The epigram is a wonderful art form, especially because it is one that provides not just a way to share useful insights. Among the better ways to get to know a person is through what they find important (or amusing) in what they have read and heard. Since I had so much enjoyed others' collections, searching for content for annual holiday letters started me converting many of the handwritten quotes that I had collected in my journals into typescript. These quotes do not necessarily reflect my own point of view, because some just got me thinking. Of course, most do, given the realistic temptation to reinforce one's outlook with words from someone who has confirmed it more succinctly, and/or with better humor. They even more closely reflect what I have been listening to or reading. Those attributed to "TPY" are my own, and do reflect at least my outlook at one moment, albeit usually with somewhat sardonic humor. Of the wider lot, some have no particular ax within them, but simply seemed examples of beautiful wordplay worthy of sharing. A few others highlight bits of outrageousness by public officials who deserve to be exposed this way. Interpolations contained within [square brackets] are my own [intended to provide further context].
What follows, then, are brief extracts interesting enough for me to employ my somewhat arthritic hands to distill from their handwritten or other original forms, and to wrestle into a more-or-less consistently formatted digital list. The compilation's year-end origin accounts for the roughly chronological within-year sets. Most juxtapositions among quotes are coincidences resulting from the relative time that I encountered them, although an unspecified few have been moved a bit for effect. To reduce clutter, I have not always provided the fullest form for citations, but have given what should be enough for appreciation, and to obtain the source if desired. Errors in transcription are anything but impossible, but I have done my human best to be accurate.
Please note that copyright for the individual quotations remains with their original authors. The specific text within quotation marks on these pages should be considered as a concise form of review, with a key point of value for its authors of leading other readers to the original sources. Copyright for this compilation, its HTML design, quotes attributed to TPY, and for any text within [brackets], is by Terence Yorks, 2006. Courtesy to myself and to other first authors should restrain further reproduction without (at least) similar citation, or better, obtain explicit permission from the most appropriate source.
Now set up in blog order, with most recent first, unlike preceeding years: “If you know a river or stream that runs dry in the summer,
you’ve seen the dusty face of the West’s biggest substance
abuse problem.” “Tug McGraw, asked what he would do with the salary he would
make as a pitcher, said, ‘Ninety percent I’ll spend on
good times, women, and Irish whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll
probably waste.’” “I am a mirage that perceives itself.” “Respect for the office of the American presidency notwithstanding,
it should be noted that Sunday night, Hollywood successfully Photoshopped
Al Gore's foot into George W.'s ass.” “‘If a man can’t remember the laws,’ Ragnar said, ‘then
he’s got too many of them.’” “…
[Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky] has retained a hold on
Paul [Churchland]’s imagination: he always remembers that, however
certain he may be about something, however airtight an argument appears
or however fundamental an intuition, there is always a chance that
both are completely wrong.” “Political language—and with variations this is true of
all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed
to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance
of solidity to pure wind.” “We Dineh don’t believe
much in luck…More in a sort of inevitable
chain of causes producing naturally inevitable effects.” “Roughly speaking, the more one pays
for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.” “My obsession with factual accuracy,
documentation, objective truth was all part of my baggage as a print
journalist, the quaint and naïve
and old fashioned credo of the age of Gutenberg and the enlightenment,
while Berlusconi is a man of a different age…of the post-modern
world where it doesn’t matter what actually happened, but what
people think happened.” “Being drunk is just about the only time a man can convince
himself he’s not a fool. Stands to reason that’s when he’s
the biggest fool of all.” “Feed your babies onions, so you can find
'em in the dark.” “Into Montana, mostly in the first fraction of
the twentieth century, come scores of thousand of homesteaders in the
greater single
spate agricultural migration in American history…” “…
a day and a half to myself there in the absorbing lean and jostle of
the Milwaukee Road coach cars, as if a more restless gravity worked
within those coaches than in the outer world.” “Prophetic indeed was the man who uttered, ‘You
can fight armies or disease or trespass, but the settler never.’” “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people
fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After that,
nothing happened.” “Recent events have caused many of us to fear that we are headed toward
a Big Brother kind of government tyranny. I think we will be lucky if the federal
government can answer the phones, let alone regulate anyone’s life, in
the post-oil era.” “We human beings of the developed societies have
once more been expelled from a garden—the formal garden of Euro-American
humanism and its assumptions of human superiority, priority, uniqueness,
and dominance. We have been thrown
back into that other garden with all the other animals and fungi and insects,
where we can no longer be sure we are so privileged.” “The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside
himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must
have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s
stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for
that is what literature is.” “What literature most needs to tell and to investigate
now is humanity’s
basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for
nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness the comes with such fears…” “When you set out to kill people, you cannot control
what happens afterward; as in revenge tragedy, death inspires more
death. …like so
many revenge tragedy protagonists, Bush is fatally flawed. By taking
revenge against a foe who had
not actually injured him, he opened a Pandora's Box of gratuitous violence,
one he cannot now close.” “Another historical note: Bleakly funny that just
when renamed "Defense" department,
it really became oriented to planning and carrying out interminable
aggressive wars. One more un-coincidental point for Mr. Orwell.” |
“Last night, watching the landscape drift by,
lit only by the full moon, such soft light, fully easy to see by even
amidst trees
— then being hit by the glaring human
lights of Kamloops, wholly unnecessary, not improving anyone's abilities
to see, humanity literally burning itself to death,
and taking the rest of the world with it.” “But the network still made a nice profit on the
Games, helped along by ads for health foods like Coke and McDonald's
fried chicken sandwiches, and by dozens of ads for gas-guzzling SUVs,
the automotive shame of America, whose emissions do their part to melt
the snow and ice that make the Winter Olympics possible.” “Siguður Nordal wrote that near the end of the pagan
era in Iceland ‘the old pessimism, the fear of an evil hidden fate,
the conviction that all would perish’ still ‘hung over the
minds of men’.” “The problem of how to live on earth without changing
it, of how to answer growing human needs without sacrificing to them
some
portion of the
natural environment, is unsolvable. If we live and work and eat and build, even
if we plant and prune and tend and cherish, it is inevitable that we
alter nature, and in that alteration it is also inevitable that some
of the things we would wish to preserve will be irretrievably lost.” “Tolkien…spent enormous amounts of effort
trying to create language that was aesthetically and morally more pleasing
than that of everyday.
He would surely have agreed entirely with Lewis (and with their other
contemporary Orwell) that although foolish thoughts give rise to foolish
language, a feeble or perverted language, or rhetoric within that language,
makes it difficult if not impossible not to have foolish and perverted
thoughts.” “As one of the novel’s pagan characters put
it, ‘Every church
is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.’” “Like a good Leonard Cohen song, its melancholy
tone carries a hidden buoyancy, a reminder that without sadness there
would be no joy.” “(question) 'What are you happy about right now?' “Asking pilots and airplane owners how many hours
they fly is akin to asking teenage boys to number their sexual conquests.
The
reported
number is almost certianly greater than the reality.” “Being an icon is overblown. Remember, an icon
is moved by a mouse.” “Democracy depends not just on elections but on
a rule of law, on stable institutions, on basic economic security for
the population, and on
checks and balances that forestall a tyranny of the majority. Elections in the
absence of this key societal context can produce authoritarian regimes
and abuses as easily as they can produce genuine people power.” “Living in Luna taught me so many profound things...
It taught me to remain rooted and connected, but also to bend and flow
and not
be rigid, including
in my beliefs. It taught me that a deep listening with all of my
senses is my access to wisdom, guidance, and connection. It taught
me that
my greatest power is not in power over, but rather in power with. And
it
taught me that we manifest what we focus on; if we focus only on
the problems, we will be sure to have more of them. If we focus on
and
live solutions, we will have a more healthy and vibrant world.” “Governments hate the idea of a shrinking population because
the absolute size of GDP matters for great power status… People
should not mind, though. What matters for economic welfare is GDP per
person.” “I turned again to Tacitus, whose description of the Lapps in
his Germania... concludes with the tantalizing sentences:
'They esteem their life a happier one than if it were spent in groaning
over
the clods and labouring to build houses, dreading ever to lose what
has already been gained. Careless of what man may do or God decree,
they have achieved the most difficult of all conditions to attain,
in that they have nothing more to pray for.'” “In Davis' words, ‘Instead of cities of light
soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world
squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.’” “Henry Ford said you don’t need weight for strength…And
if you want to know how strong a very light material can be, try eating
an Atlantic lobster with no tools.” “You learn a lot more about life from the things you’re
not supposed to do.” “Biological life is a tiny stowaway on the entropy-powered craft of
our solar system.” “Evolution covers enormous distances one angstrom at a time…” ibid. “…
almost 90 percent of Iowa’s land is devoted to agriculture, yet
the state imports about three-fourths of its food. Operating at a perennial
loss offset by federal subsides of about $1.5 billion each year, the
state’s farmers produce mostly hogs and commodity corn and soybeans…restaurants
and dining halls don’t know where to find local food, have no
way to arrange deliveries…The result: ‘so much agriculture,
and so little food,’ says Kamyar Enshayan, founder and director
of the Local Foods Project.” Q “As a good Scotsman/Irishman/whatever you are,
answer this: what are
you wearing underneath your kilt?” “Technology’s purpose is to make the world
safe for little fat men.” “It begins to appear that our output embodied the
summation and close of a musical era, rather than heralding the bright
new beginning devoutly
wished for.” “In the Diamond Sutra Buddha says, ‘Thus you
shall think of all this fleeting world: a star at dawn, a bubble in
a stream, a flash
of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a
dream.’” “The design was intelligent—but evolution wins out in the end.” “Camera, as all seeing god, satisfies our longing
for omniscience. To spy on other from this height and angle…To
make oneself invisible or small. To become gigantic and reach to the
farthest things. To change the course of nature. To
place oneself anywhere in space or time. To summon the dead. To exalt sense
and perceive inaccessible images, of events on other worlds, in one’s
deepest inner mind, or in the minds of others.” “What matters is not reaching the end, but the value
of experiences along the way.” “According to a fisherman, “Osinski used the word terroir: in an oyster, as
with wine you should be able to taste the place it came from; in this
still living creature you will find
the water and the food it ate — these living, fragile, hand-made
creatures tasting wonderfully of the health of the planet.” “…
hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.” “The Internet is wonderful, but it is a two-edged
sword. Years ago, I pointed out that it used to be that every village
had its idiot, but all he could do
was sit in the village square and mutter to himself. With the Internet,
all the village idiots now can converse, compare notes and build on
each other's mutterings,
making them ... global village idiots.” “I’m more a man than you’ll ever be,
and more woman than you’ll
ever get.” “The only thing Marx got wrong on religion…was
saying it is the opiate of the masses…the right metaphor is really
meth…an addictive substance
that often takes over the lives of otherwise decent people, turns their
world gray and forbidding, and leads them to commit horrible crimes.” “Dr. Frankenstein’s error, it will be apparent,
was not in his attempt to build a better human being — any reasonable
intelligence would see the need for that — but in his use of
the same faulty components.” “Penn State agricultural economists find food-stamp
usage doubles in counties with new Wal-mart stores and blame low wages
and the collapse
of mom-and-pop
local business networks.” “The Limey and Erythrina argued that sprites, reincarnation,
spells, and castles were the natural tools [in cyberspace], more natural
than the atomistic twentieth-century
notions of data structures, programs, files, and communication protocols.
It was…just more convenient for the mind to use global ideas
of magic as the tokens to manipulate the new environment.” “… a system of thought that distinguishes
hierarchically between the life of the body and the of the soul, between
the confusion of carnal perception and clarity
of spiritual cognition?” “Though most religions shun warfare and hold nonviolence
as the only moral route toward political change, religion and its language
have been co-opted by the
violent people who govern societies.” “… where the Compact is in force no man may
attack another with any weapon save one that brings the wielder within
arm's reach of death…” “Aquaculture—fish farms and hatcheries—costs
billions of dollars, Ames said. The ocean is free. All you have to
do is let the fish breed and keep
the fishing boats out of the nursery…It’s there year after
year, as long as you take care of it.” “Beckett’s work can lay a strong claim to
universality: not everyone has a God, but who doesn’t have a
Godot?” “The commander who wishes to impose his will one
the enemy—which is, after
all, the object of all military operations—will seek also to
deceive him; to implant in the adversary’s mind an erroneous
image which will not only help to conceal his true capabilities and
intentions but will lead that adversary
to act in such a way as to make his own task easier.” “A storm is a magnificent glimpse into the heart
of nature[,] to be regarded with wonder, not ego.” “I was misunderstood growing up and have often been
misunderstood since, but then so is everyone else. People are busy,
and you can't expect them to drop everything
and try to understand you. If you want to be understood, practice kindness
and mercy. Kindness is seldom mistaken for anything else. Small kindnesses
reverberate
a long time in people's hearts.” “Sleight talks about the way things were in southern
Utah before the too-many strangers like me showed up, before Arches
National Park, so beloved by his old
friend Abbey, was snatched away by the seekers of heat and light and
solitude once just his own, before the motor-home panzer units full
of speedboats and
mountain bikes and grandpas and babies in diapers.” "meatspace" [as the alternative reality to cyberspace]. “There is an Arabic expression: ‘The fortunate ones will learn
from the mistakes of others, the unfortunate ones will learn from their
own mistakes.’” “All our lauded technological progress—our very civilization—is like
the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.” “Some folks worry that restricting greenhouse-gas emissions could hurt
the economy. Turns out that's a bit like worrying that a tracheotomy
will hurt a patient in anaphylactic shock —yeah, it'll sting, but
without it the patient will croak.” “A solid case could be made that procreation today is de facto child
abuse.” “We have been fruitful and multiplied, now it is
time to mature and nurture.” “Deep-sea trawling is bad. How bad? Uh, pretty bad. Turns out raking
gigantic fishing nets across the ocean floor shatters millennia-old
coral, raises smothering clouds of sediment, and destroys underwater
mountains. ‘It's the equivalent of clearing old-growth forest
to collect squirrels’, says researcher Alex Rogers, who helped
prepare a draft U.N. report on the issue.” “Once a contrivance becomes part and parcel of a particular culture
it is not easily displaced by better contrivances.” “How about the term ‘flogs’ for marketing blogs?” “Viewers/listeners are pulled into a story mainly because they are led
to believe that there are interesting questions to be answered, and
that they, the audience, may possess certain insights useful in solving
the puzzle. If this is true, then it follows that a crucial element
of storytelling is knowing what not to make immediately clear, and
then devising techniques that use the camera and microphone to seduce
the audience with just enough information to tease them into getting
involved.” “The auditory canal has mild resonances that provide a boost between
5dB and 10 dB for frequencies in the range of 2 to 6 kHz.” “I've also been included the discussions with the physician, who is
a friend as well medic, and been through a pile of the related original
scientific literature, trying to help them make judgments, as one not
without experience in separating potential truth from more certain
fiction therein, and evaluating risks.” “…
men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference
of purpose between the Almighty and them.” “This single God is to the Arabs not anthromorphic, not tangible or
moral or ethical, not concerned particularly with the world or him.” “This was the France of legend: the land of tumbling francs, tumbling
governments, and saucy, tumbling filles.” “An Iranian friend once told me, ‘we have freedom of expression.
We just don’t have freedom after expression.’” “… Churchill…compared England’s public school system to ‘feeding sham pearls to real swine’”. William Manchester. 1988. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone. Little Brown, Boston, p. 377. “I don’t know why they call it graduation. It felt like a funeral for our youth.” The Grass Cows, 2005, heard on KRCL radio, Salt Lake City. “Compared to you, she’s not attractive. Who’d eat mutton
over the road when there’s fillet steak at home.” “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy,
is success in life.” “You can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.” “A religion, in order to succeed, must offer a little fun: stories,
symbols, rituals.” “It might be even fair to say that plastic is the excrement of oil.” “The endless quest for love and glory does not fade away with age.” “Direct sensual knowledge, seeing, touching, tasting the world is the
first step towards independent thought. Conversely, tyranny of every
kind relies on the invalidation of direct perception.” “If they’re gonna bait the trap with pussy, they’re going
to catch me every time.” “Homo sapiens was about the most self-deadly variation in the theme
of life.” “Robinson Jeffers pointed out that even those, such as architects, who
work in stone are ‘foredefeated challengers of oblivion’.” “They are great on book learning, but never had a lick of sense!” “Luck’s just another word for destiny.… Either
you make your own or you’re screwed.” “…if God had intended man to wear colors, he would have
created sheep in a variety of hues.” “Millions of rapacious states spilling out of their boundaries
to plunder the resources and people within reach created a false image
limitless space and wealth on the planet, available for whoever had
the weapons, organization, and willingness to kill without saying thanks.” “As [Aldo] Leopold saw and bemoaned right after World War II: ‘One
of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone
in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite
invisible to laymen.’” “As Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond says
of our climate- and population-forced transition from an excitingly
unpredictable, satisfyingly simple, seminomadic life of foraging to
the unimaginative drudgery of sedentary agriculture and conflicts and
complexities of trade, it was quite simply, ‘the worst mistake
in the history of the human race.’ And once that mistake was
made, there was no turning back. The forbidden fruit had been bitten;
the Garden was clear-cut and plowed.” “Our problems—personal and global, human
and nature—are
real, mounting, and must be dealt with. But to focus and obsess on
the negative, emulating the evening news, is a sinful waste of our
demigod intellect and heretical to the blessing of life itself.” “In anything at all, perfection is finally obtained not when
there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything
to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.” |
[First, the set I entered electronically as the year went along:] “War…enables the physically deteriorating older generation to maintain
its control of the younger, destroying it if necessary.” “Anyone who performed such meditations as directed and failed to have
visions would have been seriously lacking in imagination.” “It is said that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to re-elect,
er, repeat it.” “Doggedness, drudgery, and dutifulness—the three ‘Ds’ of
Protestantism—are at its [science’s] heart, and those Leonardo
never knew. He still thought by lunges and in metaphors.” “Same shit, smaller shovel”. [on
the current situation in Iraq] “He was mislead, however, either through ignorance or treachery of an
Indian guide, and conducted into a wild valley where he lay encamped
during the autumn and the early part of the winter, nearly buried in
snow, and almost starved.” “Lord May, president of the U.K.'s most prestigious group of scientists,
the Royal Society … criticized Bush and other leaders who are failing
to act, calling them ‘modern-day Neros over climate change, fiddling
while the world burns’.” “Lionel Archdale said that upon stepping off the train in Montana, his
first thought was that he was at the end of the world, and that when
he arrived by buckboard at his future home at Locate Creek, he knew he
was at the end of the world.” “In ‘Le temps d’amour dans la poésie des troubadours:
Jaufre Rudel et Bernart de Ventadorn’ the experience of time is
presented as either intermittent or continuous, stemming from the double
nature of hope.” “…
the scholars share an anxiety about the product of the translation process
and a conviction that a translation can never by simply a copy of the
original but becomes instead an original in its own right, which , while
inspired by a text in another language, takes place in the target language
as an independent creation.” “George Bush and the mullahs of Iran, they use the same words!
The mullahs of Iran say we have God on our side; he has God on his
side, too. Both
of them are convinced that they are going to eradicate evil in the
world. But when these words come out of the mouth of a mullah, it's normal.
It's a shame that the president of the biggest secular democracy in
the world talks with the same words as the mullahs. It's extremely scary… “…
from an airplane at 35,000 feet…We appear, at this distance,
like a successful lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mold enveloping
a fruit.” “The higher the energy required to sustain a system, the less stable it is.” “Eventually “The most dangerous idea in the world is that humans exist separate from the rest
of nature.” “It did not occur to any pakeha for decades and decades that spilling and strewing
alien organisms into an ecosystem can be like lighting a candle in order to lessen
the gloom in a powder magazine.” “What better symbol for the war in Iraq than something displayed prominently near
the gas cap of your car?” “The press is a watchdog … Now a watchdog can’t
be right all the time. He doesn’t bark only when he sees or smells
something that’s dangerous.
A good watchdog barks at things that are suspicious.” “If everyone kept religion closer to his or her heart, and away from others, it
might have found its rightful place at last.” “I look at animals as more perfect human beings.” “Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more bypath meadows, where
you many innocently linger, but the road long and straight and dusty to the grave.” “Anything you do to make a city more friendly to cars makes it less friendly to
people.” “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against
lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials,
it is surely because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight,
could conceive of no such problem.” “Indeed, all learning and discovery do take place in the terrain of ignorance,
not knowledge, and it is question, questioning , and questioners that impel scientific
advances. These mysteries and puzzles, not dry facts and pat answers, should
also drive science education as well as the research enterprise.” “Rumi said: ‘You cannot teach by disagreement.’” “Bringing the juice back into sustainability requires applying it to daily life,
to community, to business—and not just when doing so is easy.” “Everything [Manet] does, he always hits off straight away, while I take endless
pains and never get it right.” “He held to a narrow anti-modern curriculum then in place at Oxford, and befriended
a young philologist named J.R.R. Tolkien, whose views on teaching English were
even more severe than Lewis’s: Tolkien thought literature ended at 1100.” “If it ain't broke, then maybe I just haven't fixed it yet.” “The ultimate in avoiding periodic wars … is to make statesmen
responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first
applied against German aggressors, the law … must condemn aggression
by any other nation, including those which now sit here in judgment.”
[The set from my handwritten journal, with this collection actually beginning 29 November 2004:] “Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident
in history.” “In Saxon belief the trees, hills, and burial mounds swept aside by the heavy
Roman construction must have churned into the air of Middle-Earth multitudes
of ancient spirits, and monsters torn from their slumber in the depths of the
lowerworld… dead straight Roman roads offered no natural diversions, bends,
or obstacles. They were linear intrusions imposed on the landscape. This was
not only brutal—it was dangerous. Spirits would scream along the straight
paths like specters of the criminal dead, completely out of control.” “No theory ever benefited from the application of data.” “Medievalists, and not only they, should be careful to avoid the mistake of confusing
religion with the church, or theology with the beliefs of the faithful.” “Seawalls exemplify the first law of human engineering: there will be unintended
consequences.” “The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.” “If your happiness depends on what someone else does, you have a problem.” Ibid, p. 96. “Time is a stripper, doin’ it just for you.” “The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular
version of history is absolute fact.” “Only when it is dark enough can one see the stars.” “It always takes more energy to create than to destroy.” “All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” “Technology has a seductive nature. We assume that advances in this realm are
always improvements, beneficial to humans. We are deluding ourselves.” “The shorter the trip, the more value the fish per pound.” “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set
the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.” “The meek can inherit the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.” “The country wanted to go to sand dunes and rattlesnakes, wanted to scrape off
it human ticks.” “Too many conservative Christians, not enough lions.” “When the going gets tough, the tough get going—to somewhere the going is
easier.” “Despite his being a third generation American…he had never outgrown his
Latvian heritage of being burdened with a sense of impending doom.” “Visions come to prepared spirits.” “Life has a malicious way of dealing with great potential.” “Some modern Hopis and Zunis, looking at the extravagance of the American society
around them, shake their heads and say, ‘we were here long before you came,
and we expect still to be here long after you too are gone’.” “British cars always know instinctively what spares you’re carrying. Better
to take none.” “Such are the dangers of myth as a source of cultural identity: they can be appropriated
by anyone.” “Spending capital should not be regarded as making money.” “Cities are where civilization ends and crime begins.” “Television is a passive medium that subtracts creativity from my own life.” “I can’t believe in gods who make so many mistakes.” [of artists and musicians:] “You make your living out of the air.” “I have felt the godlike power man derives from his machines.” “Transforming Lynchville to Rome was minor compared with replacing Mud Creek with
Palmyra.” “Many regarded the bike trail as another step closer to becoming touristy like
Vail or Breckinridge, a comparison often evoked as worse than becoming a ghost
town.” “…
his erstwhile comrades slip away to permanent confinement in the open prisons
of materialism.” “He was born in Nazareth … indeed born to a Mary, who
had been a virgin—a
Temple Virgin.” “We of the West are prone to underestimate the importance of Mohammedanism; one
day there may be a rude awakening…” “Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a
country so thorny that the expense of your neighbor’s occupying you is
greater than the profit.” “The idea of absolute worthlessness of the present world is a pure desert conception
at the root…” “Everybody is a general in the Arab army. In British circles, a general is allowed
to make a mess of things by himself, whereas in Arabia every man wants a hand
in making the mess complete.” “The Arab Shereets and Sheiks are strong-minded and obstinate men. Nothing hurts
more than to have someone point out their mistakes. If you say ‘rubbish’ to
an Arab, it is sure to put his back up, and he will ever afterward decline to
help you.” “Among the hopeless, but never without hope.” “Our dreams are like guillotines waiting to fall.” “We need fairy-stories to give us those very things that he listed so
carefully—recovery of a more hopeful reality, escape from the
imminent shadow of death, consolation for sorrow through the eucatastrophe
that turns catastrophe
into joy.” “There are no rewards or punishments in nature, only consequences.” “…
the quest, an undertaking which requires freedom and restraint combined.” “No human culture has ever stopped trying to outguess God.” “The power of music appears often in Celtic and Welsh mythology, and the playing
of music is often a ‘bridge’ between the worlds of man and faerie.” “In the cosmogenic text entitled ‘Ainulindalë’, just as in Paradise
Lost, the account of the origins of evil begs the fundamental question of Why?
Because in our world as in Arda, both in terms of the general human condition
and in individual psychological terms, the imperfection of the world and the
fallen human condition are givens within which all our making must operate.” “You sleep away from grizzly food because you don’t want to become grizzly
food.” “Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice flows,
only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea.” “Not having to think is another American core value.” “My grandpa told me once, ‘You’re not worthless. We can always use
you as a bad example’.” “In fact, being—forgive me—rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes
tend to be correspondingly huger.” “Seeking someone with a positive attitude, who trusts the universe, realizes life
is a series of chaotic events, it’s about how graceful [sic] we respond.” “Homage begets friends; truth, enemies.” “[Condoleezza Rice] is the team player, yet carefully inserted
knives in the back of her predecessor, Colin Powell, climbing up them
like a ladder of success.” |
“You do the work and he cashes in? I think that’s called
capitalism.” “Medievalists, and not only they, should be careful to avoid
the mistake of confusing religion with the church, or theology with
the beliefs of the faithful.” Lester K. Little. 2004. 'Rebuilding
the master narrative.' Speculum 79:915.) “The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to
encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution
do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and
an eternal life.” “In Saxon belief the trees, hills, and burial mounds swept
aside by the heavy Roman construction must have churned into the air
of Middle-Earth
multitudes of ancient spirits, and monsters torn from their slumber
in
the depths of the Lowerworld, the realm of the Otherworld.” “But dead straight Roman roads offered no natural diversions,
bends, or obstructions. They were linear intrusions imposed on the
landscape. This
was not only brutal – it was dangerous. Spirits would scream
along the straight paths like specters of the criminal dead, completely
out
of control.” “No theory ever benefited from the application of data.” “The Truth must dazzle gradually “Tolkien's soul was in the Lord's keeping, but his heart —like that of his friend, C.S. Lewis — quickened to a pagan drumbeat.” “In Haiti a paranoid is defined as someone who has all the
facts," “When it comes to Afghanistan and its role in terrorism, U.S.
policy seems driven by a combination of attention deficit disorder
and ignorance.” “If the government doesn’t do it first, mama earth is going to evict
us.” “... bucking stock, were they not in a rodeo, working maybe 25 times a
year for eight seconds a time — you do the math — would be touring
France in a can.” [responding to animal activist complaints] “Reality TV will ultimately prove that there is no ‘normal’ way
to live, and it will validate the notion that every human experience
is autonomous.” “A sampler on the kitchen wall of her little house in Maine said; ‘It’s
hard to be nostalgic when you can’t remember anything.’” “…
we are engaging in a reckless drive-by drowning of much of the rest of
the planet and much of the rest of creation.” “...let's stand up for terrorism...” “War against Bedlam would be just as rational … for us to attempt,
by war, to reform all Europe, and bring them back to principles of morality,
and a respect for the equal rights of nations, would show us only maniacs
of another character. We should, indeed, have the merit of the good intentions
as well as the folly of the hero of La Mancha.” “The Hesses make jokes out of affectlessness and drabness – the
nowheresville prefab tackiness of the houses and the emptiness of a patch
of country so remote that not even popular culture touches it.” “…
America is at its best when it is a nation of goats looking for holes
in the fence, not a nation of sheep looking for a shepherd.” “…
the one about the woman who’s dyslexic, agnostic, and insomniac. ‘She
stays up all night wondering if there is a dog.’” “…
our symbolic systems, like the perceptions they contain, represent only
a fraction of what’s there. We need to be careful not to mistake
their wafer-thin parings for something more substantial.” “Never worry about old troubles with your Alfa Romeo. Soon you will get
new problems instead”. “Here, human beings had to remember that the universe was far
wider than their little nest of stars – that in the universe
at large, silence was always more than the noisiest shout of life.
Humans explored and intruded against it, and built their stations and
lived their lives, a biological contamination of the infinite, a local
and temporary condition.” “The snow fell like yeti dandruff.” Gilbert Apparicio. 2003. “The
razor that shaved the world.” “You eat what never runs free: you call that civilization?” “…
superior firepower could redistribute luck to entirely undeserving
people.” “Television…the little box that makes people think the world and
the screen are the same thing. “By rail one actively travels; by commercial air or ‘freeway’,
there is no there between theres.” “Every war has two losers.” “…
with rock and roll, the more you think, the more you stink.” “In the dark, the innocent can’t see.” “The elasticity of the framing [of a skin boat] limited the overall
length to about eighty feet. However, that same flexibility bestowed
exceptional seaworthiness, since it permitted the hull to ‘work’ in
a seaway.” “…
history is written by the victors, and as such, can be exceedingly
misleading, when it does not deliberately lie.” “I can’t grow up; I’m too old now.” “[Isaac Basevis] Singer’s own guilt-ridden journery allowed him
to channel a powerful current that is the flip side of Emersonian optimism:
the uplift of Biblical promise disturbed by a deep anxiety that God’s
blessing has been forfeited by human folly or, what is more sinister,
rescinded by a deceiving deity.” “Weight kills” “Responsibility and obeying the law are not always the same.” “It is well to remember that nothing was ever done in the past, only
in someone else’s present.” “Trouble did not come just in threes: it gathered passengers as it went,
and crashed nastily into bystanders.” “Let China sleep. When she wakes, the world will be sorry.” “Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to what
sustains life, rather than what destroys it.” “Without deviations from the norm, progress is not possible.” “Our most popular proposal is that lawyers be prohibited from service
in the assembly, because they are intent on making their own fortunes
and blind to the interests of poor and industrious citizens.” [in
a novel set in 1770 North Carolina] “Priests dread the advance of science as witches the approach of daylight.” “The Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper, and the
finest Bibles are still printed on hemp-based paper.” “The worst of destructive selfishness is not Me! but Me! Right Now!
The generous opposite could be phrased as All of us for all time – presumably
including non-humans.” “Fiction has to be plausible. Reality does not.” “The place of government…is to represent the interest of the future
to the present.” “Webster uses reverse genetics to build from scratch perfect flu strains
that reproduce reliably and quickly.” “Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.” “Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all – no
one’s around to write horror stories.” |
“…
the synthetic, self-imposed austerities of religious life provided an institutional
form of bloodless or ‘dry’ martyrdom. Like the Marines, martyrdom
and monasticism sought out the few, the brave, who might stand as ideals
for the larger community.”
— John V. Fleming. 2003. Muses of the monastery.
Speculum 78:1072.
“…
the golden age of your institution was about ten or fifteen years before
you got there.”
— ibid.
“If everyone would only fight for his own convictions, there’d be no
war.”
— Leo Tolstoy, tr. Constance Garnett. War and Peace. Modern Library,
NY.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking used when
we created them.”
— Albert Einstein, quoted by Gary M. Tabor. 2002. in
A.A. Aquirre, et al., Conservation Medicine.
“To her notions, the real object of every religion was to provide recognized
forms of propriety for the satisfaction of human desires.”
— Tolstoy,
op. cit.
“One thing is sure, the ones that call the shots will not be among the dead
and maimed.”
— John McCutcheon. 1982. Christmas in the trenches. (song)
“The one way for a religion to prove itself superior is to approach other
religions without arrogance.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenistsyn, tr. H.T. Willetts.
1984/1999. November 1916.
“In fact, any sect, once it has broken away, starts insisting that it has
a monopoly of truth.”
— ibid.
“HORRIFYING DISCOVERY in the garden of the German embassy in Bucharest: explosive
substances, bacillus cultures…”
[Russian newspaper headline, c.
1916; plus ca change...]
— ibid.
“What people experience depends on external and internal factors – what
they are looking at and what they are looking for.”
— Richard D. Zakia,
quoted by John Paul Caponigro. 2000. Adobe Photoshop Master Class.
“The accident of birth is a vulnerable point, yes. But there are also lucky
accidents… A monarch may be sublime. But a man elected by a majority
will almost certainly be a mediocrity.”
— Solzhenistsyn, op. cit.
“The RX-8’s feathery weight provides the kind of delicate responsiveness
that cannot be duplicated by a heavier machine, no matter how wide its tires
or stiff its suspension.”
— Csaba Csere. 2003. “Rotary Revival”,
in Car
and Driver. [my 30 year old Alfa Romeo weighs 700 pounds less than this
best of the current lot]
“Consciousness and logic are not reliable standards.”
— Brian Herbert
and Kevin Anderson. 2002. Dune: the Butlerian Jihad.
“Owing to the seductive nature of machines, we assume that technological advances
are always improvements and always beneficial to humans.”
— ibid.
“As Brecht said, ‘unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes’.”
— Michael
Zantovsky and David Remick. 2003. in the New Yorker.
“There is no more patriotic slogan than this: save the country from the government.”
— Attributed
to V. Lvov by Solzhenistsyn, op. cit.
“There were shaky moments at the beginning – she
sometimes shrieked at the end of a phrase, as if the high notes were mice.”
— Alex
Ross. 2003. in the New Yorker. [about
an opera singer]
“The time in which we live has unfathomable depths beneath it. Our age is
a mere film on the surface of time."
— Solzhenistsyn, op. cit.
“A terrorist is a person who conducts attacks against civilian targets.”
— Robin
Gunaratna, quoted by Jane Meyer. 2003. in The New Yorker.
“We are not the people we are supposed to be. The advertising world knows
this, the entertainment world knows this, the publishing world knows this.
All play at one time or another to those unmentioned needs for romance and
fantasy and yearning for simpler times.
— Nichols Fox. 2002. Against the
Machine: the hidden Luddite tradition…
“Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted
by Fox, ibid.
“War starts with a dubya.
Draft dodgers shouldn’t start wars.
Stop mad cowboy disease.
How did our oil get under their sand?”
— [Homemade protest signs.] 2003. in the Hightower
Lowdown.
“Just one Cruise Missile involves more money than I will earn in
my life — or most other Americans, for that matter.”
— TPY. 2003.
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that the war drums started beating
when corporate scandals began dominating the media.”
— Jay Jasper. 2003.
on New Dimensions radio.
“Thus, in many ways, says Mumford, the Renaissance did not represent the dawn
of a new age, but its twilight, for as the mechanical arts advanced, the humane
arts declined and receded.”
— Fox, op. cit.
“The problem with political jokes is that they get elected.”
— Tony Horowitz. 2002. Blue Latitudes:
boldly going where Cook has gone before.[Bumper
sticker on a Pacific Island wall.]
“Perhaps we should thank the Taliban for finishing the task the Crusades began
nine hundred years ago – proving beyond further dispute that religion is
incompatible with civilization.”
— Arthur C. Clarke. 2003. in Free
Inquiry.
“The President of the Mormon Church on Sunday pleaded for peace in Iraq, while
assuring church members that God would not hold those in the military responsible
for what their leaders require them to do.”
— AP. 2003. in
the Logan [Utah] Herald Journal, 7 April, page 1. [there are many
interpretations of this, but none encouraging;
the theoretical moral leader quoted
is certainly old enough to have heard about the Nuremberg trials
at
the end
of WWII.]
“Faith — believing in what you know isn’t true.”
— Clark, op.cit.
“When you use military power, it means your brain has stopped.”
— Osama Saleh
[Iraqi orthopedic surgeon]. 2003. quoted by Lee Anderson (“war wounds” in
the New Yorker.
“Science is not an exact art.”
— TPY. 2003.
“Because he is a missionary and a missionary is a murderer, only he murders the
soul.”
— Martin Cruz Smith. 2002. December 6.
“We harbor the mystical within, a religious impulse that need not be substantiated
by dogma and that can rejoin us to the source.”
— Paul Caponigro. 1986. Megaliths.
“We’ve got these big brains. We just don’t know how to use them yet.”
— Wes
Scoopnister. 2003. on New Dimensions radio.
“’
Look at these hands. I’m so God-cursed angry I can’t stop them from
shaking’.
‘Look at this rock, Anjin-san. Listen to it growing’.”
— James
Clavell. 1975. Shogun.
“Virtuous men throughout history have always decried bawdy houses and Pillow Places,
but men aren’t virtuous and if a leader outlaws houses and pillowing he’s
a fool because greater evils will soon erupt like a plague of boils.”
— ibid.
“George W. Bush is not the first American president to have lied about weapons
of mass destruction. On [August 6, 1945], Harry Truman announced the dropping
of the first atomic bomb, on a city with a Japanese army base. Of course, there
was no army base there.”
— Amy Goodman. 2003. Democracy Now (radio).
“He could sell a muzzle to a dog.”
— Jon Krakauer. 2003. Under the
Banner of Heaven. [of Joseph Smith, Jr. as a youth]
“Mormonism’s strictures and soothing assurances – its veneration of
order – beckoned as a refuge from the complexity and manifold uncertainties
of nineteenth century America.”
— ibid.
“There is no experience in the experience.”
— TPY. 2003. [of riding in or
driving a typical new car or truck]
“The real truth is this: the whole world is joy. Heaven is a festival all year
long. Of all lies, the greatest falsehood is melancholy.”
— Isaac Bashevis
Singer, tr. Joseph Sherman. 2003. “Androgynous”, in the New
Yorker.
“There is no such thing as the future. Human kind faces multiple possible futures,
many of which hinge on seemingly inconsequential events.”
— Brian Herbert
and Kevin J. Anderson. 2003. Dune: the machine crusade.
“…
he is driven by a kind of melancholy optimism, ‘Hopefully, you can live
in a way so you can die with a notion that, on balance, the sense of achievement
outweighs the regret’.”
— Tom Parker. 2003. “The real [Robert]
McKee”, in the New Yorker.
“Joe and his brother will be regarded as martyrs to their faith, and but little
knowledge of human nature and the history of the past is necessary to inform
us of the fact that violence, oppression, and bloodshed strengthen instead
of subduing fanaticism.”
— James Gordon Bennett. 1844, quoted by Fawn
M. Brodie. 1946. No man knows my history: the life of Joseph Smith,
the Mormon prophet. [Something many current world leaders still
do not grasp.]
“He created an illusion of meaning for lives otherwise bereft.”
— TPY. 2003.
[of Brodie’s (op.cit.) subject]
“…
inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”
— Terry
Pratchett. 1990. Moving Pictures.
"I love America, but I do not like it."
— Sinclair Lewis, undated, quoted by John Updike,
2002, in the New Yorker.
"Power corrupts; advertising corrupts absolutely."
— anonymous masthead, 2002, OrionOnLine
"The second way of thinking is the (il)logical equivalent of failing
to find a pair of pliers in a quick search of a messy garage and claiming
that failure to be good evidence that the pliers were not there."
— David F. Parkhurst. 2001. in BioScience.
"To say it changed my life would be putting it mildly. It reawoke the
child in me — not the innocent, but rather the boy capable of putting aside
cynicism and able, once again, to renew his sense of wonder."
— Charles de Lint. 2001. in Meditations on Middle
Earth, Karen Haber, ed.
"Some of these books were so bad they wouldn't even make decent landfill."
— Lisa Goldstein in ibid. [on Tolkien's imitators]
"It is ever with things men begin: there is a frost in spring, or a
blight in summer, and they fail of their promise."
— J.R.R. Tolkien. 1955. The Return of the King.
"Simplicity of reading derives from the context of detailed and complex
information, properly arranged. A most unconventional design strategy is revealed:
to clarify, add detail."
— Edward R. Tufte. 1990. Envisioning Information.
"It is not how much information there is, but how it is arranged."
— ibid.
"I made a couple of dozen heads of Christ, and the cops that killed
him."
— Woody Guthrie. 1943. Bound for Glory. [on
a try at painting]
"... a big hearty man in the prime of life, his face open and jovial,
with that good-fellowship devious men often assume as a way of proclaiming
that they are concealing nothing, when the truth is quite the reverse."
— Marion Zimmer Bradley. 1978. Stormqueen.
"... environmental scientists can be advocates, at least to the extent
of informing the general public about their work and conclusions ... After
all, biomedical scientists can gain prestige by diagnosing public health problems
and recommending ameliorative steps — and, interestingly, they aren't accused
of advocacy."
— Paul Ehrlich. 2002. in BioScience.
"No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to
be that way. It's a response to a world that's always using a can opener to
open them up and see what's inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced
with a more useful set of preserves."
— Peter Hoeg. 1993. Smilla's Sense of Snow.
tr. Tiina Nunnaly.
"If you limit earthly things, you set your thoughts free for the spiritual."
— ibid.
"Language is a hologram... In every human utterance lies the sum total
of that person's linguistic past.
— ibid.
"We have no objections to responsible drinking by adults."
— Dale Bills ("Media Staff" for the Mormon
Church). 2002. quoted by Darrell Ehrlick on the front page of the Logan
Herald Journal.
"Life is a jest of the gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no
justice. You must learn to laugh ... or else you'll weep yourself to death."
— Bernard Cornwell. 1995. The Winter King.
"She wants to be rich, and you want to be honorable. It won't mix."
— ibid.
"It is the conflicting fate of an American artist to long for profundity
while suspecting that, most profoundly, none exists, all is surface, and rather
flimsy surface at that."
— John Updike. 2002. in the New Yorker [on a
biography of Sinclair Lewis].
"If you're not pissed off at the world, you're not paying attention."
— Casey Chambers. 2002. hidden track on an album played
by KRCL, Salt Lake City.
"Ultimately, as Minor White defines it, the most penetrating image reveal
the essence of the subject 'for what it is ... and for what else it is.'"
— William Neil. 1996. Landscapes of the Spirit.
"All I have achieved are these dreams locked in silver."
— Paul Caponigro. quoted by Neil, ibid.
"Do Gods need men? Or are we like dogs barking for masters who don't
want to listen?"
— Cornwell, op.cit.
"... the message implicit in restoration work is that you can go into
a place and actually make it better. The message is hey, maybe we do belong
on this planet, and that's a very powerful message."
— Bill Jackson III. 2002. "Restoration as Responsibility",
in Orion Afield.
"... a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not
easily mended."
— Ian McEwan. 2001. Atonement.
"It is our choices ... that show what we truly are, far more than our
abilities."
— J.K. Rowling. 1999. Harry Potter and the Chamber
of Secrets.
"Pain is only weakness leaving your body."
— Lew Hicks, quoted by Joe Klein. 2002. "The Supercop
Scenario", in the New Yorker. (on intensive exercise)
"'So much learning', one of my Jesuit instructors has said, 'so little
wisdom'."
— Charles Pellegrino. 2000. Ghosts of the Titanic.
"... a 10 to 15 percent speed increase for a 100 percent cost increase
is about how airplanes work."
— Richard L. Collins. 2002. "Moving Up",
in Flying.
"Science wasn't a form of proof. It was a style of quarreling."
— Adam Gopnik. 2002. "The Porcupine", in
the New Yorker. [on Karl Popper]
"That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in
such a way that there is no need its intervention."
— Robin Hobb. 1995. The Assassin's Apprentice.
"... for all know that poxes came up from bad dust and are spread by
the turning of the soil."
— ibid.
"... to be real, it must affect the body."
— Glenn Chamberlain Barrett, quoting T.E. Hulm. 2002.
"The Center", in Northern Lights.
"The waterfalls of spring are not always delicate."
— Halvdan Koht. 1944. The Voice of Norway.
"I'd rather have a meadow than a lawn."
— TPY. 2002. Journal.
"'These guys were not superhuman', I.C. Smith noted, 'but they were
playing in a system that was more inept than they were.'"
— Seymour M. Hersh. 2002. "Mixed Messages"
in the New Yorker. [on the September 11th hijackers]
"On a cycle ... you're in the scene, not just watching it."
— Robert M. Pirsig. 1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcylcle
Maintenance.
"Physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong."
— ibid.
"Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound
to end in disaster."
— ibid.
"My surroundings aren't pristine, but they're not currently required
to produce anything or to be anything but self-willed — that is to say, wild."
— Stephanie Mills. 2002. Epicurian Simplicity.
"Experience showed that logs hewn with an axe absorbed less moisture
than the smoother face of saw-milled planks, making the wood less susceptible
to warp and rot."
— Davra Goldstein. 1994. Russian Houses.
"The Russian peasant continued to prefer log constructions for aesthetic
reasons, finding that the uneven play of light across the logs lent character
and depth to the dwelling. Boards were simply too uniform, and too new, to
offer the same interest."
— ibid.
"Nuclear bombs that self-replicate."
— TPY. 2002. Journal. [of biotechnology, and the most
powerful pun yet]
"... the real secret was to let the cells proceed according to their
own instinctive wisdom, that seeking mysteries beneath the surface reduces
the world to a foul cancer..."
— Umberto Eco. 1990. Focault's Pendulum.
"Since then, he had learned that power too often came without accountability."
— Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross. 2001.
The Fall of Neskaya.
"Good design does not begin with what we can do, but rather with questions
about what we really want to do. (Wann 1996)."
— David W. Orr. 2002. The Nature of Design.
"In Wendell Berry's words, there is a kind of idiocy inherent in the
belief 'that we can first set demons at large, and then, somehow, become smart
enough to control them."
— ibid.
"Evil begins not only with words used with malice; it can begin with
words that merely diminish people, land, and life to some fragment that is
less than whole and less than holy."
— ibid.
"We do not doubt for a second that we now face some genuine crises and
that we will face others in the future. But for the most part, ecological
deterioration will be a gradual wasting away of possibilities and potentials,
more like the original medical meaning of 'consumption'."
— ibid.
"For Locke, property rights were valid only as long as they did not
infringe on the rights of others to have 'enough and as good' (1610)."
— ibid.
"In the case of slavery, the effects were egregious, brutal, and immediate.
But the massive use of fossil fuels simply defers the costs, different but
no less burdensome, onto our descendants, who will suffer the consequences
with no prospect of manumission."
— ibid.
"Alas, the modern university facilitates interdisciplinary work with
about the same gusto and creativity as some Balkan countries facilitate interregional
tourism."
— ibid.
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves a world hungry and
blind."
— John McCutcheon. 2002. "Not in My name",
on the album Greatest Story Never Told.
"Every night when we walk on stage, our first solemn duty is to abandon
reason. We do that with remarkable aplomb and from there the unexpected stuff
is easier to discover."
— Bob Weir, quoted by Dennis McNally. 2002. A Long
Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead.
"For good and bad, the message of the Dead's experience in making music
is that magic can't happen by intention..."
— ibid.
"Haight Street philosopher Stephen Gaskin quoted a critic as saying,
'Acid lowers your powers of discrimination until everything seems important'.
On the contrary, Gaskin replied, 'Acid raises your powers of integration until
everything is important'."
— ibid.
"Remembering the trains that ran by his boyhood home, Carlos Schwantes
says, 'Never once did it occur to me whether we lived on the right or wrong
side of the tracks. I only felt fortunate to have a front row seat'."
— Anonymous. 2002. Daedalus Books mail order catalog.
"Implausible hope is probably as distinguishing a human characteristic
as our presumably great intelligence, the complexity of our technology, and
our ability to consciously, socially reorganize to meet new challenges."
— Richard B. Norgaard. 2002. "Can science and
religion better serve nature together?", in BioScience.
"Nothing spoils idle pleasure like too much awareness."
— Jacqueline Carey. 2001. Kushiel's Dart.
"The power of longing is more durable than the thrill of possession."
— Francine Prose. 2000. The Lives of the Muses.
"It was an old priestess who performed the ritual, silver-haired, her
face lined and lovely with age."
— Carey, op. cit.
"'All men are created equal' is one of the most widely quoted phrases
in America. It's too bad the so few appreciate that Thomas Jefferson neither
intended it to apply to the consequences of acts after birth, nor to suggest
that machines are equal, at any point."
— TPY. 2002. Journal.
"If everyone would only fight for his own convictions, there'd be no
war."
— Leo Tolstoy. 1865. War and Peace. (tr. Constance
Garnett, undated)
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them."
— Albert Einstein, quoted by Gary M. Tabor. 2002. In
A.A. Aguirre (et al.), Conservation Medicine.
"Every important agricultural breakthrough thus far has, at least temporarily,
produced unhappy health consequences for those caught up in it."
— John Lancaster, 2000, quoting the Cambridge
World History of Food, K.F. Kiple and K.C. Onelas, eds.
"Leaders make mistakes. And these mistakes, amplified by the numbers who
followed without questioning, moved inevitably towards great disaster. Lemming
behavior."
— Frank Herbert. 1985. Chapterhouse Dune.
"But, oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what
to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands."
— ibid.
"In the Arctic you must always be prepared for the worst, and then whatever
happens will be easier."
— Bernt Balchen. 1958. Come North with Me.
"...when I attempted to consecrate myself in the public library, believing
that every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
— Barbara Kinsolver. 1998. The Poisonwood
Bible.
"Work on yourself, not your opponent... When you try to force, throw, take
down or defeat your opponent, you are using your will power and not your power.
Keep to your own center. Let the action occur."
— Bill Devell. 1994. in Rick Fields, ed., The
Awakened Warrior.
On nuclear power, "...cost-ineffective, billion dollar water-boilers with
toxic waste products that we can't get rid of."
— Bill Kauth. in ibid.
"[Nigel Foster] said that I should set aside my qualms and try to achieve
a little more than I thought I was capable of achieving, because that was
how one encountered the greatest and most transcendent experiences in life."
— Charles Fergus. 1998. Summer at Little
Lava.
"We teach our children that the soil is our grandfather's ashes, so they
should treat it with respect."
— Chief Joseph.
"...in Beleriand under the power of Melian there was life and joy, and the
bright stars shown as silver fires."
— J.R.R. Tolkien. 1977. The Silmarillion.
"The plural of anecdote is data."
— Nelson Polsby, quoted by David Dobbs. 2000.
The Great Gulf.
"...home is where you spend the useless time in between the events you call
your life."
— Rrika Krause. 2001. "The Husbands",
in the New Yorker.
"Stability does not imply lack of change, but rather the ability of absorb
change while continuing to remain functional."
— Ellen E. Wohl. 2001. Virtual Rivers.
A bumper sticker (for a lightweight roadster), "This is the dream of the
open road; SUVs are the nightmare."
— me. 2001.
"The truth is, that most modern farmers produce less on average per acre
than the old peasant did."
— J.A. Lutzenberger. 2001. in W. Barthlott and
M. Winiger, eds., Biodiversity.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
— William Deming, quoted by Robert Costanza.
2001. Visions, values, valuation and the need for an ecological economics.
in BioScience.
"There is a pattern. That's what you must look for and look to. Nothing goes
right but as part of the pattern. Only in it is freedom."
— Ursula K. LeGuin. 2001. Tales from Earthsea.
"The great and the mighty go their way unchecked. All hope left in the world
is in the people of no account."
— ibid. [entered on 14 September].
"Nothing in the world is more haughty than a man of moderate capacity
when once raised to power."
— Baron Wessenberg (1815), quoted by John Saltas.
2001. "Unbridled Arrogance", in the Salt Lake Weekly.
"Anything in commerce that looks like a safe proposition may be a step on
the route to grief."
— Lindsey Davis. 2001. Ode to a Banker.
"Sailing has advantages over other sports. Once you have your vessel, you
do not take anything from the earth's resources to enjoy your racing, cruising
or day sailing. Your power is invisible and silent and there is always wind
to spare."
— Uffa Fox, quoted by David Glen. 2000. Under
Sail.
"We are genetically hard-wired to fear first and think second."
— David Ropeik (of the Harvard Center for Risk
Analysis). 2001. quoted by Ellen Goodman, a national columnist in the Logan,
Utah, Herald Journal.
"Stricter security reduces the frequency of attacks while increasing their
intensity."
— Malco