People From Lithuania

"“Death is in the nature of the universe, Barker. Death is only the operation of a mechanism. All the universe has been running down from the moment of its creation. Did you expect a machine to care what it acted upon? Death is like sunlight or a falling star; they don’t care where they fall. Death cannot see the pennants on a lance, or the wreath of glory in a dying man’s hand. Flags and flowers are the inventions of life. When a man dies, he falls into enemy hands—an ignorant enemy, who doesn’t merely spit on banners but who doesn’t even know what banners are. No ordinary man could stand to find that out. You found it out today. You sat in the laboratory and were speechless at the injustice of it. You’d never thought that justice was only another human invention.”"

"Now you think about this, too: you’re not charming, dashing, or debonair. You’re funny looking, as a matter of fact. You’re too busy to spare much time for me, and even if you did take me out night-clubbing somewhere, you’d be so out of place that I couldn’t enjoy it. But you do one thing: you let me feel that my rules are as worthwhile to me as yours are to you. When you ask me to do something, I know you won’t be hurt if I refuse. And if I do it, you don’t feel that you’ve scored a point in some kind of complex game. You don’t try to use me, cozen me, or change me. I take up as much room in the world, the way you see it, as you do. Do you have any idea of how rare a thing that is?"

"Tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow was always better, for someone. The difficult task lay in ensuring that the someone was one of yours."

"There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase."

"Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middle-aged philosophers."

"“You’re sincere enough.” She laughed shortly. “Heaven protect the human race from the sincere idealist!”"

"People want to be safe, and comfortable. If safety and comfort is to be found in guns, then they will take up guns—of their own accord, in their own need. And when safety and comfort are found in libraries, then the guns rust."

"And, in Cot’s mind as in that of every other human being, what had been a twinging secret shame was disastrous and disgusting as a public horror."

"The dead must not rise—they undermine everything their dying created."

"Never try to reason with a man who can see the blade swinging for his head."

"Always lobbying for his own emotions, he was the perfect man for a job the administration had tacitly committed to ineptitude."

"Man, is it wrong to miss being young and sure of yourself?"

"“Smart isn’t ‘Can you do it, is it good to do?’ Smart is ‘Can you make ’em believe what you’re doing is real?’ And real is ‘Can you get financing for it?’”"

"That was a classic maniacal farrago, and it boils down to his not being able to understand the world. It wasn’t necessary to count the contradictions after the first one."

"Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horsewhippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had handset into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end—it was simply a fact of life that operated more slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not."

"Loss of dignity is after all one of the basics to a good punchy gag."

"I wonder if time-traveling cultures are playing with us. I wonder if they process our history for entertainment values."

"It was understood on occasions of this sort that crew technicians are too busy to stay, since it had long ago been discovered that even one cameraman at a buffet was worth a horde of locusts, and tended to make awkward small talk."

"“I’m not frightened. ”“None of us are ever frightened. Now and then, we’d just like more time to plan our responses.”"

"I’m just an information processor like any other living thing."

"You know, even more than playing chess, I dislike dealing with self-righteous chess players."

"“The world is full of confusing coincidences.” “And a man’s mind insists on making patterns from random data.”"

"It’s good for us; hot breath on your heels is what keeps you on your toes."

"The way the world worked, once the word was out, the effect would take on exhaustibility. There was always not merely the event itself, but opinion of the event, and rebuttal of the opinion, and the ready charge of self-interest, and the countercharge. There was the analysis of the event, and the excavation of the root causes of the event, and the placement of the event in the correct historical context. Everyone would want to kick the can, and it would clatter over the cobblestones interminably, far from the toes of those who’d first impelled it."

"The poet faces his heart, his soul and his mood."

"I believe the art of the future including poetry will be simple, fresh and strongly coloured and will be understood and loved by the ignorant as well as the most cultivated. A popular art in the finest sense of the word."

"If you are really short of $ I could send you some (after my next pay, since I have spent my resent pay 99%). Wait another 5 days, I will send some – don't starve meanwhile. Eat grass mixed with chopped leather belt and boiled old shoes – it's vitamin and protein rich. – That's what the Russian guerillas used to eat."

"The Fluxus movement... developed its 'anti-art', anti-commercial aesthetics under the leadership of George Maciunas. Fluxus staged a series of festivals in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and New York, with avant-garde performances often spilling out into the street. Most of the experimental artists of the period, including Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, took part in Fluxus events. The movement, which still continues, played an important role in the opening up of definitions of what art can be."

"Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture ... PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, ... promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals ... FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.""

"Never lend Paik a television. He destroys all televisions."

"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 like teaching and the contact with young minds keeps one on one's toes."

"People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work."

"This year marks the beginning of Opus Dei's work in Kaunas, which I have received with great happiness and pleasure. My hope is that Opus Dei will bring the benefits of holiness that come to all the countries where the Prelature works. I am convinced that the Catholic Church in Lithuania needs the spirit of Blessed Josemaría that is embodied in his children, who uphold the authentic Magisterium of the Church…. The faithful of Opus Dei, fulfilling the desire of their Founder and following in his steps, grasp the essence of and faithfully respond to the invitation of His Holiness John Paul II – 'Put out into the deep!'""

"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."