People From Illinois

"The man did not move because only immobility could hurt more than motion: the man held himself still because to move might lessen his suffering, and that he could not bear. For him only pain had meaning."

"He did understand. Finally, fatally, he did. He had thought he was the master of history, that his fractal world-tree had grown according to his will. He had allowed himself to be deceived."

"All true stories end in death."

"Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth."

"A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world--something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear--is nothing but a cheap hustle."

"Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be."

"Anyone who is of a thoughtful, philisophical cast of mind will occasionaly be struck by the appearance of certain organizing principles of history. The forms these principles seem to take inevitably depends upon one's specific obsession. For a mornachist, history is a struggle of classes of economic civil war. An agriculturalist sees the dynamic of populations, land, and availability of food; a philosopher might speak of the will to power or the will to sythesis; a theologian of the will of God."

"The problem with happy endings," Tan'elkoth said, "is that nothing is ever truly over."

"I respect what is repectable," Tan'elkoth replied. "To ask for respect where none has been earned is childish maundering.And what is repectable, in the end, save service? Even your idol Jefferson is, in the end, measured by how well he served the species. The prize of individualism--its goal--is self-actualization, which is only another name for vanity. We do not admire men for achieving self-actualization; we admire self-actualization when its end result is a boon to humanity."

"Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other."

"Can't trust a fascist--truth is always your first sacrifice to the welfare of the state"

"A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization."

"I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step."

"When the gods would punish us, they answer our prayers."

"It's customary, at times like this, to say a few words. A man shouldn't die with no understanding of why he's been murdered. I do not pride myself on my eloquence, and so I will keep this simple."

"Fairy tales--simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life."

"My beliefs are clearly that of a hardened skeptic […] I use the term "occult" to refer to any of all of these subjects. The reader is forewarned that The Skeptics Dictionary does not try to present a balanced account of occult subjects. If anything, this book is a Davidian counterbalance to the Goliath of occult literature. I hope that an occasional missile hits its mark…"

"History is replete with examples of what happens when any group of authorities do not have to answer to empirical evidence but are free to define truth as they see fit. None of the examples has a happy ending. Why should it be otherwise with therapy?"

"Ultimately, the main product being sold by human potential gurus is hope itself. It should be obvious that in itself this is not a bad thing. We all need hope. Without hope, there is no point in making plans for the future. Without hope, there is no point in working on a relationship or setting goals. Thus, insofar as participation in Large Group Awareness Training increases one's hope for finding one's way and for achieving one's goals, it is good. Even false hope may be better than no hope at all."

"Graphology is another in a long list of quack substitutes for hard work. It is appealing to those who are impatient with such troublesome matters as research, evidence analysis, reasoning, logic, and hypothesis testing."

"The star system has us making pictures with personalities rather than stories, sacrificing everything in order to keep some old bags playing young women."

"Of all the people who make up a movie production unit, the cameraman is the only one who can call himself a free soul."

"The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, I watched those things go down because we could do it in B-17s. I watched them go down. Then I watched those black puffs of smoke and fires in some instances. I said to myself, “People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. Those are not soldiers."Well, then I had a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. I lived with a doctor. He would tell me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. [...] because they could not practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. I thought, you know, I am just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. I am supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. I won’t be worth anything if I do that.Now, I have been lucky because if I had to make up my mind and want to reject something, I can reject it and I do that. So that was one of the things that I was faced with when, as you say, I was on my way to the target. But before that time, [...] I was clearly convinced in my own mind, and I had people telling me how much property and lives that bomb would take when it exploded because it was nondiscriminatory. It took everything.[...] I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. That was the thing that I was going to do the best of my ability. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don’t care whether you are dropping atom bombs, or 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it."

"I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it, and have it work as perfectly as it did... I sleep clearly every night."

"And when it comes down to cases, everything written is at least in part a fantasy. Except maybe for the national budget. That's horror."

"We have more televangelists per square mile here in this part of the country than I really care to think about. Maybe somebody out there will figure out how to spray for them."

"There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning — because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is."

"Don't get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think."

"I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!"

"Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better."

"A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men — and people in general."

""We the people-still an excellent phrase," said the playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all…Lorraine Hansberry spoke her words about government during the Cuban missile crisis, at a public meeting in New York to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. She also said in that speech, "My government is wrong." She did not say, I abhor all government. She claimed her government as a citizen, African American, and female, and she challenged it."

"The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention. Nearly half a century ago, black playwright and critic Lorraine Hansberry took the Communists to task for failing to recognize that the Woman Question stood alongside class, race, colonialism, and the struggle for peace as "the greatest social question existent.""

"My first real job was as an art editor of the People's Voice...The secretary who was there gently growing her wings was Lorraine Hansberry."

"Years later when Alpheus Hunton, Lou Burnham and Lorraine Hansberry started Freedom, the newspaper in which Paul Robeson wrote, they portrayed Africa-a big black giant, in shackles, ready to break loose. I realized then that there was a large segment of Black America caught up in the African movement, in African history."

"The great victims in this country of the institution called segregation, which is not solely a southern custom but has been for a hundred years a national way of life-the great victims are the white people, and the white man's children. Lorraine Hansberry said this afternoon when we were talking about the problem of being a Negro male in this society. Lorraine said that she wasn't too concerned really about Negro manhood since they had managed to endure and to even transcend fantastic things, but she was very worried about a civilization which could produce those 5 policemen standing on the Negro woman's neck in Birmingham or wherever it was, and I am too."

"It is hard for me to talk about Lorraine in a way because I loved her. She was like my baby sister, in a way. I can't think of her without a certain amount of pain. Every artist, every writer goes under the hammer. But under ordinary circumstances, since a writer's real ambition is to be anonymous and since his work is done in private, one arrives at some way of living with the hammer. But the black writer is by definition public, and he lives under something much worse. The pressure of being a writer is one thing, but the pressure of being a public figure is another and they are antithetical, too. The strain can kill you. It is certainly one of the things that killed Lorraine, who was very vivid, very young, very curious, very courageous, very honest. But she died, as you know, subsequent to the eruption in Birmingham, as the country, in fact, began to go over the cliff. Many of us began to realize then that there was no way of redeeming the American Republic. It was bent on destruction. This was one of the things that killed her. It was the incomprehension of her country and the disaster overtaking the nation, which, after all, she, like I, had many reasons to love. We were born there, and our ancestors paid a great deal for it."

"Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and — I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations."

"When I said that I make out with dudes, there was a slight sense of sexual rebellion in that. And I probably even made it a bigger deal than it was."

"I’m an insomniac, my mind works the night shift."

"Q: Will Fall Out Boy ever become Fall Out Man? A: The chest hair is in the mail. So hopefully we will in four to six weeks. depending on shipping."

"Q: X-ray vision or bionic hearing? A: It's easy to hear people talking shit. I'd rather check out Patrick in his boxers with little heart prints on 'em. So vision I guess."

"Being ambiguously flamboyant really does help. I’ve had so many people come up to me and be like, ‘I felt OK to come out of the closet after you said this.’ When someone says that to me -- it’s not an event I’ve ever been through, so I don’t know what to compare it to. I don’t think I even understand how important that is to someone’s life."

"Our culture bombards us with this idea that you’re not that, and if you are that, there’s something wrong with you, and then we’re going to call you that, and then it’s an insult. There is a sense of self-empowerment or recapturing who you are by people calling you ‘fag,’ and being like, ‘Yeah, I am a fag.’ Even though you’re not. What does somebody respond? That dude has nothing to say about that again."

"I have a bit of a consummate victim in my head. That’s who I identify with throughout history. When I was 10 I would draw black eyes on myself because I thought it was cool. You’re so into people who are tragic. You want to be that so badly. But you probably aren’t really the tragic genius that you think you are."

"Whenever you say that homophobia is stupid, you just get called gay."

"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."

"There are angels near you to guide you and protect you, if you would but invoke them. It is not later than we think, it is a bigger world than we think."

"You have a chance to move in far better society than the Joneses. Why worry about keeping up with the Joneses? Keep up with the Angels and you'll be far wiser and happier."