Authors From The United States

"Look, you have probably the only three people in Washington here who think we should go straight to Belgrade and arrest Milošević but let's not kid each other - we're the only three people. The rest of this is malarkey. The Republican Congress won't even vote for the bombing, the NATO forces won't even go along with the idea of ground troops and whether or not the president will or will not is not relevant, the question it seems to me is what is the definition of victory. We sat in this program before, the definition of victory was all the troops out of Kosovo, the Albanians back in Kosovo and a NATO-led force in Kosovo. That's not total victory, that's not the victory I want, that's not the victory John wants, I've been saying we should go in, on the ground, we should announce there's going to be American casualties, we should go to Belgrade and we should have a Japanese/German-style occupation of that country and we should have public trials in order to strike away this mask of the Serbian victimization so the people of Serbia know what's happened. It's the only thing that will ultimately work but that's not what anyone but the three of us have been talking about from the beginning. So when the president says he's not for total victory he's not for what we're for but he never was nor was NATO nor is anybody but the three of us."

"But I respectfully suggest, Major, that the responsibility is slightly above your pay grade, to decide whether to take the nation to war alone, or to take the nation to war part way, or to take the Nation to work half-way. That is a real tough decision."

"You and I both know, and all of us here really know, and it's a thing we have to face, that the only way, the only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone — start it alone — and it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking this son of a — taking Saddam down. You know it and I know it."

"If Haiti, a God-awful thing to say, if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest."

"The truth is, every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden."

"Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, 'Law and order,' the Democratic match or response was, 'Law and order with justice' — whatever that meant. And I would say, 'Lock the SOBs up.'"

"Biden took on the idea that Hill's failure to come forward with complaints suggested that the incidents did not occur. "I wonder how many tens of thousands of millions of men in this country work for a boss who treats them like a lackey, tells them to do certain things, and stay on the job, and we never ask, 'Why does that man stay on the job. . . , ' " he said. "I don't know why we have so much trouble understanding the pattern of a victimized person.""

"I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife, who is sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest? [Of his Irish ancestors] Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? No, it's not because they weren't as smart. It’s not because they didn’t work as hard. It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand."

"It is an exciting and dangerous time, for this generation of Americans has the opportunity so rarely granted to others by fate and history. We literally have the chance to shape the future - to put our own stamp on the face and character of America, to bend history just a little bit."

"The standard of judgment is no longer results but the flickering image of seriousness, skillfully crafted to squeeze into 30 seconds on the nightly news. In this world, emotion has become suspect - the accepted style is smooth, antiseptic and passionless."

"We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society — for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference. We must reclaim the tradition of community in our society. Only by recognizing that we share a common obligation to one another and to our country can we ever hope to maximize our national or personal potential. We must reassert the oneness of America. America has been and must once again be the seamless web of caring and community."

"For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. For too long as a nation, we have been lulled by the anthem of self-interest. For a decade, led by Ronald Reagan, self-aggrandizement has been the full-throated cry of this society: 'I've got mine, so why don't you get yours' and 'What's in it for me?'"

"During the '60s, I was in fact very concerned about the civil rights movement. I was not an activist. I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. I was involved, but I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma, I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans in my own city."

"I don't want anybody to give me credit for sharing any point of view George Wallace has. There are some people who oppose busing because they are racist, but the vast majority of the American people — the people of Delaware — oppose it for the same reason that the architect of the concept now opposes it.Professor Coleman, an educator, first suggested the possible benefits of busing in a 1966 report. Now in 1975 Coleman says, "Guess what? I was wrong. Busing doesn't accomplish its goal." We should be concentrating on things other than busing to provide for the educational and cultural needs of the deprived segment of our population. But we've lost our bearings since the 1954 "Brown vs. School Board" desegregation case. To "desegregate" is different than to "integrate."I got into trouble with Democratic liberals in 1972 when I refused to support a quota-system for the Democratic National Convention.I am philosophically opposed to quota-systems; they insure mediocrity. The new integration plans being offered are really just quota-systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with; what it says is, "in order for your child, with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son." That's racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child? The point is that if we look beyond the "old" left to the "New Left," almost all the new liberal leaders and civil rights leaders oppose busing."

"Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point."

"I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don't buy that. I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation ls today, for the sins of my own generation. And I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago."

"I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace—someone who's not afraid to stand up and offend people, someone who wouldn't pander but would say what the American people know in their gut is right."

"(W)hen it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I'm about as liberal as your grandmother. I don't like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don't think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body. I support a limited amnesty, and I don't think marijuana should be legalized."

"[Atheism] believes that truth for truth's sake is the highest ideal and that virtue is its own reward."

"It is because of the Biblical curse on man's search for knowledge, which has so paralyzed his mind during the past ages, and its detrimental effect upon progress, that makes the Bible the most wicked, the most detestable, the most pernicious, and the most obnoxious book ever published. ... We will never achieve intellectual liberty until the wickedness of this book has been discarded with the belief in the flatness of the earth."

"The Bible is not a divine revelation from God. It is not inspired; on the contrary, it is a wicked book .... It has been responsible for more suffering and torture than any other volume ever printed……”"

"With this recognition of the finality of death, no one should willingly withhold acts that would bring benefits, joy or happiness to others."

"Religion is all profit. They have no merchandise to buy, no commissions to pay, and no refunds to make for unsatisfactory service and results.... Their commodity is fear. They blackmail their parishioners with threats of hell and damnation. These poor deluded people give them their hard earned money to save them from a hell that does not exist, and from eternal torment that was invented by the perverted minds of priests to rob the living and in addition, they are exempt from taxation! Insult to injury! Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great scheme of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey upon the ignorance and fears of the people. The penalty for this type of extortion should be as severe as it is of other forms of dishonesty."

"Changing a rod into a serpent and the serpent back into a rod may be clever magic, but how does such a demonstration prove that Moses spoke to God? If the only thing necessary to prove the truth of an extraordinary claim were to demonstrate an ability to bewilder, there would be no more mysteries to solve. If a person claims that he can bring the dead back to life, and in proof of that power pulls a rabbit out of a hat, that is hardly a demonstration of the truth of his claim; it is merely an example of his ability in the art of deception. If he claims that he can fly without wings and without the use of mechanical help of any kind, and in proof of his ability pulls another rabbit out of another hat, that is not proof of his ability to fly, but of his ability to lie, and he will without much hesitation be condemned as a faker. The demonstration of one thing has absolutely no bearing in proving the truth of the other, when there is no relationship between them."

"On too many occasions, especially in matters concerning purported conversations and messages from gods, mystery has been employed by charlatans to hoodwink the people."

"When the tyranny of the state is combined with the hypocrisy of the church, you have a modern example of the twin vultures that have devoured man, and his rights, throughout the ages."

"Imagine using as an authority in the matter of marriage the opinion of a celibate priest!"

"Of the ten crimes which Biblical Hebrew law punished by stoning, nine have ceased to be offenses in modern society."

"Praying as a public function, particularly when led by a clergyman, is a vulgar display of an exclusively personal matter."

"As superstition is the weed of the brain, it grows perfusely, once started."

"Man's inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man."

"Facts and not merely opinions are what we want. Emotionalism is not a substitute for the truth."

"If Atheism writes upon the blackboard of the Universe a question mark, it writes it for the purpose of stating that there is a question yet to be answered. Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved? Does not the word "God" only confuse and make more difficult the solution by assuming a conclusion that is utterly groundless and palpably absurd?"

"A precept claiming infallibility should certainly possess the universality of the law of gravitation and the perfection of the arithmetical table. If it fails to possess these undeviating qualities, its imperfection is self-evident and its value either greatly diminished or useless."

"Look around you. Everywhere. They are there. In every home - lurking in dark corners … small, bi-pedal entities with almost human brains play their games in which adults are the pawns. They play and wait for the time when they will take over the world!"

"He was just really spontaneous, and it was just exciting. I was having a hard time in the band I was in, and so to meet Jeffrey was just like being given a set of paints. Do you know what I mean? It was just like I had all this colour in my life again. I mean, he idolized me before he met me. It's kind of creepy and I, I was like that with him. This is embarrassing, but it's the truth. I just couldn't help falling in love with him. He was adorable. I read his diaries, he read mine, you know we'd just swap, we'd literally just hand over this very personal stuff, and I've never done that with anybody else. I don't know if he has. So in some ways it was very, there was a great deal of intimacy but then there'd be times when I'd just think "oh no, I'm just not penetrating this Jeff Buckley boy at all. I just felt like a groupie or something, sometimes. It wasn't like being his partner at all. He just had something you wanted, it didn't matter who you were."

"I wanted to fuse together my favorite elements of rock and soul singers into something I could call my own. The inflections of Stevie Wonder with the soaring qualities of someone like Buckley. It was his emotional intensity that inspired me more than anything. Also, Jeff came along at a time most singers weren’t using their upper register. His approach helped me embrace the fact that I was a tenor. I owe that guy a lot."

"I saw my favorite bands, Rage Against the Machine, ten years ago also, Jeff Buckley, in '94, so as well I learned a lot about music through coming to this festival, so it means lot to me taking chance to headlining here."

"Never heard such a range, and such a purity. When he would place one note next to the other, you could actually see its kind of roundness."

"I just love his spirit, and his whole energy, and I also love when men use their voice so unselfconsciously, and just really...feminine, masculine, all over the place. And he just, um...he was, and is, my favourite."

"I'm here because I adore his spirit, and I adore him, and the place from which he creates."

"I’d love to sing with Jeff Buckley. He is currently making his first album, and if it’s anything like a radio session I heard by him, it should be amazing. He’s written this song called ‘Grace,' which literally makes the hair on my neck stand on end. I was sweating like a fucking June bride when I first heard him. Music has never done that to me before."

"His voice is an incredible instrument, angelic, and powerful, and mean, at the same time. Tortured. He has been a huge inspiration and influence to me over the last two years. This tune is just unreal."

"I just wanted to pay tribute to him and talk about the situation. When asked if it was a conscious thing to give an Eastern flavor to the song, Sheik says, "definitely... I know that he was, like, a big fan of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and he was listening to a lot of that kind of music. There's also just a really mournful quality to that kind of string playing. "I wanted to send him off and say a few things about how much his music moved me and other people."

"There was a period when I couldn’t get through the day without hearing him sing 'Hallelujah' 3 or 4 times. He had a one in a billion voice and an emotionally piercing guitar style and...I know everyone is saying this, but it hurts so much to lose an artist who was capable of so much before he'd had a chance to do his best work. I guess I should be thankful for what there is: the album "Grace," his first EP, the bootleg live cassettes floating around, and whatever SONY will inevitably scrape together for release. It’s a fucking shame."

"Jeff Buckley's Lilac Wine is the most beautiful thing ever recorded..."

"The reason why I think that record is a great album is just the uniqueness of hearing a man sing so beautifully, and the record, to me, spills with emotion, the whole time."

"Jeff was a beautiful man. Grace is an album full of the most beautiful songs, and he possessed an equally gorgeous voice. When we lost him, we lost a fantastic talent."

"I think he had one of the best voices I've ever heard. Grace, I think, is the best album of the '90s."

"The last few records that I bought that I really enjoyed...Jeff Buckley. It wailed me. I was like walking around in tears, just so grateful that I discovered this record."