June 2017 Quotations (53)

"More than forty years after the nightmare of Watergate, our national tragedy is being repeated as farce."
~~ Peter Rothberg, publisher at The Nation Magazine

"Laughter really is carbonated holiness."
~~ Anne Lamott

"When all is said and done, we're really just walking each other home."
~~ Ram Dass

"Our task is no longer to make political films, but to make films politically."
~~ French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, in April 1970

"Let the wine of love flow through your veins."
~~ Persian poet & mystic Rumi [1207-73]

"Even as this administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future, I'm confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet [that] we've got."
~~ Barack Obama on 1 June 2017

"If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
~~ author Toni Morrison

"[Anne of Green Gables is] the dearest, most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

“Certain things in life simply have to be experienced -and never explained. Love is such a thing.”
~~ Brasilian author Paulo Coelho

“I don't care what you say to me. I care what you share with me.”
~~ Nepalese poet Santosh Kalwar

“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
~~ author E.A. Bucchianeri lives in Portugal

“Instructions for living a life. / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”
~~ Mary Oliver

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
~~ Allan W. Watts [1915-73]

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.”
~~ Roy T. Bennett

“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”
~~ British playwright Sir Peter Shaffer [1926-2016]

"If we don’t have a healthy land we won’t have a healthy people."
~~ Carleton Bowekaty, Tribal Councilman at Zuni Pueblo

“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

“Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship character.”
~~ T. Alan Armstrong, band teacher in Georgia USA

"I'm always sorry when pleasant things end. Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure."
~~ L.M. {Lucy Maud} Montgomery [1874-1942]

"Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will get you everywhere."
~~ recent popular quote, NOT by Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water."
~~ Nobel-laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941]

"I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free."
~~ painter Georgia O'Keeffe [1887-1986]

"When the sun shines, it shines for everyone."
~~ Jamaican musician Ziggy Marley

"The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday."
~~ Don Marquis [1878-1937]

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard because if it isn't there, I never lost it to begin with."
~~ author L. Frank Baum [1856-1919]

"Our culture is about choosing an identity and sticking with it so [that] people can market [crap] to you. Anything that switches that around is completely the antithesis of what our culture implores us to do."
~~ entertainer RuPaul Charles

"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be."
~~ NOT said by Yogi Berra, but by Peter De Vries [1910-93], in his 1959 novel "The Tent of Wickedness"

“Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.”
~~ Hans Christian Anderson [1805-75]

“I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.”
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

“Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.”
~~ Judy Blume

“In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.”
~~ Langston Hughes [1902-67]

"Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world."
~~ Dr. Wayne W. Dyer [1940-2015]

"Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom."
~~ writer E.B. White [1899-1985] in "The Trumpet of The Swan" [1970]

“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
~~ British author Virginia Woolf [1882-1941], in her seminal 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own”

"I am not a good man, and I'm not a bad man. I am not a hero. And I'm definitely not a president. And, no, I'm not an officer. Do you know what I am? I am an idiot with a box and a screwdriver."
~~ 12th Doctor Who

"The Pacific Northwest has its year-long 'Rain Festival' and Washington, DC continues celebrating its year-long 'Festival of Stupid'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
~~ Zen proverb

"I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years."
~~ boxing great Muhammad Ali [1942-2016]

"In the old battle between the public interest and private greed . . . private greed is winning, personified by President Donald Trump."
~~ Ruth Conniff, editor-in-chief at The Progressive Magazine [est. 1909]

"Rick Perry puts the 'goober' back in gubernatorial."
~~ progressive activist Jim Hightower

"At times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overscrupulous."
~~ Alexander Hamilton [1757-1804], in 1800

"What if the fourth time's the charm and we've just been settling thus far?"
~~ "Frazz" syndicated comic strip [est. 2001] by Jef Mallett

"The good society is one in which virtue pays. "
~~ Abraham Maslow [1908-70]

"Leaks are illegal and hated by those in power (and their followers) precisely because political officials want to be able to lie to the public with impunity and without detection."
~~ journalist Glenn Greenwald

"Lying is the message. It's not just that Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly to assert power over truth itself."
~~ Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen

"Ni Pravda b Tass, ni Tass b Pravda (No truth in The News, no news in The Truth)"
~~ longtime Russian saying . . . the humor here is that Pravda (truth) is the Communist Party newspaper and Tass (news) is the official government news agency

"Hillary Clinton carried only 472 counties in America out of more than 3,000, but those 472 were predominately urban and accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country's economic output."
~~ political theorist Yascha Mounk

"Donald Trump and the Republicans are creating a tribe of 'Me and Mine' while no longer even recognizing a democratic society of 'Us and Ours'."
~~ John Kircher of Washington, DC (letter in May 2017 The Atlantic Magazine [est. 1857])

"The consequences of our not thinking are great . . . People who aren't thinking are capable of anything."
~~ George E. Minnich, CFO & multiple board member

"There is no partial commitment to justice. You are either in or you're out."
~~ 1968 Olympic athlete Dr. John Carlos

"The supreme issue [is] the encroachment of the powerful few on the rights of the many."
~~ Robert M. La Follette [1855-1925]

"The next few years are going to be hell."
~~ feminist Gloria Steinem, in November 2016

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