closer, as snail-paced diplomacy is outdistanced by missile-propelled technology. We physicians demand deeds to implement further deeds which will lead to the abolition of all nuclear weaponry. We recognise that before abolition can become a reality, the nuclear arms race must be halted."

"We physicians have focused on the nuclear threat as the singular issue of our era. We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties. But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival."

"Alfred Nobel believed that the destructiveness of dynamite would put an end to war. He deeply believed that the tragic reality of mass carnage would achieve results which all the preaching of peace and goodwill had so far failed to achieve. His prophecy now must gain fulfillment. Recoiling from the abyss of nuclear extermination, the human family will finally abandon war. May we learn from barbaric and bloody deeds of the twentieth century and bestow the gift of peace to the next millennium. Perhaps in that way we shall redeem some measure of respect from generations yet to come. Having achieved peace, in the sonorous phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoken here twenty-one years ago, human beings will then "rise to the majestic heights of moral maturity"."

"The hope of a benevolent civilization was shattered in the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The "war to end all wars" claimed sixteen million lives, and left embers which kindled an even more catastrophic conflagration. Over the sorry course of 5,000 years of endless conflicts, some limits had been set on human savagery. Moral safeguards proscribed killing unarmed civilians and health workers, poisoning drinking waters, spreading infection among children and the disabled, and burning defenseless cities. But the Second World War introduced total war, unprincipled in method, unlimited in violence, and indiscriminate in victims. The ovens of Auschwitz and the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inscribed a still darker chapter in the chronicle of human brutality. The prolonged agony which left 50 million dead did not provide an enduring basis for an armistice to barbarism. On the contrary, arsenals soon burgeoned with genocidal weapons equivalent to many thousands of World War II's. The advent of the nuclear age posed an unprecedented question: not whether war would exact yet more lives but whether war would preclude human existence altogether."

"Every historic period has had its Cassandras. Our era is the first in which prophecies of doom stem from objective scientific analyses."

"Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem "Darkness":"

"As no national interest would justify inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the aggressor, a prevalent misconception is that nuclear war will never be fought. But the realities of our age compel an opposite assessment. In no previous epoch were adversaries so continuously and totally mobilized for instant war. It is a statistical certainly that hair-trigger readiness cannot endure as a permanent condition. Furthermore, the unrelenting growth in nuclear arsenals, the increasing accuracy of missiles, and the continuing computerization of response systems all promote instabilities which court nuclear war by technical malfunction; by miscalculation, human aberration or criminal act."

"Throughout human history, when confronted with what was deemed a deadly enemy, the fixed human response has been to gather more rocks, muskets, cannons, and now nuclear bombs. While nuclear weapons have no military utility — indeed they are not weapons but instruments of genocide-this essential truth is obscured by the notion of an "evil enemy". The "myth of the other", the stereotyping and demonizing of human beings beyond recognition, is still pervasive and now exacts inordinate economic, psychologic, and moral costs. The British physicist P.M.S. Blackett anticipated this state of paranoia: "Once a nation bases its security on an absolute weapon, such as the atom bomb, it becomes psychologically necessary to believe in an absolute enemy". The imagined enemy is eventually banished from the human family and reduced to an inanimate object whose annihilation loses all moral dimension."

"Perhaps the signal accomplishment of the IPPNW has been the broad-based, free-flowing dialogue between physicians of the two contending power blocs. We heed Einstein's words, "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding". In a world riven with confrontation and strife, IPPNW has become a model for cooperation among physicians from East and West, from North and South. Paranoid fantasies of a dehumanized adversary cannot withstand the common pursuit of healing and preventing illness."

"Combatting the nuclear threat has been our exclusive preoccupation, since we are dedicated to the proposition that to insure the conditions of life, we must prevent the conditions of death. Ultimately, we believe people must come to terms with the fact that the struggle is not between different national destinies, between opposing ideologies, but rather between catastrophe and survival. All nations share a linked destiny; nuclear weapons are their shared enemy."

"We must hold fast to the dream that reason will prevail. The world today is full of anguish and dread. As great as is the danger, still greater is the opportunity. If science and technology have catapulted us to the brink of extinction, the same ingenuity has brought humankind to the boundary of an age of abundance. Never before was it possible to feed all the hungry. Never before was it possible to shelter all the homeless. Never before was it possible to teach all the illiterates. Never before were we able to heal so many afflictions. For the first time science and medicine can diminish drudgery and pain. Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible. But in order to do the impossible, in the words of Jonathan Schell, we ask "not for our personal survival: we ask only that we be survived. We ask for assurance that when we die as individuals, as we know we must, mankind will live on"."

"If we are to succeed, this vision must possess millions of people. We must convince each generation that they are but transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future. Only life itself can lay claim to sacred continuity. The magnitude of the danger and its imminence must bring the human family together in common pursuit of peace denied throughout the century. On the threshold of a new millennium the achievement of world peace is no longer remote, for it is beckoned by the unleashing of the deepest spiritual forces embedded in humankind when threatened with extinction. The reason, the creativeness, and the courage that human beings possess foster an abiding faith that what humanity creates, humanity can and will control."

"… each dot: the center of a circle without circumference …"

"Is there anything more miraculous than the wonders of nature?" the monk asked. The Master answered: "Yes! Your awareness, your understanding of the wonders of nature."

"a single leaf falling autumn is everywhere…"

"Illusion is the mantle of the Real"

"The sinner's ego is crude that of the saint refined, distilled. Careful! It may be more poisonous!"

"When a monk complained about the world's evil, the Buddha stretched his hand toward the Earth: "on this Earth I attained Liberation.""

"I am neither I nor Other, both I and other…"

"How old are you? As old as the Buddha. And how old is the Buddha? As old as I am"

"all at once I saw that the sun was round! Since then I have been the happiest man on Earth!"

"The Tao cannot be divided, it cannot be shared"

"The clearsighted eye turns the light back to see its own Original Nature…"

""What are you?" — I am no What!I am only I … In relation to you!"

"The Void is a living void … pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction. The great Void does not exist as Void, it embraces all Being/non-Being"

"Do you believe in God? I, I believe in nothing but God!"

"Do you believe in God?" "Which one?"

"The religions are delusional constructs formed around an infallible core."

"It is not that things are delusory but their separateness in the fabric of the Whole that is illusory…"

"People walking? Karma walking … Buddha nature walking..!"

"If you still have to talk about Ultimate Reality See how it manifests itself nakedly in Every thing!"

"In the beginngless beginning there was the Meaning"

"When the Christ says I: it is the I of all the Masters: the Way, the Truth, the Life"

"I and the Father are not-two!"

"the grasses whisper "This is my Body""

"Innumerable Buddhas Enlightened… innumerable Christs crucified… always the same Christ, the same Buddha!"

"Even if there had never been a Buddha nor a Christ CHRIST NATURE IS! BUDDHA NATURE IS!"

""Nothing burns in hell but ego" says Tauler. Does anything live but Buddha Nature, Christ Spirit?"

"The cross of the Cruxifixion — without the cross of the Resurrection is the symbol of a mutilated Christianity."

"They do not see what they look at, hence they know not what they do."

"the distance between this pigeon's brain and mine is minute compared to that between mine and Bodhi's Wisdom Compassion"

"Life ends with the previous thought It is resurrected with the subsequent One"

"Above all else, Franck was a bridge builder whose marvelous combination of art and spirituality points to a new way of being in the twenty-first century. He calls it transreligious: "outside the categories of both 'interfaith' and 'ecumenical' . . . even less a syncretistic scrambling together of symbols, concepts, and rituals of the various religious traditions." He clearly had great respect for each tradition and found in his art and writing ways to convey "the inner experience in which these traditions converge.""

"The goal of moksha, of emancipation, though individual in form (like the Western quest for personal salvation), is thoroughly social in content. In a way, it goes beyond even the prevailing Western conception of moving from egoism to altruism. For the goal is not unselfishness but selflessness—a movement not from self to other, but from self to Self, in which there is no other."

"Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control."

"In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist. I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled."

"The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently."

""Some fool has put the head of this nail on the wrong end." "You idiot, it's for the opposite wall!" To be sure, if the space of physical objects allowed motions of translation only, and not also rotations. That space has such geometry is a fantasy; experience shows otherwise. It is only experience that makes this complaint and the rejoinder a dialogue of madmen."

"Experience is of particulars only."

"To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, "What would the world be like if it were true?" The operationist asks, "What would we have to do to come to believe it?" For the pragmatist the question is, "What would we do if did believe it?""

"We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts."

"Whenever you wash dishes, cook, or clean, if you make no sound, this is smartness itself. A person who enters a house and makes a lot of noise is revealing a lack of spirituality; even cats and dogs do not make unnecessary sounds, and man as he naturally is does not make any either."

"When you are angry, it means you, yourself are unhappy. Even if you are wronged, you are still making yourself unhappy if you feel anger."

"If you think of harming someone, this is the same as actually doing it, in terms of the spiritual world, since the spiritual world is vibrational, which includes thinking."

"Pasteur originally conceived the idea of germs and of destroying them. Although this started as a personal thing, it has mushroomed into DDT, killing beetles and worms, resulting in food contamination, much sickness, and trouble. Although he is regarded as hero by modern medicine, Pasteur will be treated in much the same way as a warmonger when he is judged in the spiritual world."

"All of our punishment institutions, including jails, laws, church confessionals, and so forth, are systems of illusion. The order of the universe, the infinite justice of yin and yang, naturally takes care of all motion and compensation. We don't need to invent arbitrary ways to make balance with punishments."

"Memory is merely the process of tuning into vibrations that have been left behind in space and time."

"Although the future exists, you can avoid or alter it by changing you present condition. By the quality of our condition, we attract or are attracted to particular types of experiences. If our condition is good we do not attract or need to experience certain events that would otherwise be necessary to balance our lives. We exert control over and have responsibility for our future because it is determined by our present condition."

"If you are eating well and your condition is pure and clean, life itself becomes like the dreams or visions that you have when sleeping."

"See the person's eating and cooking, and then you can judge his or her spirituality."

"Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity."

"What neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion."

"Your "conscious life" is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons."

"Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence."

"Any ape can reach for a banana, but only a human can reach for the stars or even know what that means."

"Whether a country is to be called 'civilised' or not, depends not on how affluent the upper 10 per cent are, but how well they treat the lower 10 per cent."

"The two greatest things that all men aim at in any free government are liberty and permanency. We have had liberty enough - too much perhaps in some respects - but at all events, liberty to our hearts content."

"We have here no traditions and ancient venerable institutions; here, there are no aristocratic elements hallowed by time or bright deeds; here, every man is the first settler of the land, or removed from the settler one or two generations at the furthest; here, we have no architectural monuments calling up old associations; here, we have none of these old popular legends and stories which, in other countries, have exercised a powerful share in the government; here every man is the son of his own works. (Hear, hear.)"

"This is a new land - a land of pretension because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the only true aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term. (Hear, hear.)"

"I will take leave to read to the house a few figures which show the amazing, the unprecedented growth which has not perhaps a parallel in the annals of the past, of the military power of our neighbours within the past three or four years... From January 1861 to January 1863 the army of 10,000 was increased to 800,000... In January 1861 the ships of war belonging to the United States were 83; in December 1864 they numbered 671... These are frightful figures for the capacity of destruction they represent, for the heaps of carnage that they represent, for the quantity of human blood spilt that they represent, for the lust of conquest that they represent, for the evil passions that they represent, and for the the arrest of onward progress that they represent."

"If we are true to Canada, if we do not desire to become part and parcel of these people, we cannot overlook this the greatest revolution of our times. Let us remember this, that when the three cries among our next neighbours are money, taxation, blood, it is time for us to provide for our own security..."

"The idea of a universal democracy in America is no more welcome to the minds of thoughtful men among us than was that of a universal monarchy to the mind of the thoughtful men who followed the standard of the third William in Europe, or who afterwards, under the great Marlborough, opposed the armies of the particular dynasty that sought to place Europe under a single dominion. (Hear, hear.) But if we are to a universal democracy on this continent, the lower provinces - the smaller fragments - will be "gobbled up" first, and we will come in afterwards by the way of dessert. (Laughter.)"

"I will content myself, Mr. Speaker, with those principal motives to union; first, that we are in the rapids and must go on; next that our neighbours will not, on their side, let us rest supinely, even if we could do so from other causes; and thirdly, that by making the united colonies more valuable as an ally to Great Britain, we shall strengthen rather than weaken the imperial connection. (Cheers.)"

"Everything we did was done in form and with propriety, and the result of our proceedings is the document [the Quebec Resolutions] that has been submitted to the imperial government as well as to this house and which we speak of here as a treaty. And that there may be no doubt about our position in regard to that document we say, question it you may, reject it you may, or accept it you may, but alter it you may not. (Hear, hear.)"

"Miracles would cease to be miracles if they were events of everyday occurrence; the very nature of wonders requires that they should be rare; and this is a miraculous and wonderful circumstance, that men at the head of the governments in five separate provinces, and men at the head of the parties opposing them, all agreed at the same time to sink party differences for the good of all, and did not shrink, at the risk of having their motives misunderstood, from associating together for the purpose of bringing about this result. (Cheers.)"

"That is a glorious doctrine to instill into society. (Cheers.)"

"It is my contention that Creativity is as important today in Education as Literacy and we should treat it with the same status."

"Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence."

"I saw a well-meaning policy statement that said ‘College begins in Kindergarten'. No it doesn’t, Kindergarten begins in Kindergarten. A friend of mine once said ‘A Three-Year old is not half a Six-Year old."

"We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education. And it’s impoverishing our spirits and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies."

"If you’re doing something you love, an hour seems like 5 minutes. If you are doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit 5 minutes can seem like an hour. And the reason that so many people are opting out of Education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion."

"Whoever thought of the No Child Left Behind legislation and its title certainly understands irony because millions of our children are indeed being left behind. This standardized testing is making the job of teachers unnecessarily difficult, limiting the discretion of teachers to teach. School systems are imposing conformity instead of promoting creativity."

"For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed."

"(Prince Duan and others) with the support of Empress Dowager took control of the Manchu Imperial Court. Using the most ignorant mind, by the most despicable means, with the most selfish goal, using Yihetuan, which was the most prone to rioting social underclass, to "support the Qing, eliminate the foreigners", and to takeover the regime. This coup d'etat was repeated 66 years later, by those aggressive Red Guards (China). History repeated itself, in minute details."

"We want a better America, an America that will give its citizens, first of all, a higher and higher standard of living so that no child will cry for food in the midst of plenty. We want to have an America where the inventions of science will be at the disposal of every American family, not merely for the few that can afford them. An America that will have no sense of insecurity and which will make it possible for all groups, regardless of race, creed, or color to live in friendship, to be real neighbors; an an America that will carry its great mission of helping other countries to help themselves, thinking not in terms of exploitation, but of creating plenty abroad so we can all enjoy it here in America."

"I need your help. The abstruse nature of the subject requires not only concentrated reading, not alone clear understanding, but co-operation with the author. For that which could easily be made comprehensible by personal contact and demonstration, must of necessity depend on mere words and intellectual concepts. Many of the questions that may arise in your mind during or after reading of each chapter can best be answered through the practical application of the exercises prescribed herein. Unfortunately, there is no other way to co-operate: the technique of acting can never be properly understood without practicing it."

"What rights have women? …(they are) punished for breaking laws which they have no voice in making. All avenues to enterprise and honors are closed against them. If poor, they must drudge for a mere pittance— if of the wealthy classes, they must be dressed dolls of fashion — parlor puppets…"

"…There is 10 times more in the world than would maintain all in yet unknown luxury. Yet how much misery there is in our midst; not because there is not enough, but owing to the misdirection of it."

"We have heard a great deal of our Pilgrim Fathers…but who has heard of the Pilgrim Mothers? Did they not endure as many perils, encounter as many hardships, and do as much to form and fashion the institutions of New England as the Pilgrim Fathers? And were not their trials, and is not their glory equally great? Yet they are hardly remembered."