July 2015 Quotations (57)

"We're raising our children, our kids, our future generation on crap."
~~ chef & businessman Roy Choi of West Los Angeles

“...rush out in the rain to be soaked with the sky.”
~~ Persian poet & mystic Rumi [1207-73]

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."
~~ Sir John Lubbock [1834-1913]

"A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawnmower is broken."
~~ sportswriter James Dent

“They don't think it be like it is, but it do.”
~~ baseball player Oscar Gamble, circa 1975

"No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself."
~~ Anthony Trollope [1815-82]

"[Donald] Trump is a virus that the Republican Party has no immunity from because he actually represents everything that the party stands for, from anti-immigrant hysteria to worship of plutocrat 'job creators'."
~~ podcast host Sam Seder, June 2015

"Form to the sculptor is all and yet it is nothing. It is nothing without the spirit; with the idea it is everything."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"Ha`ina `ia mai ana ka puana" means 'disclose the essential message'
~~ Hawaiian saying, often sung at the end of traditional songs or dances

"There are those who do not fear death for they are more afraid of not really living."
~~ ancient proverb

"The only law that matters is gravity."
~~ line in the movie "Point Break" [2015]

“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.”
~~ Federico Fellini [1920-93]

"It is not my intention to repeat myself, but in my work there should certainly be references to what I have done in the past. Say what you will, but 'The Trial' is the best film I ever made . . . I have never been so happy as when I made this film."
~~ Orson Welles [1915-85]

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye." ("On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.")
~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-44]

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."
~~ A.A. Milne [1882-1956]

“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”
~~ André Bazin [1918-58]

“[There are] two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; [and] those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.”
~~ Robert Bresson [1901-99], in "Notes On The Cinematographer" [1975]

“It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.”
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013], in "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie" [2000]

“I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.”
~~ Francis Ford Coppola

“Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read ... if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.”
~~ Werner Herzog

“I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”
~~ Georges Duhamel [1884-1966], in "Scènes de La Vie Future" [1930]

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."
~~ graphic novel & TV series "V For Vendetta"

"We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68], in "Beyond Vietnam" [1967 speech]

'Earth' without 'art' is just 'eh'.

"Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings."
~~ Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
~~ William Pitt [1759-1806]

"To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940], in "The Great Gatsby" [1925]

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
~~ Frederick Douglass [1818-95]

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.”
~~ Neil Gaiman

“I think of life as a good book. The further [that] you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.”
~~ Rabbi Harold Kushner

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
~~ Haruki Murakami

“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.”
~~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis [1929-94]

“Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.”
~~ John Green

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book [that] you would not read yourself.”
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
~~ William Styron [1925-2006]

“I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.”
~~ William Lyon Phelps [1865-1943]

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
~~ Joseph Brodsky [1940-96]

“Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.”
~~ J.K. Rowling

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

“The book [that] you don’t read won’t help.”
~~ Jim Rohn [1930-2009]

"Four things greater than all things are / Women and horses and power and war."
~~ Rudyard Kipling [1865-1936]

"I'm so hungry I could eat a vegetable."
~~ comic strip character Dennis the Menace, as drawn by Hank Ketcham [1920-2001]

"The first rule in politics is never defend. Always attack."
~~ Sen. Tom Harkin

"The historical record makes homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer."
~~ Prof. Yuval Noah Harari

"Life is like a roll of masking tape - it goes a lot faster toward the end."
~~ Funky Winkerbean comic strip, as drawn by Tom Batiuk

"There is no such thing as not voting."
~~ David Foster Wallace [1962-2008]

"Art has to offer something other than stylized despair."
~~ novelist Ben Lerner

"From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cellphone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, [web]site you visit, subject line you type is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not."
~~ June 2013 email from whistleblower Edward Snowden to filmmaker Laura Poitras

"The U.S. Supreme Court put the government up for sale."
~~ Howard Dean, in 2015

"If a June night could talk, it would probably boast [that] it invented romance."
~~ Bern Williams

"There is no opposite of an idea. So an idea goes everywhere."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"Those lacking imagination take refuge in reality."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"Where there is great love there are always miracles."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]

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

peasant lives matter

News Factoids for Second Quarter 2015

Republican Pigheadedness: Due to G.O.P. budget cuts in all areas, the bad guys are winning. The Treasury Department is now unable to curtail the production of counterfeit paper money such that merchants in my tiny town in the middle of New Mexico now require their employees to test each and every five-dollar bill with that pen thing and also to hold it up to the overhead light.

Later in 2015, gun deaths are expected to surpass car accidents as the leading cause of death of young people in the U.S.A. for the first time ever.

Six corporations - Time Warner, Disney-ABC, News Corporation-Fox, Viacom-MTV-Paramount, Comcast-NBC-Universal, and CBS - control roughly 90 percent of the media in the U.S.

Lego of Denmark plans to invest $1 billion over the next 15 years to replace its iconic plastic building blocks with blocks made of materials that are better for the environment; it will also make its packaging more sustainable.

The first six months of 2015 are, in aggregate, the hottest on record, i.e. since such measurements began in 1880. The second half of the year is expected to follow suit, per weather scientists.

The brouhaha about the Confederate flag has just begun. The most common actual flag of the Confederate States of America (there were four) had a white background. The 'Stars and Bars' battle flag was flown by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and was the flag that he physically surrendered at Appomattox. The flag saw little use until resurrected by the Ku Klux Klan as a symbol of segregation and racism in the 1920s. The new meme of the Stars and Bars design as the 'Dixie Swastika' says a lot about its impact on non-whites and non-racists in the XXIst Century.
Copyright 2015 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved