All Quotes

"In truth, the main characteristic of these men was vanity—intellectual and literary. They had the inflation of German professors, and the ruthless talk of undergraduates."

"Friendship is a relation that has many types. On none did I presume to set a more special value than on my intercourse with this observant, powerful, reflective, marvellously full mind. He saw both past history as a whole and modern politics as a whole. He was a profound master of all the lights and shades of ecclesiastical system; a passionately interested master of the bonds between moral truth and the action of political system; an eager explorer of the ideas that help to govern the rise and fall of States; and a scrupulous student of the march of fact, circumstance, and personality in which such ideas worked themselves through. He was comprehensive as an encyclopaedia, but profound and rich, not tabulated and dry."

"He was not without some intellectual difficulties for us to reconcile. The union of devoted faith in liberty with devoted adherence to the Church of authority was a standing riddle. His conception of history as a business of wide general forces did not easily fit in with his untiring hunt for incidents on the political backstairs, as the historian's most precious and decisive prizes. He was sometimes fatally addicted to the oblique and the allusive, as if he might enjoy playing hide-and-seek with the well-meaning reader. He winds up his weighty—almost too weighty—introduction to Machiavelli's Prince with the remark that the nineteenth century had seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime. I often challenged him for the precise list of this tremendous Newgate Calendar; I could never induce him to disclose more than a dozen."

"If the gods granted me the privilege of recalling to life for half an hour's conversation some of the great men of the past I have had the good fortune to know, I should say Acton."

"I went down into Shropshire to look at that famous library before it was removed to Cambridge. There were shelves on shelves of books on every conceivable subject—Renaissance Sorcery, the Fueros of Aragon, Scholastic Philosophy, the Growth of the French Navy, American Exploration, Church Councils. The owner had read them all, and many of them were full in their margins with cross-references in pencil. There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section... I never saw a sight that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning. A quarter of the time that had been spent on making those marginal annotations, and filling those pigeon-holes might have produced a dozen volumes of sound and valuable history—perhaps an epoch-making book that might have lived for centuries. But all the accumulated knowledge had vanished... And I said to myself—intensive research, even by the most competent researcher, is wasted, unless the results are put together and printed."

"This air isn't free, you pay for every breath."

"Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it."

"First, what is it you want us to pay taxes for? Tell me what I get and perhaps I'll buy it."

"In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies."

"Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with eight thousand supporters might have two votes in this body. Difficulties, objections, practical points to be worked out — many of them! But you could work them out. . . and thereby avoid the chronic sickness of representative government, the disgruntled minority which feels — correctly! — that it has been disenfranchised."

"Whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!"

"Comrades, I beg of you — do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

"Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation."

"I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?"

"In writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtue of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies... no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation... no involuntary taxation."

"What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing."

"Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden."

"Oratory is a null program."

"Some logics get nervous breakdowns. Overloaded phone system behaves like frightened child. Mike did not have upsets, acquired sense of humor instead. Low one. If he were a man, you wouldn't dare stoop over. His idea of thigh-slapper would be to dump you out of bed — or put itch powder in pressure suit."

"Excuse me, I did not mean to criticize your planet."

"Women are scarce; aren't enough to go around — that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don't care whether they stay alive or not."

"At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity chose the right candidate. In this age the myth is "the will of the people" ... but the problem changes only superficially."

"You listening, Bog? Is a computer one of Your creatures?"

"But I was born free."

"Given my present belief in the much greater range of variability as to both order and kind of complexity in the world's musics versus the world's languages, I can hardly imagine how a model developed really satisfactorily for the detailed structureal explanation of one musical language is so easiy modified to another, and all the more so if the original model be evolved from linguistics rather than from the musical disciplines."

"'Objective' analysis is a tool, primarily useful for suggesting or confirming putative relationships between different musical styles....'Critical' analysis results not in a statistical measurement of style or proof of relationship but rather, ideally, in a formal model for a relatively independent and artistically controllable style within a culture, and should then be viable for accounting for individual manifestations of that style..."

"[A. Merriam] neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner."

"No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But...the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present."

"In applications of the music-as-language metaphor we should attend to diverse musical traditions in musical terms, including not only traditions of the music we study but also traditions of how we study music."

"A tonal type is minimally identifiable by its three markers and thus objectively observable completely apart from its musical or cultural context; it is 'scientific,' it is 'etic.' 'Mode' conversely is all bound up in sixteenth-century musical culture, not as a living doctrine of the music of the church and a heritage fomr the Middle Ages but also as a musical construct being expirimented with by members of the culture, from both humanistic and traditional points of view; it is thoroughly 'emic' and requires study on its own terms...."

"Counterpoint texts tend to resemble one another in the underlying principles of voice-leading they espouse and in the kinds of orderings of rules they provide, but no one could accuse the harmony texts of, let us say, Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann, or of Allen Irvine McHose and Walter Piston--or for that matter, of Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Roger Sessions--of being mutually compatible, either in premise or in practice."

"Rules of simultaneous ensemble constraint can't be assumed a priori to be the kinds of rules or rest on the same foundations as rules for constraint on succession. They may well be similar, but they may well not be similar also. It seems to me that ensemble constraints must first be understood in their own terms, within musical cultures individually and comparitively, looking to what appear to be basic principles in each in light of the others, I would call such a study "comparative counterpoint."

"She stood at the gate, waiting; behind her the swamp, in front of her Colored Town, beyond it, all Maxwell. Tall and slim and white in the dusk, the girl stood there, hands on the picket gate."

"We in America – and men across the earth – have trapped ourselves with that word equality, which is inapplicable to the genus man. I wish we would forget it. Stop its use in our country: Let the communists have it. It isn’t fit for men who fling thei...r dreams across the skies. It is fit only for a leveling down of mankind."

"The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making."

"Lillian Smith is a very great, and heroic, and very lonely figure. Obviously. She has very few friends in that little hamlet in Georgia where she carries on so gallantly. She has paid a tremendous price for trying to do what she thinks is right. And the price is terribly, terribly high. The only way the price can become a little bit less is for more people to do it."

"I would be unelectable. I'm an atheist. As we all know, that is something people won't accept."

"In private, you got what you got in public. He treated everyone the same. He was just a very warm man, and he worked hard to impress upon his children the value of kindness. He was biologically incapable of gossip. There was no smallness in him."

"If you are going to call yourself a Christian—and I don't—then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog's leash? How can Christians tolerate it? It is unconscionable. It has put our young men and women who are over there, fighting a war that they should not have been asked to fight— it has put them in greater danger."

"Limbaugh hasn't had a natural erection since the Nixon Administration; think he's compensating for something? Now, I wouldn't pick on him for any of this stuff, not his blubbiness, not his man-boobs, not his inability to have a natural erection -- none of that stuff -- to me, off limits until! until! -- Mr. Limbaugh, you turn that sort of gun on somebody else -- once you start doing that, you're fair game, fat boy. Absolutely, you jiggly pile of mess. You're just fair game, and you're going to get it, too. [Laughs] You'd better watch what you say, Limbaugh, because it can come back the other way."

"Marijuana will not tolerate repression. Tranquillizers and depressants relax the body and release tension, but the state of mind associated with these drugs is "unconsciousness" whereby we escape rather than resolve our dilemmas. Alcoholism is an extreme need of both the body and personality sometimes to release the nervousness that has accumulated and continues to build up to an unbearable degree. It serves the same function for the collective personality for the society as well. A culture in which alcohol and tranquillizers are the prevalent form of release prefers not to witness internal confusion and actually chooses to act without conscious participation, maintaining a semi-numb condition."

"Marijuana can act as the loosening agent, so that whatever has been banned from consciousness may come cascading forth. To uncover our deceptions without our usual rationalizations can be unpleasant, an experience that has turned many psychologically fragile individuals away from marijuana despite its therapeutic catharsis."

"For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it."

"You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses."

"HEMP, n. A plant from whose fibrous bark is made an article of neckwear which is frequently put on after public speaking in the open air and prevents the wearer from taking cold."

"I believe pot should be legalized (and Jack Daniels should always remain legal!)"

"I had gotten caught with a shopping bag full of Marijuana, a shopping bag full of love - I was in love with the weed and I did not for one minute think that anything was wrong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or five years and was convinced, with the zeal of a crusader, that marijuana was superior to lush - yet the rulers of the land seemed all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more justified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a grasshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly prosecuted."

"The Rastas, more than any other group, have elevated ganja to a central place in their religious practice and have developed a well-articulated ideology justifying its use and explaining its significance. ... Rastas regard the proscription of ganja use by Babylon's government as part of its strategy of social control."

"As a source of illumination, ganga has become an instrument in the war against Babylon and Babylonian consciousness. Its use, therefore, plays a major role in the de-alienation and decolonization of the African mind."

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."