"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
-John Morley
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we are sure, it would be an evil still."
-John Stuart Mill
"The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish."
-Justice Robert Jackson
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-C.S. Tallentyre
"We should be eternally vigilant against attempt to check the expression that we loathe."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"If I've offended anyone here tonight.....Fuck 'em."
-Robin Harris
"Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?"
-Linus Van Pelt
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right."
-Mao Tse Tung
"Without free speech no search for truth is possible; without free speech, no discovery of truth is useful."
-Charles Bradlaugh
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
- Charles Austin Beard
"Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
-Justice Thurgood Marshall
"Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
-Justice William O. Douglas
"It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. "
-Justice William O. Douglas
"Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective. "
-Justice William O. Douglas
"Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor. "
-Justice William O. Douglas
"The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think. "
-Justice William O. Douglas
"What we must remember, however, is that preservation of liberties does not depend on motives. A suppression of liberty has the same effect whether the suppressor be a reformer or an outlaw. The only protection against misguided zeal is constant alertness to infractions of the guarantees of liberty contained in our Constitution. Each surrender of liberty to the demands of the moment makes easier another, larger surrender. . ."
-Justice William O. Douglas
"In short, the liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected."
-Justice William O. Douglas
"The challenge to our liberties comes frequently not from those who consciously seek to destroy our system of government, but from men of goodwill -- good men who allow their proper concerns to blind them to the fact that what they propose to accomplish involves an impairment of liberty. "
-Justice William O. Douglas
"Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose."
-George Orwell
"Every burned book enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime."
-Justice Potter Stewart
"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
-Thomas Jefferson
"I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man."
- Thomas Jefferson
"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
-Granville Hicks
"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
-Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."
-General William C. Westmoreland
"Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest of cowardice."
-Holbrook Jackson
"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."
-A. Whitney Griswold
"Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real. Somewhere in their upbringing they were shielded against the total facts of our experience. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist. "
-Charles Bukowski
"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. "
-Claude-Adrien Helvetius
"The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea. "
-Max Lerner
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame. "
-Oscar Wilde
"The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. "
-Joseph Lewis
"We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. "
-John Milton
"Liberty of thought means liberty to communicate one's thought."
-Salvador de Madariaga
"Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?"
-Joseph Henry Jackson
"I look upon those who would deny others the right to urge and argue their position, however irksome and pernicious they may seem, as intellectual and moral cowards."
-William E. Borah
"No more fatuous chimera ever infested the brain of man than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the human heart than the barbarous desire to do so."
-William E. Borah
"If the press is not free, if speech is not independent and untrammeled, if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen."
-William E. Borah
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis
"In America - as elsewhere - free speech is confined to the dead."
-Mark Twain
"[T]o those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends."
-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, December 6, 2001
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-Benjamin Franklin
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond."
-Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein
"Freedom of choice
Is what you got.
Freedom from choice
Is what you want."
-DEVO ("Freedom of Choice")
"You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will"
-Rush ("Freewill" - lyrics by Neil Peart)
"I'm the one who's got to die
When it's time for me to die,
So let me live my life
The way I want to live."
-Jimi Hendrix ("If 6 was 9")
"If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us."
-Francis Bacon
"Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both."
-Eleanor Roosevelt
"Hide me, hide you
Better hide the baby, too
We demand an interview
How long have you been a Jew?
We can make you testify
Freedon is no alibi."
-Janis Ian ("God and the FBI")
"O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant."
-Shakespeare ("Measure for Measure" Act 2 Scene 2)
"Woman is the nigger of the world,
Think about it. Do something about it."
-John Lennon
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
-Thomas Paine
"Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but the certainly pay for all they get."
-Frederick Douglass
"Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted by either words or blows or both."
-Frederick Douglass
"Power concedes nothing without a demand."
-Frederick Douglass
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing, rain without thunder and lightning."
-Frederick Douglass"
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
-Frederick Douglass"
"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
-Frederick Douglass"
"There is nothing that dies so hard and rallies so often as intolerance. The vices and passions which it summons to its support are the most ruthless and the most persistent harbored in the human breast. They sometimes sleep but they never seem to die. Anything, any extraordinary situation, any unnecessary controversy, may light those fires again and plant in our republic that which has destroyed every republic which undertook to nurse it."
-William E. Borah
"All we are saying
Is Give Peace a Chance"
-John Lennon
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."
-Jimi Hendrix
"Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies, or else? The chain reaction of evil, hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars, must be broken or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it; between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past; between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists. "
-William Jefferson Clinton
"If one's cause is supported by sound reasoning, there is no point in using violence. It is those who have no motive other than selfish desire and who cannot achieve their goal through logical reasoning who rely on force."
-The Dalai Lama
"Life is what happens while your busy making other plans."
-John Lennon
"There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval."
-Santayana
"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate - that's my philosophy."
-Thornton Wilder
"You might slip, you might slide
You might stumble and fall by the roadside
But don't you ever let nobody drag your spirit down
Remember you're walking up to heaven, don't let nobody turn you around"
-Eric Bibb (from "Don't Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down" on Good Stuff)
"You gotta live with passion
Love with the same
Hold the key to your chains
And keep my name in your mind
My number in your wallet
For when you got the time"
-Terri Hendrix (from "Wallet" on Wilory Farm)
"We can change the face of life
Just by looking from another point of view"
- Mel Watson of FRUiT (from "Burn" on Burn)
"Life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
-Willam Shakespeare ("All's Well that Ends Well," Act 4, Scene 3)
"Life's a bitch and then you die
Nothing you can do about it
Anything you steal or buy
You're gonna be leaving here without it."
-Joe Jackson
"Life is too short to eat processed cheese
Or mealy tomatoes, or third-rate Chinese
Or to live someplace dismal without any trees
And life is too short to fold underwear
Life is too short to fold underwear
Life is too short to play solitaire
Get off your duff - it's time to begin
There's good deeds to do and there's sins to be sinned
And there's not enough time to fit it all in
Life is too short to fold underwear"
- Zoe Mulford
"We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon."
-Konrad Adenauer
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
-Oscar Wilde
"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...You must do the thing you cannot do."
-Eleanor Roosevelt
"Do.
Or do not.
There is no try."
- Yoda
" All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely props."
- Scott C. Smith (with apologies to Will Shakespeare)
"I may not amount to much, but at least I am unique."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Life is 10% what you make it, and 90% how you take it."
-Irving Berlin
"I am happy and content because I think I am."
- Alain-Rene Lesage
"Please, Lord, teach us to laugh again; but God don't let us forget that we cried."
-favorite saying of AIDS patient Evelyn Toter
"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."
-Helen Keller
"No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish."
-John Ruskin
"And the writer said 'I wish you'd known me
When I still believed in the truth
Now it's all I have left along with my debts
And lack of youth'. He said -
Take no prisoners. Tell no lies.
No pretty songs of compromise.
Take no prisoners. Tell no lies.
It's a good day to die."
-Janis Ian ("Take No Prisoners")
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A real nice guy with a n-n-n-n-nasty side
Good God said man
Couldn't face up to the Yin and the Yang
Everybody - all of us have a Shadow
Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men
The Shadow knows
We become what we do, not what we pretend
Between the intention and the expression
Between the emotion and the response
Falls the Shadow"
-DEVO, ("The Shadow")
"On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit au morts que la verité."
"One owes respect to the living; one owes nothing to the dead but truth."
— or —
"We owe the living respect; to the dead we owe only truth."
- Voltaire
"Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said —
On wings they are carried —
After the singer is dead
And the maker buried."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I Don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of iron- mongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
"There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am about to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot - say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance - literally to astonish his son's weak mind."
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
"What do you want with me?"
"Much!" - Marley's voice, no doubt about it.
"Who are you?"
"Ask me who I was."
"Who were you then?" said Scrooge, raising his voice. "You're particular - for a shade." He was going to say "to a shade," but substituted this, as more appropriate.
"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley."
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
"Love is all you need"
-Lennon and McCartney
"Love, like ice cream, is a beautiful thing, but nobody should regard it as adequate provision for a long and adventurous journey."
- Samuel Marchbanks (a.k.a. Robertson Davies)
"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
- Franklin P. Jones
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
- Victor Hugo
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."
- Buddha
"A flower falls even though we love it. A weed grows even though we don't."
- Dogen
"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."
- Ingrid Bergman
"True friends share genuine closeness and remain friends irrespective of fluctuating fortunes."
-The Dalai Lama
"Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day."
-The Dalai Lama
"The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the places beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that give and him that takes."
-Shakespeare ("The Merchant of Venice," Act 4, Scene 1)
"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself."
-Shakespeare ("King Henry VIII," Act 1, Scene 1
"'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.' "
-T.H. White (from The Once and Future King)
"Walk with the rich
Walk with the poor
Learn from everybody
That's what life is for"
-Eric Bibb (from "Don't Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down" on Good Stuff)
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
"They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
"Would you tell me, please," said Alice, "what that means?"
"Now you talk like a reasonable child," said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. "I meant by "impenetrability' that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you meant to do next, as I suppose you don't intend to stop here all the rest of your life."
"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
"When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."
"Oh!" said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There"
"I had a wrangle today with a man who said that there is no such thing as grammar, and that 'the living speech' was good speech. He talked about 'Everyman's grammar' - meaning anything anybody cares to say - as the only guide to usage. Humph! I wouldn't particularly like to trust myself to Everyman's medicine, or Everyman's ideas about the law. Why should I accept Everyman's grammar?"
- Samuel Marchbanks (a.k.a. Robertson Davies)
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw
"What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real."
- George Bernard Shaw
"From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories."
- Taisen Deshimaru
"The fool doth think he is wise
But the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
-William Shakespeare ("As You Like It", Act 5, Scene 1)
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought."
-Basho
"Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who have found it."
-Andre Gide
"Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it."
-William Bulter Yeats
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
- Henry David Thoreau
"I confess that I find the modern enthusiasm for the Common Man rather hard to follow. I know a lot of Common Men myself, and as works of God they are admittedly wonderful; their hearts beat, their digestions turn pie and beef into blood and bone, and they defy gravity by walking upright instead of going on all fours: these are marvels in themselves, but I have not found that they imply any genius for government of any wisdom which is not given to Uncommon Men....But talk about the Common Man gives the yahoo element in the population a mighty conceit of itself, which may or may not be a good thing for democracy which, by the way, was a result of some uncommon thinking by some very uncommon men."
- Samuel Marchbanks (a.k.a. Robertson Davies)
"Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice,
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement."
-William Shakespeare ("Hamlet", Act 1, Scene 3)
"Everybody yippin' yappin' in the interview chair
Hawking their philosophy
Be a Christian, be a Buddhist, be a billionaire
Be like me, can't you see
Hey
Let Everybody have their say
And at the end of the day
All you really get's another shade of grey
-Susan Werner ("Shade of Grey")
"So don't tell me the answers
I'd rather learn them for myself
And don't sell me your answers
Put your book back on the shelf
With the new non-fiction
-Susan Werner ("Shade of Grey")
"I don't mind the despair, it's the hope I can't take."
-Charlie Brown ("Peanuts" by Charles Schulz)
"There is no easy way from the earth to the stars."
-Seneca
"The heart of a city
Is the soul of a man
It winds like a river
Through the heart of the land
They can tear down a building
They can tear down a park
They can strike at a symbol
But they can't strike the heart."
-Janis Ian ("Heart of a City", unreleased 2002)
"Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, casts the shadows of our burden behind us."
-S. Smiles
"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The world is but canvas to our imaginations."
- Henry David Thoreau
"If music be the food of love, play on."
-William Shakespeare
"Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know."
-Louis Armstrong (asked to define jazz)
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
-Aldous Huxley
"Music is the space between the notes."
-Claude Debussy
"Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar... except, possibly, two."
-Frederic Chopin
"Without music, life would be a mistake."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."
- Charles Mingus
"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."
- Paul Gauguin
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
"Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you."
-Andre Gide
"Money can't buy happiness, but it makes misery much more tolerable."
-Scott C. Smith
"They say 74% of everything you're learning in college is a bunch of bullshit you'll never need
83.4% of everything you've got, you bought to satisfy you're greed
Because 91% of the world's population links their pssessions to success
Even though 88% of the wealthiest 1% of the population drinks to an alarming excess
More money more stress"
-Todd Snider ("Statistician's Blues")
Zen is simply a voice crying "Wake up! Wake up!"
-Maha Sthavira Sangharakshita
"The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao."
- Lao Tzu
"More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of."
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
- Shakespeare
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
- Carl Sagan
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it."
- Edith Wharton
"After the ecstasy, the laundry."
- Zen saying
"May I never get too busy with my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion."
-Thomas Jefferson
"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
-Winston Churchill
"Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
-Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe."
-Albert Einstein
"God DOES play dice with the universe, but sometimes He cheats."
-Scott C. Smith
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
-Shakespeare ("Troilus and Cressida," Act 3, Scene 3)
"Nature hath no goal though she hath law."
-John Donne
"Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent."
-Stephen Jay Gould
"In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous."
-Aristotle
"It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things, and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable."
-William Penn
"What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man."
-Chief Seattle (1854)
"The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order."
-Henry Miller
"A scientist is someone to whom nothing is too obvious to be incorrect."
-Karvel Thornber
"I want to know God's thoughts. The rest are details."
-Albert Einstein
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
-Albert Einstein
"An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation."
-Niels Bohr
"Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down. We don't move, today is today, always is today."
-Octavio Paz
"Reality has no inside, outside, or middle part."
-Bodhidharma
"Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupations is exhilarating and life-giving."
-Gandhi
A beginning student complained to his master that the meditation practice of following the breath was boring. The Zen master unexpectedly grabbed the student and held his head under water for quite a long time while the student struggled to come up. Finally, he let the student go.
"Now how boring is your breath?" he asked.
-Zen Mondo
"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."
-Paul Valery
"As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses."
-M. C. Escher
"'You don't believe in me,' observed the ghost.
'I don't,' said Scrooge.
'What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your own senses?'
'I don't know,' said Scrooge.
'Why do you doubt your senses?'
'Because,' said Scrooge, 'a little thing effects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. Yo may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of chees, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'"
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
"Having failed to distinguish thought from things, we then fail to distinguish words from thoughts. We think that if we can label a thing we have understood it."
-Maha Sthavira Sangharakshita
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-Pablo Picasso
"One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic realy is."
-Frank Herbert
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
-Albert Einstein
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
- Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
- Rabindranath Tagore
"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical."
- Niels Bohr
"I think I think; therefore, I think I am."
- Ambrose Bierce
"The next thing I say to you will be true.
The last thing I said was false."
-DEVO
"There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer."
-Gertrude Stein
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"They say 3% of people use 5 to 6% of their brains
97% use just 3% and the rest goes down the drain
Now I'll never know which one I am, but I'll bet you my last dime
99% think we're 3% 100% of the time
They say 65% of all statistics are made up right there on the spot
82.4% of people believe them, whether they're accurate statistics or not
Now I don't know what you believe, but I do know there's no doubt
I need another double shot of soemthing 90 proof, I got too much to think about"
-Todd Snider ("Statistician's Blues")
"Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
I'll tell you who Time ambles withal,
Who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal,
And who he stands still withal."
-Shakespeare ("As You Like It," Act 3, Scene 2)
"Time is not a line, but a series of now-points."
- Taisen Deshimaru
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."
- Saint Augustine
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in the petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!"
-Shakespeare ("Macbeth," Act 5, Scene 5)
"The trouble is that you think you have time"
- Zen saying
"But Jennifer says we got time
She says it's all we have"
- Mel Watson of FRUiT (from "Jennifer Says" on Burn)
Tom Seaver: "Hey, Yogi, what time is it?"
Yogi Berra: "You mean now?"
"Predictions are difficult, especially about the future."
- Yogi Berra
"Christmas is the day that holds all time together."
- Alexander Smith
"Christmas is the one time of year when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ."
- Bart Simpson
"Christmas begins about the 1st of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April 15th on the next year."
- P.J. O'Rourke
"May you have the gladness of Christmas which is hope; the spirit of Christmas which is peace; the heart of Christmas which is love."
- Ada V. Hendricks
"'Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be Merry? You're poor enough'
'Come then,' returned the nephew gaily, 'What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.'
Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, 'Bah!' again; and followed it up with 'Humbug!'"
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
"'... If I could work my will,' said Scrooge indignantly, 'every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!'"
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
"'Nephew!' returned the uncle sternly, 'keep Christmas in your own way and let me keep it in mine.'
'Keep it!' repeated Scrooge's nephew. 'But you don't keep it.'
'Let me leave it alone, then,' said Scrooge. 'Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!'
'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew; 'Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round -apart from the veneration due to its sacred name, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that- as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!''"
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
"I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive."
- President George W. Bush, speaking from a golf tee (which somehow dilutes the seriousness of the remark!)
"If you cannot read, this leaflet will tell you how to get lessons."
- from a literacy pamphlet
"Guys aren't able to get $15 or $20 million [a year] anymore, so you have to play for the love of the game."
- poor little rich boy Penny Hardaway on the NBA salary cap
"The foolish colonel will foam and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis. All that oxalic acid, in one dose, and you're dead. If the Wolf Peach [tomato] is too ripe and warmed by the sun, he'll be exposing himself to brain fever. Should he, by some unlikely chance, survive, I must warn him that the skin...will stick to his stomach and cause cancer."
- Dr. James van Meeter, 1830, Salem, Massachusetts, speaking about Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, who was going to publicly eat a tomato
"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has got to go."
- last words of Oscar Wilde
"I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short."
- Blaise Pascal
"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition."
- Monty Python
"Where is the ambiguity? Over there, in a box."
- Monty Python
"What makes the Hottentots so hot?
What puts the ape in an apricot?
What have they got that I ain't got?"
"COURAGE!"
"You can say that again"
- The Cowardly Lion (from "The Wizard of Oz")
"I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them, but they were only satellites
It's wrong to wish on space hardware"
I wish, I wish, I wish you cared"
- Kirsty Maccoll ("New England")
Cogito ergo spud.
I think, therefore I yam.
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
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That's a mighty big 'if'.
"Aba-de, aba-de, aba-de, that's all folks!"
- Porky Pig