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Saturday, November 08, 2008

November Quotations

"You can never do a kindness too soon, because you will never know how soon it will be too late."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force."
~~ James Gustave Speth

"Home is the place where, when you go there / They have to take you in"
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable to superstition and demagoguery."
~~ George Scialabba

"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism."
~~ Gore Vidal

"All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts."
~~ Raymond Chandler [1888-1959]

"One immediately recognises a man of judgment by the use he makes of the semicolon."
~~ Henry de Montherlant [1896-1972]

"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"37 seconds well used is a lifetime!"
~~ Mr. Edward Magorium character, as written by Zach Helm

"Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
~~ Edna Ferber [1885-1968]

"Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to
be relished."
~~ William Wordsworth [1750-1850]

"Writing a book is an adventure: It begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma."
~~ Hendrik Willem van Loon [1882-1944]

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have had."
~~ Marlene Dietrich [1901-92]

"My father showed me his library, which was very large, and told me to read whatever I wanted, but that if something bored me, I should immediately put it down."
~~ Jorge Luis Borges [1899-1986]

"Morality is all right, but what about dividends?"
~~ Kaiser Wilhelm II [1859-1941]

"Have nothing ... that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
~~ William Morris

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print;
A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.
~~ George Gordon, Lord Byron [1788-1824]

"Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse."
~~ Hannah Arendt [1906-75]

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Trust your editor, and you'll sleep on straw."
~~ John Cheever [1912-82]

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money."
~~ Robert Graves [1895-1985]

"Sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it has not harmed him."
~~ Epicurus [341–270 B.C.E.)

"Henry [Kissinger] does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature."
~~ Helmut Sonnenfeldt

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness."
~~ Jane Austen [1775-1817]

"The knowledge that the aristocrats take for granted, we must pay for with our youth."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"Every gun that is made ... signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, and those who are cold and are not clothed."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]

"That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]

"I am so tired of being told that I want mankind to go back to the condition of savages. As if modern city people weren't the crudest, rawest, most crassly savage monkeys that ever existed, when it comes to the relation of man and woman. All I see in our vaunted civilization is men and women smashing each other emotionally and physically to bits, and all I ask is that they should pause and consider."
~~ D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]

"The sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"The domination of women by men has lasted for fifty thousand years. Why can't it last just fifty more?"
~~ grafitto in Berlin, Germany

"[Mankind is] a herd of beings that must be governed by fraud, effigy, and show."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-97]

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]

"If it rained knowledge I'd hold out my hand, but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"[Poetry] is not so fine a thing as philosophy – for the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth."
~~ John Keats [1795-1821]

"Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt."
~~ Allan Bloom

"The superior man is distressed by his want of ability."
~~ Confucius [551-479 B.C.E.]

"Why not make the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him."
~~ Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977]

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]

"In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]

"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character. Happiness does that sometimes; but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."
~~ W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]

"You have to choose: live or tell stories."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]

"Truisms are best."
~~ Noam Chomsky

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Monday, November 03, 2008

November News Factoids (with election predictions)

PREDICTIONS

Barack Obama will win by a landslide 60% to 40% over John McBush in tomorrow's national election – UNLESS the Rove-bot machinery of the Republican Party manages to steal another election, in direct conflict with The Constitution and the Will of The People.

The once-red state of New Mexico will switch all five Congressional seats to Democratic. Bingaman continues as Senator; Udall replaces disgraced longtime Sen. Domenici; and Martin Heinrich & Harry Teague & Ben Ray Lujan sweep the House seats.

OTHER NEWS

Influenza kills about 36,000 people each year in America.
~~ A.P. Radio News

My local power company P.N.M. included a chart in the billing last month that defines their fuel sources as 41% coal (San Juan Generating Station), 16% nuclear, 22% natural gas, 8% wind, with solar a small part of 13% other. So New Mexico is basically up to speed with a lot of what T. Boone Pickens is after with his energy plan.
~~ sign up with the Pickens Army at www.PickensPlan.com

"One result of the Bush policies that erupted in the Russia-Georgia miniwar is that Russia now controls the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline."
~~ The Washington Spectator

"The [U.S.] military budget, now nearly $600 billion, is almost as large as the combined military budgets of the rest of the world. We outspend China by a factor of ten to one, Russia by sixteen to one, and Iran by almost ninety times."
~~ The Nation Magazine (Oct 2008)

THE ECONOMY

George W. Bush has run up more debt than any other person in the history of Mankind, i.e. fifteen trillion dollars (to be paid off by U.S. taxpayers).

The $700 billion subprime market bailout is the largest money bill ever passed by the U.S. Congress; it is also more money than it cost to fund the VietNam War.

September data on job losses in America show that we have lost jobs for nine months in a row.
~~ A.P. Radio News

There were 5.6 million jobs lost or displaced in 2007.
~~ Economic Policy Institute (Sept 2008)

Over the last 25 years, the percentage of obese children in America has doubled.
~~ www.EarthShare.org

"[Wall Street] had a party / Now you're going to pay"
~~ subhead of Time Magazine cover story (cover date 29 Sept 2008)

"The S&P Case-Schiller Index of house prices in 20 [U.S.] cities has been falling since February 2007. And the decline is accelerating. In June [2008], prices were down 16% compared with a year earlier."
~~ Time Magazine (Sept 2008)

As-of October 2008: The S&P 500 Index was down 33% for the year; the Nikkei Index fell to its lowest in 26 years; the Chinese stock market was down about 60% for the year; Germany's DAX Index was down 38%; the BM&F-Bovespa Index in Brasil was down 40%; Shanghai's S.E. Composite Index was down 60%; Russia's RTS Index was down 67%.

ENVIRONMENT

Worldwide, species threatened or extinct: birds, 1 in 7; amphibians, 1 in 3; mammals, 1 in 5.
~~ Time Magazine chart 10/2008

Due to global warming and to irrigation use during the dry season, the rivers Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, Nile (and many others) no longer reach the ocean.

"Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force."
~~ James Gustave Speth

"Environmental crisis is gathering as ... the result of a system of political economy - today's capitalism - that is profoundly committted to profits and growth and profoundly indifferent to nature and society."
~~ James Gustave Speth

"We are losing the planet ... Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are gone. Half the planet's wetlands are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone and 75 percent of marine fisheries are overfished, fished to capacity, or depleted. ... Twenty percent of the corals are gone, another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing about 1000 times faster than normal."
~~ James Gustave Speth (in 2008)

"[In the United States,] forty percent of ... fish species are threatened with extinction, a third of plants and amphibians, 15 to 20 percent of birds and mammals. Half of U.S. lakes and a third of the rivers still fail to meet the standards that the 1972 Clean Water Act said should be met by 1983."
~~ James Gustave Speth (in 2008)