BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: meself
Date: 03 Sep 11 - 03:58 PM

"never slap a man whose chewing tobacco has been attributed to Will Rogers"

Now there's a piece of advice I'm going to put into action today!

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: kendall
Date: 03 Sep 11 - 03:28 PM

Never squat while wearing spurs, and never slap a man whose chewing tobacco has been attributed to Will Rogers.


So many Christians, so few Lions.
Never own anything that you have to feed or paint
A man should try everything once, except incest and Morris dancing.
All three Utah Phillips.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: saulgoldie
Date: 03 Sep 11 - 10:12 AM

Interesting discussion about quotes here:


http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=140163723&m=140163694


Saul

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Midchuck
Date: 03 Sep 11 - 08:29 AM

Midchuck, have you read the last Travis McGee book? I suspect that McDonald knew he wouldn't live to write another one. McGee meets, and reconciles with, a daughter that he hadn't known he had; it brings him in from the cold.

Oh, yeah. When I read fiction, it's usually science fiction or fantasy. But I read everything McDonald published from the '70s up to his death. As I did with Richard Parker up to his.

Peter

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: autolycus
Date: 03 Sep 11 - 04:27 AM

"They say the internet is amazing. That you can call up any book. Go to the page you want; to the very paragraph!.

"Bit like a library really."

[Ben Elton, quoted by Bill Nighy in the programme Grumpy Old Men.]

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: frogprince
Date: 03 Sep 11 - 02:13 AM

Midchuck, have you read the last Travis McGee book? I suspect that McDonald knew he wouldn't live to write another one. McGee meets, and reconciles with, a daughter that he hadn't known he had; it brings him in from the cold.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: katlaughing
Date: 03 Sep 11 - 12:18 AM

That gives me chills, Midchuck. Thanks for posting it. I hope it is not reflective for you so much now.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Midchuck
Date: 02 Sep 11 - 07:29 PM

This may be longer than was looked for on this thread. But I read it back in the '70s, and it shook me so badly, that someone else was into my head so thoroughly, that when I got a computer, many years later, I typed the whole thing in.

P.

*********************************************************

I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life
and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards
they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and
I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades. The
world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway
back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each
others' faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too
far to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind
of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone
and fears, just as they? Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often,
to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of
remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible,
touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil
of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without
loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter,
closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way
off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what
strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.

Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective
things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange
expression on his face. "But we are all like that!" he said. "That's the way
it is. For everyone in the world. Didn't you know?"

I tried to believe him. But belief is a very difficult feat when you crouch
out here in the night, too far from the fire to feel its heat, too far from the
people to hear the words of their songs.

    MacDonald, John D., The Scarlet Ruse. Fawcett, 1973, p. 264

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Dorothy Parshall
Date: 02 Sep 11 - 05:34 PM

In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." - Baba Dioum, Senegalese poet

"Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world." -The late people's historian Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010)


"Excellence is the result of caring more than others think
is wise; risking more than others think is safe; dreaming
more than others think is practical; and expecting more
than others think is possible." ~ Anonymous


The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." --Albert Einstein

"If one life has breathed easier because you have lived this is the meaning of success" Emerson

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Ed T
Date: 02 Sep 11 - 04:07 PM

Not really a quote, a definition
Bustard- A very rude bus driver.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: katlaughing
Date: 02 Sep 11 - 03:06 PM

So many gods,
So many creeds,
So many paths
That wind and wind,
While just the act of
Being kind is all the
Sad world needs.

- Ella Wheeler Wilcox -

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 11:03 PM

Began the novel today: Sinclair Lewis Babbitt Chapter One "George F. Babbitt Starts the Day" page 2.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920 and he made nothing in particular, neigher butter nor shoe nor poety, but he was minble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Hmmmmm - overpriced loan collapse?

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: mrdux
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 10:21 PM

"We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy, error undetected will flourish and subvert."

                        – J. Robert Oppenheimer


       "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."

                        – Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), I. Economy.


    Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
        (I have a catapult. Give me all your money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.)

                        – Anon


to SRS and Uncle Dave --

The earliest version I've found:

"If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor."
("Si Dieu nous a fait à son image, nous le lui avons bien rendu.")

                       – Voltaire, Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Mickey191
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 09:07 PM

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Bert
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 04:51 PM

Everything I need to know I learned on Mudcat.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Little Hawk
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 10:46 AM

LOL! Bravo, Will Rogers!

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Rapparee
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 09:36 AM

I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

                      -- all from Will Rogers

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: GUEST,Tierod Willie
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 09:25 AM

Great thread.

"You may have heard the msic of Man, but you have not heard the music of Earth. You may have heard the music of Earth, but you have not heard the music of Heaven."

Chuang Tzu, 2nd Cent. B.C.

"You may have heard the music of heaven, but you have not heard the music of hell."

William T. Shefchik, Las Vegas, Nevadsa, 1996 A.D.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Amos
Date: 28 Oct 07 - 06:50 PM

"The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth."

Teilhard de Chardin

(Thanks, Carol C.)

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Midchuck
Date: 26 Oct 07 - 10:24 AM

Anybody remember the actual wording of the Woody Allen line about having a "need to return to the womb - any womb"?


Peter

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Teribus
Date: 26 Oct 07 - 10:21 AM

"There is no such thing as a little war for a great country" Wellington

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Amos
Date: 25 Oct 07 - 01:09 PM

"Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery." -- Georges Bernanos - 1888-1948) Source: in Diary of a Country Priest

=

"What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11845.htm

=

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government." -- George Washington (1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country' Source: Farewell Address, September 17, 1796, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (521)

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 08 Oct 07 - 12:02 PM

To hell with Tecumseh, I wanna live forever......ME!

Don T.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: 3refs
Date: 08 Oct 07 - 07:04 AM

Tecumseh's entire quote

"So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your
heart.
Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their
view, and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Alwaysgive a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people and grovel to none.
When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in
yourself.
Abuse no one and nothing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.
When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: GUEST,Scorpio
Date: 07 Oct 07 - 07:25 PM

Out of the clouds
a voice said,
"Cheer up, and be happy!
Things could be worse!"
So I cheered up,
and was happy,
and behold:
things became worse.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: heric
Date: 07 Oct 07 - 02:25 PM

"Well that's us fucked."

(Liz the Squeek?)

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Oct 07 - 01:54 PM

Translation from AmosSpeak.

"It shows how silly it is to suppose that YOUR ideas are really from out 'there' somewhere. And it makes thinking for yourself a positive thing."


sorta...

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 07 - 12:22 PM

A very important one; it identifies the crashing illogicality of reversing the projection as a mechanism of manipulation. It identifies the powerful distorting effect of naming the wrong source for something. And it identifies the inherent creative freedom of the individual willing to cast of cloaks of social determination.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 07 Oct 07 - 11:20 AM

Even more than a quote, it's a realization and a turning point.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 07 Oct 07 - 11:12 AM

SRS, I knew that when I was at the University of Minnesota, say 55 years ago. No idea where it came from.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: GUEST,ed
Date: 07 Oct 07 - 09:59 AM

So much Tofurkey, so little time!

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Bill D
Date: 06 Oct 07 - 05:48 PM

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
"I need this job like a hole in the head!"

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: GUEST,ed
Date: 06 Oct 07 - 01:55 PM

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
When he stubbed his toe getting into bed
x ! x ! xxxxxxxxx ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !! 3 ? ?

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 06 Oct 07 - 01:40 PM

One that I wrote in an undergraduate paper years ago but that I realize as I studied more is echoed in philosophy over the eons is that "Man created God in his own image." I haven't made note of the more famous variants of it, but I recognize that there are a lot of famous thinkers who said it earlier.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Kent Davis
Date: 06 Oct 07 - 12:29 AM

A subordinate position does not imply an inferior nature.

Kent

P.S. As far as I know, I originated the phrase above. However, if you know of another source, please let me know. I could have internalized it and then have forgotten its origin.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Oct 07 - 02:05 PM

"The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning." ~Adlai E. Stevenson

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Emma B
Date: 05 Oct 07 - 12:51 PM

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

Voltaire

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Rapparee
Date: 05 Oct 07 - 12:36 PM

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.    -- A. Lincoln

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? -- A. Lincoln

Look at the tyranny of party--at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty--a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes--and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master. -- Sam Clemens

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. -- Mark Twain

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 Oct 07 - 11:33 AM

"What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols." - Molly Ivins

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Oct 07 - 10:41 AM

"Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose." ~George Will

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Oct 07 - 10:38 AM

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." ~John Kenneth Galbraith

"Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others." ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other." ~Oscar Ameringer

"He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech." ~Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, (explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be no loss of wetlands)


"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." ~John Stuart Mill

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Oct 07 - 10:25 AM

"There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle." ~Alexis de Tocqueville

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right." ~H.L. Mencken, 1956

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Midchuck
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 10:33 PM

He didn't coin the phrase. He certainly was responsible for its wide popularization.

Peter

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Amos
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 07:20 PM

Au contraire, he was purely a believer in ability, the rights of man, and the vigorous defense against bureaucratic encroachment, the stock-in-trade of Fascism. He didn't believe in free lunches (he coined TANSTAAFL), but he sure as hell was no Fascist.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Rapparee
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 07:17 PM

From Robinson's "Rah, rah, RAH!":

(Note: all these are most-brainless, as not one of the critics is in any position to know anything about Heinlein the man. The man they attack is the one they infer from his fiction: a mug's game.)

(1) "Heinlein is a fascist." This is the most popular Heinlein shibboleth in fandom, particularly among the young and, of course, exclusively among the ignorant. I seldom bother to reply, but in this instance I am being paid. Dear sir or madam: kindly go to the library, look up the dictionary definition of fascism. For good measure, read the history of fascism, asking the librarian to help you with any big words. Then read the works of Robert Heinlein, as you have plainly not done yet. If out of forty-two books you can produce one shred of evidence that Heinlein—or any of his protagonists—is a fascist, I'll eat my copy of Heinlein in Dimension.

If you don't own a copy of it, you can find the entire essay here.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Rapparee
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 07:11 PM

Yes, he was so Fascist that his peers honored him with the first every Grand Master Hugo award. So Fascist that he worked in the Philadephia Naval Yard on electronics that helped defeat Hitler and Mussolini.

Cite one passage from his works that demonstrate Fascism.

Conservative, yes, in the Goldwater mold. But not Fascist.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Midchuck
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 06:57 PM

Once upon a time Heinlein was an interesting SF writer. Later he became a fascist wanker and idiot.

Fascist? The man who created one of the major influences in starting the whole hippy thing?

You have it ass-backwards. He was educated in a way that put him in danger of being somewhat fascistic, or at least authoritarian (Naval Academy), but he outgrew it.

Peter

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Rapparee
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 06:52 PM

Richard, I recommend you read Spider Robinson's essay "Rah, Rah, RAH" -- and Heinlein.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 06:47 PM

Make that self important idiot.

Subject: RE: BS: Great Quotes - relevant to today's world
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 04 Oct 07 - 06:46 PM

Once upon a time Heinlein was an interesting SF writer. Later he became a fascist wanker and idiot.