~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]
"Pleasure can be based on illusion, but happiness rests on reality."
~~ Nicolas Chamfort [1741-94]
"The life that awaits after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
~~ Spinoza [1632-77]
"When there is no joy there can be no courage, and without courage all other virtues are useless."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]
"The poets lie too much."
~~ poet Robinson Jeffers [1887-1962]
"Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them [that] they are superior."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
Nice bumper sticker: Who Would Jesus Bomb?
"Life is plenty good."
~~ Charlie Chan, as written by Earl Derr Biggers [1884-1933]
"Consequent to a time of War ... the life of Man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
~~ Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679] (in "Leviathan" 1651)
"It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think [that] you were born that way.”
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
"A better day is coming."
~~ Michael Moore
"I hate how the white masters of the universe have squeezed and exploited every last square inch of earth for every penny [that] they can get. There's nothing left, nothing [that] they haven't ruined."
~~ Robert Westbrook
"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
~~ full text of the famous Dictum of Lord Acton [1834-1902]
"It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty."
~~ John C. Calhoun [1782-1850], in Senate speech 1848
"If the government has nothing to hide, why is it hiding everything?"
~~ USAF LtCol. Robert Bowman
"Happiness consists in realizing [that] it is all a great strange dream."
~~ Jack Kerouac [1922-69]
"Nothing exists until it is measured."
~~ physicist Niels Bohr [1885-1962]
"A lie is profanity ... A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth."
~~ Richard Pryor [1940-2005]
"None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated."
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"Small people talk of other people, average people talk of things, great people talk of ideas."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
"Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine."
~~ Fran Lebowitz
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defence is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65], in 1858
"The task of my generation is a separation of corporation and state."
~~ John Laesch, 2008 candidate for Congress in Illinois
"A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom."
~~ Bob Dylan
"The most effective idealist is one who is nine-tenths entertainer."
~~ silent movie star Fred C. Thomson [1890-1928]
"63% of U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes last year."
~~ Robert Kennedy, Jr. (2007)
"The clearest way into the universe is thru a forest wilderness."
~~ John Muir [1838-1914]
"The Bush administration has taken politics from the gutter into the sewers."
~~ Stephen H. Weentland of Houston, TX
"With democrats, it's often a struggle to get them to take their own side in an argument."
~~ Will Durst
"What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
~~ Fitzgerald (in "The Last Tycoon")
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Like virtue, adventure is its own reward."
~~ James D. Doss
"A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]
"[The Bush] administration has taken a wrecking ball to the very foundations of our democracy."
~~ Al Gore, Jr. (August 2007)
"The road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but with self-justification."
~~ D.R. Meredith
"The class warfare that is being waged by the great rich against the greater majority is not just a slogan. It is as heartless as terrorism, as real as death, and expanding in scope day by day."
~~ Owen Williamson
"Integrity needs no rules."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]
"You can't fix stupid."
~~ Ron White
"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done.
Then they begin to hope [That] it can be done.
Then they see [that] it can be done.
Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."
~~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
"The usurpation on the part of the Executive of the conduct of foreign relations, which results in Congress blindly and ignorantly following the course dictated by the President, instead of itself declaring the war policy, is fundamentally the cause of our being in this war."
~~ Sen. Robert 'Fighting Bob' La Follette, in June 1917
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm."
~~ Walter Benjamin [1892-1940]
on the Working Minds website}
