Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt


All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends


Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common


Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word


The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed'


You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think


This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown aside with great force


Dorothy Parker, American writer
(Born this day 1893)



You can't teach an old dogma new tricks

[Tamrin]

The enemy is every institution which denies
full social and economic equality to anyone


The atom bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians.
There was not even the slightest military justification because the military
outcome of the war had been decided months earlier. The only reason that
the fighting was still going on was the refusal of American authorities to
discontinue a war which postponed the inevitable economic collapse at
home, and was profitable to their pocketbooks, their military and political
prestige, their race hatred, and their desires for imperialist expansion


But obliteration bombing by blockbusters, incendiaries, and atom
bombs was a logical part of the brutal warfare that had been carried
on for nearly four years with the patriotic support of American
political, religious, scientific, business, and labor institutions. The
sudden murder of 300,000 Japanese is consistent with the ethics of a
society which is bringing up millions of its own children in city slums


The American system has been destroying human life in peace and in war,
at home and abroad, for decades. Now it has produced the crowning infamy
of atom bombing. Beside these brutal facts the tidbits of token democracy
mean nothing. Henceforth no decent citizen owes one scrap of allegiance
(if he ever did) to American law, American custom, or American institutions


This is a diseased world in which it is impossible for anyone to be
fully human. One way or another, everyone who lives in the
modern world is sick or maladjusted. Slick businessmen and bosses,
parasitical coupon clippers, socially blind lawyers, scientists, and
clergymen are as much victims of "a world they never made" as
are the rough and irresponsible elements of America's great slums


The fight against military conscription cannot be separated from
the fight against the economic conscription involved in private
ownership of the country's factories, railroads, and natural resources


The war for total brotherhood must be a nonviolent war carried on by
methods worthy of the ideals we seek to serve. The acts we perform must
be the responsible acts of free men, not the irresponsible acts of conscripts
under orders. We must fight against institutions but not against people


David Dellinger
US nonviolence advocate
(Born this day 1915)



The evil of our civilization cannot be combated by
campaigns which oppose militarism and conscription
but leave the American economic and social system intact

[Tamrin]

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall


Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.
It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy.
You can't try to do things. You simply must do things


If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it


We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will.
Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another.
The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts


If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder


If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people,
they will want to grow up to be like you


Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds.
See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories


Ray Bradbury
American sci-fi author (Fahrenheit 451)
(Born this day 1920)



We are an impossibility in an impossible universe

[Tamrin]

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language


“The world is a staircase," hissed the accordion maker in the darkness.
"Some go up and some come down. We must ascend”


There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe,
but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it


There are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow,
the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman


And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery


It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone


You all know we are only passing by. We only walk over these stones
a few times, our boats float a little while and then they have to sink.
The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her


Annie Proulx
Pulitzer Prize winning US author
(Born this day 1935)



I would rather be dead than not read

[Smithee]

Smithee's pick of the day.

Aug 22, 2012 6:51:37 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

The enemy is every institution which denies full social and economic equality to anyone

David Dellinger
(Born this day 1915)

[Tamrin]

Quotes for the Day:

Life — life — let there be life!


Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul


Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade,
and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid.


In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed


We are the Choice of the Will: God, when He gave the word that called us
into line, set in our hand a sword; set us a sword to wield none else could
lift and draw, and bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law


East and west and north, wherever the battle grew, as men to a feast we fared,
the work of the Will to do. Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease —
(Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a place of peace!) — Marching, building,
sailing, pillar of cloud or fire, Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, our sire


Arise! no more a living lie, and with me quicken and control
some memory that shall magnify The Universal Soul


William Ernest Henley
English poet, critic and editor (Invictus)
(Born this day 1849)



I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul

[Tamrin]

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be
aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm,
and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice


The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the
outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there
is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and
we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God
or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility


The persistence in just being human could unite us all, intellectuals., non-intellectuals, people of
every nation, race, ideology, religion, all who believe that mankind has no right to liquidate itself


The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play


Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the
scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self


A life which does not go into action is a failure


Arnold Toynbee
British historian, economist and social reformer
(Born this day 1852)



Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor

[Tamrin]

To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, but life without meaning is the torture
of restlessness and vague desire — It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid


What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters, life is too strong for you — It takes life to love life


The earth keeps some vibration going there in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle, why, fiddle you must, for all your life


Only after many trials for strength, only when all stimulants fail, does the
aspiring soul by its own sheer power find the divine by resting upon itself


Those who first oppose a good work, seize it and make it their own,
when the cornerstone is laid and memorial tablets are erected


Immortality is not a gift, immortality is an achievement;
And only those who strive mightily shall possess it


How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?


Edgar Lee Masters
American poet and author
(Born this day 1869)



Beware of the man who rises to power from one suspender

[Tamrin]

I only know that all is lost, and that nothing can help me
unless I inherit money, strike oil or go to work


All Modern Men are descended from a Wormlike creature but it shows more on some people


The Egyptians of the First Dynasty were already civilized in most respects. They had hiero-
glyphics, metal weapons for killing foreigners, numerous government officials, death, and taxes


He went to Asia with his army and killed the natives to his heart's content, and stole so much of
their goods that Egypt was rolling in wealth for quite a while. Thutmose III was thus one of the
earliest exponents of internationalism, or going into other countries and slaughtering the inhabitants


Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool
the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons


Carthage was governed by its rich men and was therefore a plutocracy.
Rome was also governed by its rich men and was therefore a republic


Even as a child back in Indiana, whenever I took a Butterbelly off the hook I used to ask
myself, "Does this fish think?" I would even ask others, "Do you suppose this Butterbelly
can think?" And all I would get in reply was a look. At the age of eighteen, I left the state


William Jacob Cuppy
American humorist, hermit and self-styled curmudgeon
(Born this day 1884)



Ah, well! We live and learn, or, anyway, we live

[Tamrin]

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun


I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very sceptical


I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement
and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field


Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological mascu-
line bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue


Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field:
history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance


It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of
the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found


One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the
natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one


Clifford James Geertz
American anthropologist (The Interpretation of Cultures)
(Born this day 1926)



In ritual the world as lived and the world as imagined... turns out to be the same world