Friday, July 31, 2015

Plato, "Republic"

The wise man who refuses to concern himself properly with the affairs of his city will be appropriately punished. He will be constrained to live out his life under bad government.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Authority is the most damaging trauma to which the psyche is subjected between birth and death.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Gabriel García Marquez, "Cien Años de Soledad"

En la escuela desportillada donde experimentó por primera vez la seguridad del poder, a pocos metros del cuarto donde conoció la incertidumbre del amor, Arcadio encontró ridículo el formalismo de la muerte. En realidad no le importaba la muerte sino la vida, y por eso la sensación que experimentó cuando pronunciaron la sentencia no fue una sensación de miedo sino de nostalgia.

(In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they announced the sentence was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.)

Monday, July 27, 2015

Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Donde quiera que la muerte nos sorprenda, bien venida sea.

(Where ever death may surprise us, it will be welcome.)

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

... Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiae, of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong) - no history, no tradition, no poetry - nothing that can give it even a passing interest.

Friday, July 24, 2015

C.Wright Mills

When little is known, or only trivial items publicized, or when myths prevail, then plain description becomes a radical fact - or at least is taken to be radically upsetting.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

... I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Victor Hugo, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"

Alas! The small things shall bring down the great things; a tooth triumphs over a whole carcass. The rat of the Nile destroys the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale; the book will kill the edifice.

Note: In the modern world one could continue: The atom will destroy humankind, or perhaps the germ.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Alexis de Tocqueville

There is a great difference between doing what one does not approve, and feigning to approve what one does; the one is the weakness of a feeble person, the other befits the temper of a lackey.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

John Paul Stevens

Money is property; it is not speech … Speech has the power to inspire volunteers to perform a multitude of tasks on a campaign trail, on a battleground, or even on a football field. Money, meanwhile, has the power to pay hired laborers to perform the same tasks. It does not follow, however, that the First Amendment provides the same measure of protection to the use of money to accomplish such goals as it provides to the use of ideas to achieve the same results.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Roger Ebert

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

This world ... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Thomas Jefferson, 1787

God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion... What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The First Circle"

One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

The stately language of the Bible refers to a crown of life whose luster will reflect the day beams of the endless ages of eternity, not the butterfly existence of a city built by men's hands, which must pass to dust with the builders and be forgotten even in the mere handful of centuries vouchsafed to the solid world itself between its cradle and its grave.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Winston Churchill, 1947

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Dante Alighieri

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "August 1914"

...it's a universal law - intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

John Steinbeck, "East of Eden"

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Monday, July 6, 2015

Blaise Pascal

I praise and prize only that writer who tells the truth about men - with tears in his eyes.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Thomas Jefferson

Legislators do not generally possess information enough to perceive the important truths, that knowledge is power, and knowledge is safety, and that knowledge is happiness.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Leonardo Da Vinci

Dimmi, dimmi se mai fu fatta cosa alcuna.

(Tell me, tell me if anything ever got done.)

Friday, July 3, 2015

Henry David Thoreau

It is not enough to be busy... The question is, what are we busy about?

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Thomas Jefferson

I believe, with the Quaker preacher, that he who steadfastly observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven, as to the dogmas in which they all differ.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Carl Sandburg

Offering and Rebuff

I could love you
as dry roots love rain.
I could hold you
as branches in the wind
brandish petals.
Forgive me for speaking so soon.