85 quotes found
"There are two kinds of cartoonists in the world today—those who started out by ripping off The Far Side, and those who won't admit that they've ever ripped off The Far Side, probably because they're still doing it (some people rip off Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County, of course, but they all started by ripping off The Far Side)."
"Ethics are so annoying. I avoid them on principle."
"Ahhhh... Satchel, my boy, there's nothin' like a tuna smoothie on a hot summer day..."
"A bad writer is just a good writer with writer's block."
"Robert, you are so wrong, philosophers weep at the sound of your voice."
"Thank you, o can opener, for this can which you are about to open. You are truly a beautiful can opener, and though I am not worthy of you, I love you."
"Is that drooling problem you have due to genetic inbreeding, or are you just really attracted to me? (Example 1 of why Bucky isn't allowed out in public)"
"You may think you're not pretty enough for me, but I bet I'm pretty enough for the both of us. (Example 4 of why Bucky isn't allowed out in public)"
"It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can not fool all of the people all the time... Dogs, on the other hand, with them all you need to do is flick your wrist and they run off looking for some stupid tennis ball. (Famous cat quotes)"
"Friends... Romans... Countrymen... leave me alone. (Famous cat quotes)"
"Two slugs slithered on a yellow wood, And sorry that I could not trample both, Being one trampler, long I stood And looked them down as fierce as I could To where they sat in the undergrowth... I will be telling this with a sigh Somewhere sitting upon a fence: Two slugs slithered on a yellow wood And I-- I ate the slug less trampled by, And that has made all the difference. (Famous cat quotes)"
"I regret that you have but one pie to give for my tummy. (Famous cat quotes)"
"Do not go gentle into that cold bath! (Famous cat quotes)"
"Robert, after spending 48 hours with this fish, we have transcended the conventional "food-to-consumer" relationship. This fish is now my friend."
"Ohhh, get 'im off me, Satchel!"
"You can wordify anything if you just verb it."
"OK, monkey, it's just you and me... I'll give you time to pray to your big, filthy monkey god before I food you."
"I call this "Ode to a Pigeon": Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, You lookin' at me? You lookin' at me?!"
"I think... therefore I am annoyed."
"This is the line for the hydrant, right?"
"Holy cow! You were totally right-- whipped cream rocks!"
"Oh-ho-ho-man! I could sit here and smell this pole all day, I kid you not! (Example 1 of why Satchel isn't allowed outside)"
"Ohhh, your real name is "Brad"?! I only knew you by what Rob calls you around the house: "big dumb *#%$". (Example 2 of why Satchel isn't allowed outside)"
"Do I live here? ...if not, would you still feed me? (Example 3 of why Satchel isn't allowed outside)"
"Is that food? ...that looks like food... I think I'll taste it. (Example 5 of why Satchel isn't allowed outside)"
"He's an FBI Bomb Dog!!! Do you know how cool that is?! That's the people equivalent of like if Paul Newman was a fire-fighting, baby-kissing rock square!"
"Now you listen to me, you little party favor, I'm sick of your rotten attitude! I let you call me names and push me around because I consider you my friend, but I'm sure that if I wanted to, I could throw you around like a chew toy!!!"
"Oh, Bucky... You're so tiny, yet you're such a massive nutjob..."
"I tell ya, man, your cat is officially out of control. He really gives new meaning to the term tempest in a teapot."
"In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned, would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if that is, perhaps, one of the things which make makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one does not find elsewhere."
"When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman."
"Outside a million windows, a million birds had sung as morning swept around the globe. Few men and few women were so glad that a new day had dawned as these birds seem to be.... We are likely to awake with an "Oh, dear!" on our lips; they with a "What fun!" in their beaks.""
"Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history."
"As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw."
"Life’s better, sounder, when we don’t brood unnecessarily on horrors. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination."
"In the Year of Our Lord 1456 Drakula did many terrible and curious things. When he was appointed Lord in Wallachia, he had all the young boys burned who came to his land to learn the language, four hundred of them. He had a large family impaled and many of his people buried naked up to the navel and shot at. Some he had roasted and then flayed. There was a footnote, too, at the bottom of the first page. The typeface of the note was so fine that I almost missed it. Looking more closely, I realized it was a commentary on the word impaled. Vlad Tepes, it claimed, had learned this form of torture from the Ottomans. Impalement of the sort he practiced involved the penetration of the body with a sharpened wooden stake, usually through the anus or genitals upward, so that the stake sometimes emerged through the mouth and sometimes through the head. I tried for a minute not to see these words; then I tried for several minutes to forget them, with the book shut. The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had — apparently — actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the “large family” dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history’s terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you’ve seen that truth — really seen it — you can’t look away."
"My dear and unfortunate successor: I shall conclude my account as rapidly as possible, since you must draw from it vital information if we are both to — ah, to survive, at least, and to survive in a state of goodness and mercy. There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime."
"Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light."
"It is a fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true that as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us. Visiting an American university — not mine — several years after this, I was introduced to one of the first of the great American historians of Nazi Germany. He lived in a comfortable house at the edge of the campus, where he collected not only books on his topic but also the official china of the Third Reich. His dogs, two enormous German shepherds, patrolled the front yard day and night. Over drinks with other faculty members in his living room, he told me in no uncertain terms how he despised Hitler’s crimes and wanted to expose them in the greatest possible detail to the civilized world. I left the party early, walking carefully past those big dogs, unable to shake my revulsion."
"It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy."
"I’ve always been interested in foreign relations. It’s my belief that the study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it."
"There is no thinking except as aftermath or preparation of communication."
"Thinking would not be possible at all if we were not social; we would have no words, no abstract ideas, and no energy for anything outside of immediate sensuality."
"“Truth” is the reigning sacred object of the scholarly community, as “art” is for literary/artistic communities; these are simultaneously their highest cognitive and moral categories, the locus of highest value, by which all else is judged."
"Individuals who participate in interaction rituals are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy “moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense interaction rituals; at the high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make passive individuals; and those whose interaction ritual participation is meager and unsuccessful are withdrawn and depressed."
"Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only on this level. Intellectual sacred objects can be created and sustained only if there are ceremonial gatherings to worship them. This is what lectures, conferences, discussions, and debates do: they gather the intellectual community, focus members’ attention on a common object uniquely their own, and build up distinctive emotions around those objects."
"The key intellectual event is a lecture or a formal debate, a period of time when one individual holds the floor to deliver a sustained argument on a particular topic. This is different from the give-and-take of sociable conversations, which typically cannot reach any complex or abstract level because the focus shifts too often. Intellectuals giving their attention for half an hour or more to one viewpoint, developed as a unified stream of discourse, are thereby elevating the topic into a larger, more encompassing sacred object than the little fragmentary tokens of ordinary sociable ties."
"What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive interaction rituals, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense. Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into property appropriated under the sanction of social groups."
"An India driven by conflicts goes counter to the image prevalent not only among Westerners but among Indian thinkers themselves. We have been taught to think of India as essentially static, even “timeless,” under a perennial otherworldly mysticism. The image had to be created. It came about through a series of events: the destruction of medieval Buddhism, which had anchored the first great round of debates; the tactic of archaizing one’s own tradition to elevate its prestige over that of factional rivals; and the predominance, in the centuries since 1500, of popular devotional cults of an anti-intellectual bent at just the time when Hindu scholars were in a syncretizing and scholasticizing mode in defense against alien conquerors."
"Poetry is the culture of a people. We are poets even when we don’t write poems; just look at our life, our rhythms, our tenderness, our signifying, our sermons and our songs."
"Poets shouldn't commit suicide. That would leave the world to those without imaginations or hearts. That would bequeath to the world a mangled syntax and no love of champagne. Poets must live in misery and ecstasy, to sing a song with the katydids. Poets should be ashamed to die before they kiss the sun."
"You have to read the poem and say, “My god, that’s a good poem,” and kind of smile at yourself. If you’re not willing to do that, then you’re wasting your time, and you’re hurting yourself in another way because you’re trying to please somebody who doesn’t like you. You don’t want to get in that position."
"it is not unusual that the old bury the young though it is an abomination ...those who make war call themselves diplomats ...the unfaithful pray loudest ...we judge a man by his dreams not alone his deeds ...by his intent not alone his shortcomings ...it is not unusual to know him through those who love him"
"...i sit waiting for a fresh thought to stir the atmosphere"
"i hope my shoulder finds a head that needs nestling ...i hope i die warmed by the life that i tried to live"
"they say you should fight the cold with the cold but since i never do anything right i called you"
"...how else to spend a rainy day other than with you seeking sun and stars and heavenly bodies"
"...i believe the most beautiful poem ...is your heart racing"
"how do you write a poem about someone so close ...don't you already know what i feel and if you don't maybe i should check my feelings"
"may i spin a poem around you come let's step into my web and dream of freedom together"
"if nature is true we shall all lose our eyes since we cannot even now distinguish the good from the evil ...i've a mind to build a new world want to play"
"...do you ever stop to think what it looked like before it was an avenue ...ever look south ...and see gazelles running playfully after the lions ...did you ever, sit down and wonder about what freedom's freedom would bring ...the , Alonquin and ... could caress the earthever think what Harlem would be like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears grew... the parrot parroting ...ever think it's possible for us to be happy"
"if trees could talk wonder what they'd say met an old man ...told me "girl! my hands seen more than all them books... at tuskeegee" ...met an old woman ..."sista" she called to me "...my feet seen more than yo eyes ever gonna read" ...if trees would talk wonder what they'd tell me"
"if it does not sing discard the ear for poetry is song if it does not delight discard the heart for poetry is joy if it does not inform then close off the brain for it is dead if it cannot heed the insistent message that life is preciouswhich is all we poets wrapped in our loneliness are trying to say"
"We need food for the Soul We need poetry ... We deserve poetry"
"Paint me Hopeful Paint Me Futuristic Paint Me Nikki I'm a Poet"
"History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened…"
"Politics is personal. That, however, doesn’t mean it’s ideological. It means that one cares about what she or he is doing, what he or she is writing…"
"As a writer, one has to be willing to be wrong, willing to make mistakes. I’ve put everything on the table and accepted the fact that I may come up short. And, if (or when) I do, that’s okay."
"There is a game I must tell you of It's called Catch the Leader Lying (and knowing your sense of the absurd you will enjoy this) ... You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play"
"Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy"
"let's build what we become when we dream"
"then I awoke and dug that if i dreamed natural dreams of being a natural woman doing what a woman does... i would have a revolution"
"...as i grew and matured i became more sensible and decided i would settle down and just become a sweet inspiration"
"if science has the most perfect language just think of me as Mc2 ...one day i'm gonna grab your loveand you'll be satisfied"
"If I were advising someone on a writing career, the deal is this: write. If you get it published, good. If somebody pays you, better, because you have to eat, but the deal is you have to write."
"The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader."
"I'm a big fan of the black woman and so I'm always looking at aspects of the black woman--what she's doing and how she does it."
"At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it."
"(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things."
"I go around doing many, many different things. I speak to children, doing motivation speeches. And Disney helps me when I do something for Childhelp and abused children. We’ve raised a great deal of money to buy units that go out into the suburbs of Knoxville and help children who can’t afford to come in to doctors and everything. I love to do that. I have always loved children. They seem to have a certain affinity with me. I just enjoy their naturalness and their joy of living and their questions. It keeps me young, frankly."
"I think God put me in this position as a punter and in professional football because He wants something out of me to be able to share with other people, as a Christian, I think God has given me that platform to say, "Hey, I've allowed you to do a lot of things and I need you to speak My name." He always finds a way to put His people in situations where they can spread His Word and spread His name."
"Every animal has a particular purpose on the planet. We may not like some of those purposes, but they're all necessary for us to exist."
"I've been blessed by the good Lord to be able to go to all these places and that fine, that’s real fine and dandy. But what about the other billions of people? Unless you love something, you can't save something and that’s my logo. You know, that's why I take animals with me so that people that live in an intercity."
"I'm just trying to explain to people: these are zoological parks, and whether you're a believer or not, these are the arks of the world, everybody."