Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

Everybody keeps calling for Excellence — excellence not just in schooling,
throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excel-
lent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, who-
ever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic


Greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct — magnanimity, in short —
does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give
us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches


The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies
but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve


The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not
disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary


Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim
to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today
would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are
spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means


Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition


The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not
teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it


Jacques Barzun
French-born American historian, critic, teacher and editor
(Born this day 1907)



I have always been — I think any student of
history almost inevitably is — a cheerful pessimist

[Tamrin]

Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's
something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles


Morality seems to enter the picture only when individuals interact with each
other. It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond
the one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate,
the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility
company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide who exactly is stealing
from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit. Capitalism is license
to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much


Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned
to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit


The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it


You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents,
not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists


Once you get the right image the details aren't that important


Sacred cows make the best hamburger


Abbie Hoffman, US author & Yippie leader
(Born this day 1936)



I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute

[Tamrin]

Sunday’s Quotes:

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes,
but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena
and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them


A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason,
but not from the arena of his impulses


To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that
most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all


Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which
millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth


A pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises,
an optimist nothing but unpleasant


There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up


I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion


Rex Stout
US crime writer (Nero Wolfe)
(Born this day 1886)



I have a strong moral sense — by my standards

[Tamrin]

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they
would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?


After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face,
stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would
ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?


Each had defended his own country; the Germans Germany,
the Frenchmen France; they had done their duty


At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had
wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead
men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all


And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man,
which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity


We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation
is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it


The revolution is like a vessel filled with the pulsating heartbeat of millions of working people


Ernst Toller, left-wing German playwright
(Born this day 1893)



Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth

[Tamrin]

1 0f 2:

Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the
nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun


If my film makes one more person miserable, I'll feel I've done my job


Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once


To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition


Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends


If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the
worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever


There are worse things in life than death. Have you
ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?


Woody Allen
Professional New York neurotic
(Born this day 1935)



I'm not afraid of dying ... I just don't want to be there when it happens

[Tamrin]

2 of 2:

Eighty per cent of success is showing up


The two biggest myths about me are that I'm an intellectual, because
I wear these glasses, and that I'm an artist because my films lose money


Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons


If only God would give me some clear sign! Like
making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank


Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once


I don't want to achieve immortality through
my work, I want to achieve it by not dying


On the plus side, death is one of the few things
that can be done just as easily as lying down


Woody Allen
(Born this day 1935)



My one regret in life is that I am not someone else

[Tamrin]

Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as
long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition:
the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body? And how operate on it?
Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form — the qualities of Space.
... No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory


The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had
inverted the universe — what was it but joy in the confirmation of his know-
ledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of?


Is your mind so big that it can encompass galaxies or is the universe little enough to fit in one's head?


And that's the last chapter of the history of the world: in which we create, through
the workings of the imagination, a world that is uncreated: that is the work of
no author. A world that imagination cannot thereafter alter, not in its deepest
workings and its laws, but only envision in new ways; where our elder brothers
and sisters, the things, suffer our childish logomantic games with them and wait
for us to grow up, and know better; where we do grow up, and do know better


But there were problems too with wishing for moral qualities, serenity, large-minded-
ness. The interdiction (which Pierce thought obvious) against wishing for such things
as artistic abilities — sit down at the piano, the Appassionata flows suddenly from
your fingertips — applied in a way to wisdom too, to enlightenment, to heart-know-
ledge, useless unless earned, the earning of it being no doubt all that it consisted of


The vastest point, the center, the infinity — Faëry,
where the gigantic heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea upon sea
and there is no end to possibility — that circle is so tiny it has no doors at all


Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a mountaineer


John Crowley
American author (fantasy, science fiction & mainstream)
(Born this day 1942)



The world is founded on a pillar which is founded on the Deep

[Tamrin]

Intolerance is evidence of impotence


Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called
is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty


The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate
heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed,
it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach


If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad.
But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad


They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual
frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally
allowable emotion, it may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted
German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman


I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening;
I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning


Every man and woman is a star


Aleister Crowley
English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician
(Died this day 1947)



We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon.
Our method is science, our aim is religion

[Tamrin]

Each person must live their life as a model for others


Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it


At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this.
It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made
it significant was that the masses of the people joined in


I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up,
this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear


Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children
for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome


I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about
freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people


Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others


Sister Rosa Lee Parks
US civil rights activist
(Arrested this day 1955 for refusing to
give up her bus seat to a white passenger)




(OES, Alabama, PHA)

Why do you all push us around?

[Tamrin]

In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles


The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a
concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East


Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews.
But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question


To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State,
bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion


We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic
forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change


The most dangerous enemy to Israel’s security is the
intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security


If an expert says it can't be done, get another expert


David Ben-Gurion
Polish-born first Prime Minister of Israel
(Died this day 1973)



Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs

[/i][/div]