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Edited on Sat Dec-29-07 10:33 PM by Old Crusoe
Vulture-Kicking & Other Socio-Political Indiscretions
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Been here a little while now. I say thanks to the admins and the mods and to the good company of many people on these boards. Following are quotations for a winter’s night. May they nibble at you into the New Year like a strange mouse at your ear.
:bluebox: :bluebox: :bluebox:
“I make music with vultures. I kick them and they produce different sounds.” :bluebox: (Shane D. Maudiss, blog respondent, on rec.music.artists.emmylou-harris)
"Mitt Romney is a soulless, unprincipled freak." :bluebox: (Ruth Marcus, Washington POST, winter 2007)
“All good art is an indiscretion.” :bluebox: (Tennessee Williams)
"My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there is hardly any difference." :bluebox: (Harry S. Truman)
Let's pretend this plug is 'Iraq' and you're trying to connect it to the 'War on Terror,' which is this avocado. You can do it, but here's the problem: the avocado still doesn't turn on. And now your plug is covered in guacamole." :bluebox: (Jon Stewart, c. October 2006)
"Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president. One hopes it is the same half." :bluebox: (Gore Vidal)
“I hated that man. First two fights, he tried to make me a white man. Then he tried to make me a nigger. How would you like it if your kids came home from school crying, because everyone was calling their daddy a gorilla? I’d like to fight Ali-Clay-whatever-his-name-is again tomorrow. I still want to take him apart piece by piece and send him back to Jesus.” :bluebox: (Joe Frazier, on Muhammad Ali)
“Growth for growth’s sake is the psychology of cancer.” :bluebox: (Edward Abbey, on suburban sprawl in America)
“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people... it is true that most stupid people are conservatives.” :bluebox: (John Stuart Mill)
“The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently.” :bluebox: (Frederick Nietzsche)
"I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. ... We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. 'These are dark and evil days,' the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear." :bluebox: (Poet Charles Simic)
“Nimue finished her bread and honey and wiped her hands tidily on a clump of grass. ‘I never understood Father Griffin...but he was angry when I did not. I was punished when I asked him why we must fast and pray for our sins when Christ had already forgiven them, and he said I had been taught heathendom and made Mother send me to my room. What is heathendom, aunt?’
‘It is anything a priest does not like,’ said Morgaine.”
:bluebox: (Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon)
“The importance of reaching the stars is that somewhere out there are other life forms and even, in all likelihood, other intelligences. To study other forms of life or to make contact with other intelligences would represent a chance at a monumental advance of knowledge.” :bluebox: (Isaac Asimov, 1968)
“It’s a horseshit stadium.” :bluebox: (then-Yankee Manager Billy Martin, on the then-brand-new Metrodome in Minneapolis)
“Two friends, disillusioned with the rigors of a responsible life, turn to cattle rustling.”
:bluebox: (plot summary of Rancho Deluxe in TV GUIDE)
“I for one am happy the Indianapolis 500 is fading in prominence. It has always been the biggest collection of white-trash drunks short of a Klan rally.” :bluebox: (anonymous caller, in the “Let It Out” column, Indianapolis Star, 5-19-98)
“He had made a life in the political marketplace with an unexceptional stall of xenophobic and punitive opinions.” :bluebox: (Ian McEwan, Amsterdam)
“And what I saw has mixed with what I have heard, most of all from you; and those again with what my mind’s eye has made of them. It is all one cloth now, I shall never tease out the threads. But it taught me tragedy, all the same.” :bluebox: (Mary Renault, The Praise Singer)
“The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian. I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me in this land and it belongs to me. The White Man was raised over the great waves, and his land is over there. Since they crossed they sea, I have given them room. There are now white people all about me. I have but a small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep it.” :bluebox: (Red Cloud, of the Lakota, 1864)
“I had reasoned out there was two things I had a right to -- liberty and death. If I could not have one, I would have the other, for no man should take me alive.” :bluebox: (Harriet Tubman)
“This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House--with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.”
:bluebox: (John F. Kennedy, to Nobel Prize Laureates)
“And a man standing alone at the side of the road holding up a copy of the Morning News opened to the page that had everybody talking. ‘Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas.’ An ad placed by a group called the American Fact-Finding Committee. Grievances, accusations, jingo fantasia--not so remarkable, really, even in a major newspaper, except that the text was bordered in black. Nicely ominous. Jack Kennedy had seen the ad earlier and now, with towered downtown Dallas in the visible distance, he turned and said softly to Jacqueline, ‘We’re heading into nut country now.’” :bluebox: (Don DeLillo, Libra, early moments of the Kennedy motorcade through Dallas)
“At the beginning of the World Series of 1947, I experienced a completely new emotion, when the national anthem was played. This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for everyone else. This is organized major league baseball, and I am standing here with all the others; and everything that takes place includes me.” :bluebox: (Jackie Robinson)
“The basic problems of the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.” :bluebox: (John F. Kennedy)
"I cannot eat as much as I would like to throw up." :bluebox: (Painter Max Liebermann, writing in his diary after looking from his window onto Berlin's Pariser Platz when he saw the newly-triumphant Nazis marching through the Brandenburg Gate)
“In the ongoing saga of Western civilization, declines continue to lead advances by a wide margin.”
:bluebox: (Manhoff cartoon, in THE NEW YORKER)
“To see itself through, music must have either idea or magic. The best has both. Music with neither dies young.” :bluebox: (Ned Rorem)
“The poet must continue to stand in an adversarial relationship. The most elementary of our adversarial relationships are in terms of the power of the state, which has never been so great in the history of mankind. That power can destroy us all. It’s a terrible power to entrust to people who are not spiritually great, that’s all there is to it. You see it in the callousness, self-aggrandizement, insensitivity to the plight of the poor. In the general level of ethical conduct, the state has become an abomination. The Vietnam war--I was very angry about that, as I am about our policy in Nicaragua--all such difficulties lead one to feel more and more separated from the heads of state and the conduct of the state. A poet can’t change anything, but the poet can demonstrate the power of the solitary conscience. It’s an example. Any gain, even the conquest of a small part of oneself, is a triumph.” :bluebox: (Stanley Kunitz, interview in the Washington Post, May 12, 1987)
“Literature is news that stays news.” :bluebox: (Ezra Pound)
“One of the things I am trying to say is that a healthy society must include people with alternative dreams. This is necessary so that all ideas, as many ideas as possible, can be available to us as we deal with our social problems. Our society is changing radically and we have to respond to those changes. If our responses are severely limited, our chances of survival are much less.” :bluebox: (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., interview in the Indianapolis Star, 1980)
“Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shithouse.” :bluebox: (Kim, remembering his father’s advice in William Burroughs’ The Place of Dead Roads)
“Islam faces no challenge in Afghanistan except from its own variations. To destroy these ancient monuments because their builders followed the way of the Buddha is like setting forest fires because the Celts worshipped in sacred groves. Though the lesson is not worth the cost, the Taliban’s crimes against memory and spirit--which are more than matched by its crimes against men and women--are a reminder that the profession of religion and the practice of virtue need not go together.” :bluebox: (Hendrik Hertzberg, on the destruction by Afghanistan’s Taliban ruling authority of the 5th century Buddhas of Bamiyan in March, 2001)
“Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.” :bluebox: (George Bernard Shaw)
“And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.” :bluebox: (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat’s Cradle)
"The most violent element in society is ignorance.” :bluebox: (Emma Goldman)
“The true contest must take place on the level of the individual. It is here, in the present, that the Temple is reclaimed or demolished.” :bluebox: (Azriel, in Elie Wiesel’s The Oath)
“He who eats of my body and drinks of my blood shall have eternal life.” :bluebox: (Jesus of Galilee, c. 30 C.E.)
“He who eats of my body and drinks of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall know salvation.’” :bluebox: (Zarathustra, c. six centuries before Jesus)
“Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary.” :bluebox: (John Lennon)
“Hero-worship is strongest where there is the least regard for human freedom.” :bluebox: (Herbert Spenser)
“At Warp-9, they all look green to me.” :bluebox: (bumper sticker evoking the speed trajectories of Star Trek starships as a rationalization for fast driving)
“A man’s destiny stands not in the future but in the past. That, rightly considered, is the most vital of all vital facts. Every child thus has a right to choose his own ancestors.” :bluebox: (Havelock Ellis)
“Puritanism is an insatiable vice that feeds on its own shit. The president only wanted to do what every man has done and hidden from his wife since the beginning of time. Clinton’s fault is that he didn’t lie and continue, as would have any self-respecting adulterer with his head held high.”
:bluebox: (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, defending President Clinton in the Lewinsky matter)
“They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don’t you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won’t be a robot.”
“But Ignatius, they help out a lot of people that got problems.”
“Do you think that I have problems? The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don’t like new cars and hair spray. That’s why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”
“Ignatius, that ain’t true. You remember old Mr. Becker who used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked.”
“Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I’ve always considered Mr. Becker to be one of the martyrs of our age.”
:bluebox: (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
“Can I get a new bike?” :bluebox: (Chad Brenner, age 8, of Rockville, Maryland, mistakenly sent an IRS refund of $39,541.55)
“The essence of practicality.” :bluebox: (ad placed by a Chinese supplier of AK-47s in Soldier of Fortune magazine)
“Once you could run away from the problems that seemed to confound and confuse life in the places where people congregated. You could go back to the farm and forget the city. You could go off to the colonies and forget the home country. You could head for the South Seas. But today the mushroom clouds from atomic blasts climb into the air not far from Tahiti. Bulldozers and chain saws roar in the upper Amazon. There is no place left to hide. If you want a world fit to live in, you must fight for it now.”
:bluebox: (Raymond F. Dasmann)
“The propaganda of the drug war obliterates the injustices of class and race, the issue of government for and by the rich. It reduces the social problem to a glaring symptom of widespread helplessness. The only true lesson of the war on drugs is the same as that of the catastrophic health care repeal: a demoralized and confused population can be manipulated into acting against its own best interests for an indefinite period of time. People will use drugs as long as the society offers them nothing but shit, and shit is what we have on the menu.” :bluebox: (Gary Indiana, Village Voice, October 31, 1989)
“I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”
:bluebox: (James Baldwin, 1984)
“The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect.” :bluebox: (Harper’s Weekly, 1902)
“According to Orrin Hatch, it’s ok to destroy a frozen embryo because the embryo is only a person if it’s in a woman. This location theory of personhood is obviously unsatisfactory: You put the cells in the woman, it’s a person, you take them out, it’s not a person, you put them back in, voila!--it’s a person again. You might as well say Orrin Hatch is a person in his office but not in his car. If, as anti-choicers like to claim, what makes personhood is a full set of chromosomes--rather than, say, possession of a gender, a body, a head, a brain--then a clump of cells in an ice cube tray is at least as much a person as Trent Lott. Maybe more.”
:bluebox: (Katha Pollitt, in The Nation, August 20/27, 2001)
“Shortly before the 1968 primary election, aides were urging Bobby Kennedy to lead a parade of supporters around Monument Circle even though they couldn’t get a parade permit for several days. Bobby nixed the suggestion explaining: ‘I can’t stand the thought of spending a night in jail with nothing to read but the Indianapolis Star.’” :bluebox: (J. Jeff Hays, of Evansville, Indiana, letter to the Star, May 18, 1998)
“The gross national product is rising above $800 billion a year but that figure does not measure the health of our youth, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not measure the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” :bluebox: (Robert Kennedy, 1968)
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” :bluebox: (Abraham Lincoln)
“Thinking of him, we all see so vividly what we admire in a human life, and what are the great causes we care about. The impact of his example will help and inspire men and women for time yet to come.”
:bluebox: (Arthur Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his eulogy for JFK)
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. It’s easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” :bluebox: (Hermann Goring, Nazi High Command at Nuremburg)
“Love occurs, despite the thousand reasons it should not.” :bluebox: (Andrew Holleran, Nights in Aruba)
“I dimly recall, from childhood, a movie where a man and a woman meet on the Staten Island Ferry late at night, by chance. It’s gradually revealed that one or the other, maybe both of them, had planned on jumping off the boat. But instead they fall in love, each becoming the other’s ray of hope. Love, the rescuer’s flashlight. Perhaps we all grow up with these salvational fantasies that never get entirely dislodged by experience.” :bluebox: (Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy)
“Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child who lost a dog yesterday.” :bluebox: (Thornton Wilder, 1960)
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” :bluebox: (Oscar Wilde)
“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” :bluebox: (Jacques Barzun)
“Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.” :bluebox: (Bernardo Bertolucci)
“...but it was already an unconventional place, the cradle of radical movements and audacious forms of rebellion. It was my luck to be present at the transformation of the caterpillar into the large-winged, brilliantly colored butterfly that animated an entire generation.” :bluebox: (Gregory, on Berkeley, in Isabelle Allende’s The Infinite Plan)
“I read him for the first time in the early 1940s, something about bells, balls, and bulls... and I loathed it.” :bluebox: (Vladimir Nabokov on Hemingway)
"I have always imaged that paradise will be a kind of library." :bluebox: (Jorge Luis Borges 1899 – 1986)
“Once we were dissimilar but unseparate. That is what beauty is.” :bluebox: (Poet Adrienne Rich)
“Ordinary fuckin’ people -- I hate ‘em.” :bluebox: (Harry Dean Stanton in Repo Man)
"You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot AND stray -- witch, Hansel, and Gretel in one." :bluebox: (Seamus Heaney, "The Plantation," from DOOR INTO THE DARK)
“As for real death--it has always been a temptation to me, since my mother solved so many problems with it. The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem, even one in simple algebra. Question: if Farmer A can plant 300 potatoes an hour, and Farmer B can plant potatoes 50 percent faster, and Farmer C can plant potatoes one-third as fast as Farmer B, and 10,000 potatoes are to be planted to an acre, how many nine-hour days will it take Farmers A, B and C, working simultaneously, to plant 25 acres?” Answer: I think I’ll blow my brains out.” :bluebox: (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Palm Sunday)
“The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes -- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills--like a god. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal.” :bluebox: (Dr. Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s Equus)
“As it happens, I am comfortable with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” :bluebox: (Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
“When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.” :bluebox: (Eugene V. Debs)
“...the beauty of the cosmos derives not only from unity in variety, but also from variety in unity."
:bluebox: (Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)
“Washington is about stress, about not getting along. It is about conflict. It is about fighting. It is a Disneyland of egomaniacs and stress-seekers.” :bluebox: (John Flannery, attorney in the District of Columbia)
“All his life he had felt whatever happiness came to him would be feeble and substitutional.”
:bluebox: (Laura Argiri, The God in Flight)
“The ability to think for one’s self depends on one’s mastery of the language.” :bluebox: (Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
“A man who could not seduce men cannot save them either.” :bluebox: (Soren Kierkegaard)
“We shall see who emerges from the labyrinth: the man or the minotaur.” :bluebox: (Rev. Daniel Berrigan)
“The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man’s unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error.” :bluebox: (Carl Jung)
“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and enobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.” :bluebox: (Martin Luther King)
“I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.” :bluebox: (Lenny Bruce)
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
:bluebox: (John F. Kennedy, Inaugural, 1961)
“Distrust all men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” :bluebox: (Frederich Nietzsche)
“Trust those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it.” :bluebox: (Andre Gide’)
“I stopped at a cafe in Dalhart and ordered a chicken fried steak. Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.” :bluebox: (Larry McMurtry)
“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” :bluebox: (E. M. Forster, “Two Cheers for Democracy”)
“Do you want me to tell you what Dallas is? It’s the city that proves once and for all that God is really dead.” :bluebox: (George de Mohrenschildt, in Don DeLillo’s LIBRA)
“Austin, in a canyon on the west slope of the Toiyabe Mountains, is a living ghost town: forty percent living, fifty percent ghost, and ten percent not yet decided.” :bluebox: (William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways)
“You’ve got to scrape that shit right off your shoes.” :bluebox: (the Rolling Stones, last line of chorus to “Sweet Virginia,” on Exile on Main Street)
“In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise…”
:bluebox: (couplet from Auden’s eulogy to W. B. Yeats)
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