The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning,
and lo! now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

--H.D. Thoreau



Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make
mistakes. Always.

--Mahatma Gandhi



There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even
passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and
upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got
to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it,
to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be
prevented from working at all!

--Mario Savio on the steps of the administration building overlooking
Sproul Plaza on UC Berkeley campus



I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state. But I would prefer
that to their being educated by the state.

--Max Victor Belz, grain dealer, Grundy County, Iowa



There's a _hardness_ I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments
of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so
serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now. ...
I mean, nobody even has _hobbies_ these days. Not that I can see.
Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video
games. Nobody seems to be able to endure simply being by them_selves_,
either--but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more,
only to go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling
or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep.
I see these things. The whole world is only about work: _work work work
get get get_ ... racing ahead ... getting sacked from work ... going
online ... knowing computer languages ... winning contracts. I mean,
it's just _not_ what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd
asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate
about money, and at best, indifferent to the future."
	She grabs her breath. "So you ask me how do _I_ feel? I feel lazy.
And slow. And antique. And I'm scared of all these machines. I shouldn't
be, but I am. I'm not sure I _completely_ like the new world."
	Hamilton's jaws clench and Karen sees this. "I know--you want me to
say how great everything is now, but I can't. It's pretty clear to me
that life now isn't what it ought to have become."
	* * *
	"I think I know what you mean," Hamilton says. "If you look at the
world as a whole, we have to admit life's good here where we live. But
in an evil _Twilight Zone_ kind of way there's nothing _else_ to choose.
In the old days there was always a bohemia or a creative underworld
to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag--or a life of crime, or
even religion. And now there's only the _system_. All other options have
evaporated. For most people it's the System or what ... _death_? There's
nothing. There's no way out now."

--Douglas Coupland, _Girlfriend in a Coma_ (1998), pp. 154-155



Men do not fight against senselessness by demanding more of it, or
against horror by wallowing in it, or against rot by glorifying disease,
or against insanity by enshrining lunatics.

--Leonard Peikoff, _The Ominous Parallels_ (1993, c1982), p. 207



The belief that government schools are neutral on morality and religion
is extraordinarily naive. Once it becomes clear that government schools
indoctrinate captive students in the tenets and dogma of humanism
to the exclusion of all other religions, it also becomes clear that
the government itself is in the business of establishing a state-run,
religious monopoly. It is time for the total privatization of schools
and the building of a wall of separation between state and education.
 
--Linda Bowles, _The Federalist Brief_, August 29, 2000, No. 00-35



As far as the Bible is concerned, the function of transmitting truth and
educating the young belongs to the home and church... As with so many
other divine ordinances, however, man has sadly corrupted God's plan,
especially in these latter days, until finally the educational activities
of mankind--as formalized in vast systems of public education--have become
a chief instrument for turning man away from the truth...

--Morris, Henry M., _Christian Education for the Real World,_
(1991, 3rd Ed.) El Cajon, CA: Master Books, p. 23



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



It is difficult for a man to understand something when his income depends
upon him not understanding it.

--Upton Sinclair



Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found
state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure
implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

--Benjamin Disraeli, 1874



Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It
passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and
able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.

--Mohandas Gandhi



The road to wisdom?
Well it's plain
and simple to express:

Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

--Piet Hein (Danish poet); engraved on the entryway to Donald Knuth's home



The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

--Edwin Schlossberg



The average person today is about as naive 
as was the average person in the Middle Ages. 
In the Middle Ages people believed 
in the authority of their religion, no matter what.
Today, we believe in the authority of our science, 
no matter what.

--George Orwell



Nothing in the world can replace persistence. Talent will not; nothing
more common than the unsuccessful man with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is
full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination are omnipotent.

--Calvin Coolidge



Just as people used to ask me how much my Great Dane weighed and how much
he ate, people invariably ask about home schooling -- "How will the kids
be socialized?" When in turn I ask what it means to be socialized the
answers vary wildly, but everybody seems to agree that there's no better
way to get it done to you than to be tossed into a kind of semi-prison
environment with a whole lot of other persons born the same year you were.

--"School Is Out" by Denis Johnson, Oct. 1, 1997
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1997/10/01school2.html



A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give
orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently,
die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

--Robert Heinlein



No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law, and no courts are bound
to enforce it.

--16 Am Jur 2d, Sec 177 late 2d, Sec 256



Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict,
Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease."
Disraeli replied, "That all depends upon whether I embrace your principles
or your mistress."



Everything we do has moral significance, especially where we have the
power to affect the lives of others. What could be more categorically
moral or ethical, more fundamentally serious, than determining the nature
of how we live and how others live? Our power to both impact others
and to influence their own behavior and decisionmaking processes is what
obliges us to find a ground for our own inner and most intimately personal
life, that obliges us to explore the questions the spiritual paths explore
-- ultimate, penultimate, short-term, long-term, mundane, and immediate.

--Maynard S. Clark



As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty,
and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became
a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

--Matt Cartmill



People who relieve others of their money with guns are called
robbers. It does not alter the immorality of the act when the income
transfer is carried out by government.

--Cal Thomas (American columnist)



Liberals love to say things like, "We're just asking everyone to pay their
fair share." But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The
difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and
being raped, between working for a living and being a slave.

The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything.
It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don't pay.

--Thomas Sowell, Forbes, July 1994



One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one
is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested
in big things, and happy in small ways.

--Edith Wharton 



The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.

--John Hay, 1872



Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question,
"Is it politic?" Vanity asks the question, "Is it popular?" But conscience
asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must
take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular -- but
one must take it because it's right.

--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.



Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins,
in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The
world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.

--Thomas Henry Huxley



The best qualification of a prophet is to have a good memory.

--Lord Halifax



We need a fellow at the head who can stand the sound of a machine gun. The
rabble need to get fear into their pants. We can't use an officer,
because the people don't respect them any more. The best would be a
worker who knows how to talk.... He doesn't need much brains, because
politics is the stupidest business in the world, and every marketwoman
in Munich knows more than the people in Weimar. I'd rather have a vain
monkey who can give the Reds a juicy answer, and doesn't run away when
people begin swinging table legs, than a dozen learned professors. He
must be a bachelor, then we'll get the women.

--Dietrich Eckart, Nazi prophet, Brennessel Cabaret, Schwabing, Munich, 1919



I still think that a writer will find himself at a crossroads, probably
around the age of thirty-five. At least that's how I felt it. Your
first burst of writing necessarily draws on the things you've observed
and felt and understood in your youth. One day, however, this initial
burst drops off, runs out of steam, and you're faced with the question:
What now? How should I go on? And if you don't want simply to reproduce
mechanically the things you've already accomplished, you have to take a
basic step. But this is very hard to do, because you feel bound by what
you've already managed to understand so far, and what you've done. You
are bound, in a sense, by your own literary history, and you can't simply
slip out of that history and start again from the ground up. Moreover,
you've become a little more modest, you've learned a few things, you've
lost your literary virginity, as it were, with the wonderful arrogance,
self-confidence, the still-sharp ability to see that goes with it.

... But I'm still not entirely certain that I've really rediscovered
myself. I can't write the way I used to write when I was young: I'm
different, the times are different, and I'm interested in different
things. But I don't think I would go so far as to say that aesthetically,
for instance, I'm now walking on a new path. I'm still searching,
in fact--searching for that second wind. Who knows whether I'll ever
find it, or whether it can even be found. I mean, I don't know whether
all the other things I will eventually write will not remain anchored
forever in a feeling of merely searching for the lost certainty of youth--

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), pp. 61-62



In this miserable state of mind, I began to understand, toward the end
of my stay in prison, that a trap was being laid for me: a relatively
innocent turn of phrase--or so I thought at the time--in one of my
requests for release was to be published in a falsified version in
order to discredit me. I had no idea how to stop this from happening,
or how to defend myself against it. It was a very dark time for me, but
then odd things began to happen. If I remember correctly, instead of the
usual books, like _Far from Moscow_, I suddenly had delivered to my cell
Goethe's _Faust_, and then, right after that, _Doctor Faustus_ by Thomas
Mann. I had strange dreams and was haunted by strange ideas. I felt as
though I were being, in a very physical way, tempted by the devil. I
felt that I was in his clutches. I understood that I had somehow become
involved with him. The experience of having something misappropriated
in this way--something I had actually thought and written, something
that was true--clarified for me with fresh urgency that the truth is
not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which
it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 67



Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

--Bertrand Russell



The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should
serve the state is essentially a Communist notion ... In a free society
these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their
function is to serve as checks upon the state.

--Alan Barth



God in His infinite mercy has revealed to us a great truth. It is a
truth that, when understood by us, gives a new light to our existence
and inspires us with the most exalted hopes. That truth is that God is
our Father, and we are His children. What a tender relationship! What
a feeling of nearness it creates within us! What? God my Father? Am I
indeed His son? Am I indeed His daughter? Do I belong to the family of
God? Is this literally true? The answer is, 'Yes.' God has revealed it,
that we are literally His children, His offspring, that we are just as
much His children as our offspring are our children, that He begot us,
and that we existed with Him in the family relationship as His children.

What an immensity of vision is given to us in this truth! What a field
for reflection! And how our hearts should be inspired with great hopes
and anticipations to think that the Being under whose direction this
earth was organized, who governs the planets and controls the universe,
who causes the rotation of the seasons and makes this earth so beautiful
and such a delightful place of habitation, is our Father and that we are
His children, descended from Him! What illimitable hopes the knowledge
of this inspires us with!

Now, this is the truth. We humble people, we who feel ourselves
sometimes so worthless, so good-for-nothing, we are not so worthless as we
think. There is not one of us but what God's love has been expended upon.
There is not one of us that He has not cared for and caressed. There
is not one of us that He has not desired to save and that He has not
devised means to save. There is not one of us that He has not given His
angels charge concerning. We may be insignificant and contemptible in
our own eyes and in the eyes of others, but the truth remains that we
are the children of God and that He has actually given His angels --
invisible beings of power and might -- charge concerning us, and they
watch over us and have us in their keeping.

--George Q. Cannon, _Gospel Truth_, 1:1-2



Suddenly I realized that, regardless of how many vulgar words these people
used or how long their hair was, truth was on their side. Somewhere in the
midst of this group, their attitudes, and their creations, I sensed a special
purity, a shame, and a vulnerability; in their music was an experience of
metaphysical sorrow and a longing for salvation. It seemed to me that this
underground of Jirous' was an attempt to give hope to those who had been most
excluded.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 127, about the rock band
"The Plastic People of the Universe"



I don't think it hurts occasionally to remind people who live in
totalitarian states, subtly perhaps, that they might also do something
about their own domestic totalitarianism, instead of just running
away from it. If I demand that Westerners not think merely of their own
particular interests and that they behave as all of us should behave--that
is, as though we were immediately responsible for the fate of the whole of
society--then I see no reason why I shouldn't demand the same of people
living in totalitarian countries. This may sound harsh, and in fact I
don't think in such harsh terms myself, but unfortunately, when I heard
your question, I began to see in my mind's eye all those familiar people
whose spines are bent, who are cautious, who inconspicuously support
and create totalitarianism and then, on their very first trip abroad,
suddenly decide that they'd rather live in a country where the living is
easier, and they immediately demand the rights and glory due to political
refugees. Why is it that over there in the West they see all these rights
as a natural responsibility of government, whereas when they were here
they contributed in all sorts of ways to a state in which individuals
have no rights at all?
 
--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 169-170



A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to
be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is
that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be
a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in
proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism
over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body. ...
An education established and controlled by the state should only exist,
if it exists at all, as one among many competing experiments.

--John Stuart Mill



[E]ven a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible
political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political
significance.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_, p. 115



For isn't it characteristic that the miserable historical events we are
condemned to live through, in which we try to do our best at a cost that is
all but incomprehensible elsewhere, are organically wedded here to our
traditional sense of irony and self-deprecation, to our sense of the absurd,
to our own free or black sense of humor? Don't these two things somehow belong
essentially together? Don't they condition each other? Isn't it entirely
possible that we would not be able to carry out our historic role and make the
sacrifices that are required of us if we could not maintain this constant
distance from them and from ourselves? So not only does the one not exclude
the other, it's as if each pole made the other one possible!
    Foreigners are sometimes amazed at the suffering that we are willing to
undergo here, and at the same time they are amazed at the things we are
still able to laugh at. It's difficult to explain, but without the
laughter we would simply be unable to do the serious things. If one were
required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to
the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly
petrify and become his own statue. And such a statue could scarcely write
another historical manifesto or be equal to any human task! If you don't want
to dissolve in your own seriousness to the point where you become ridiculous
to everyone, you must have a healthy awareness of your own human
ridiculousness and nothingness. As a matter of fact, the more serious what you
are doing is, the more important it becomes not to lose this awareness. If you
lose this, your own actions--paradoxically--lose their own seriousness. A
human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of
a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything
human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an
action. The outlines of genuine meaning can only be perceived from the bottom
of absurdity. Everything else is superficial ...

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_, p. 112-113



The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against
arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which
now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be
always possible.

--Hubert Humphrey, U.S. Vice President (1964-1968)



[S]ociety is a very mysterious animal with many faces and hidden
potentialities, and ... it's extremely shortsighted to believe that the face
society happens to be presenting to you at a given moment is its only true
face. None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the
population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when
there is the right interplay of events, both visible and invisible. Who would
have believed ... that half a year later [this] same society would display a
genuine civic-mindedness, and that a year later this recently apathetic,
skeptical, and demoralized society would stand up with such courage and
intelligence to a foreign power! And who would have suspected that, after
scarcely a year had gone by, this same society would, as swiftly as the wind
blows, lapse back into a state of demoralization far deeper than its original
one! After all these experiences, one must be very careful about coming to any
conclusions about the way we are, or what can be expected of us.
    Something else: that week showed how helpless military power is when
confronted by an opponent unlike any that power has been trained to confront;
it showed how hard it is to govern a country in which, though it may not
defend itself militarily, all the civil structures simply turn their backs on
the aggressors.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 109



[I]nstead of suggesting something that no one could ever hope to carry off, it
would be better to attempt something possible, something within our power ...
[I]t was a thousand times more valuable to insist, regardless of the
consequences, on something more modest but realistic, than to pacify one's
conscience by firing off loudmouthed proposals that evaporate forever the
moment they're made and therefore commit no one to do anything about them.
Histrionic emotions expressed through proposals like that are extremely
unreliable: they may be grand today, but the resignation felt tomorrow can be
equally as great ... Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic
emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little
difficulty, to something different each day.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 111



The letter [an open letter to President Husak], on the primary level, was a
kind of autotherapy: I had no idea what would happen next, but it was worth
the risk. I regained my balance and my self-confidence. I felt I could stand
up straight again, and that no one could accuse me any longer of not doing
anything, of just looking on in silence at the miserable state of affairs. I
could breathe more easily because I had not tried to stifle the truth inside
me. I had stopped waiting for the world to improve and exercised my right to
intervene in that world, or at least to express my opinion about it.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 123



Or take the rapid awakening and spread of religious feeling among young
people, illustrated, for example, by the pilgrimmage in Velehrad. This is not
an accidental phenomenon; it is an inevitable one: the endless, unchanging
wasteland of the herd life in a socialist consumer society, its intellectual
and spiritual vacuity, its moral sterility, necessarily causes young people to
turn their attentions somewhere further and higher; it compels them to ask
questions about the meaning of life, to look for a more meaningful system of
values and standards, to seek, among the diffuse and fragmented world of
frenzied consumerism (where goods are hard to come by) for a point that will
hold firm--all this awakens in them a longing for a genuine moral "vanishing
point," for something purer and more authentic. These people simply long to
step outside the general automatic operations of society and rediscover their
natural world and discover hope for this world. Against the "eschatology of
the impersonal" they simply place another eschatology.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), pp. 184-185



In the beginning are precise rules or conventions. It is only after these are
established that the process of gradually overturning and undermining them can
begin, of travestying and disrupting them, and disrupting their disruption,
their abuse. I have always claimed that, where everything is permitted,
nothing can surprise. Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might
have--by disrupting that order--a way of surprising.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), pp. 196-197



The role of theatre, as I understand it and as I have tried to practice it, is
not to make people's lives easier by presenting positive heroes into which
they can project all their hopes, and then sending them home with the feeling
that these heroes will take care of things for them. To my mind, that would be
doing the lion's share of the work. I've already talked about how each of us
must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can't delegate that to
anyone else.
    My ambition is not to soothe the viewer with a merciful lie or cheer him
up with a false offer to sort things out for him. I wouldn't be helping him
very much if I did. I'm trying to do something else: to propel him, in the
most drastic possible way, into the depths of a question he should not, and
cannot, avoid asking; to stick his nose into his own misery, into my misery,
into our common misery, by way of reminding him that the time has come to do
something about it. The only ways out, the only solutions, the only hopes that
are worth anything are the ones we discover ourselves, within ourselves, and
for ourselves. Perhaps with God's help. But theatre does not mediate that kind
of help; it is not a church. Theatre ought to be--with God's help--theatre.
And one way of helping people is by reminding them that the time is getting
late, that the situation is grave, that it can't be ignored. Seeing the
outlines of horror induces the will to face up to it. ... Face to face with a
distillation of evil, man might well recognize what is good. By showing good
on the stage, we ultimately rob him of the possibility of making such a
recognition himself--as his own existential act.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 199



I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about
(especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I
understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we
have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not
essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate
of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the
spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is
immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I
don't think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some
movement, or of some favorable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest
roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility
are, though of course I can't--unlike Christians, for instance--say anything
concrete about the transcendental. An individual may affirm or deny that his
hope is so rooted, but this does nothing to change my conviction (which is
more than just a conviction; it's an inner experience). The most convinced
materialist and atheist may have more of this genuine, transcendentally rooted
inner hope (this is my view, not his) than ten metaphysicians together.
    Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things
are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously
headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something
because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more
unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope
is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the
conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something
makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the
deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above
water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking
dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it
were, from "elsewhere." It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the
strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that
seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), pp. 181-182



Isn't the reward of all those small but hopeful signs of movement this deep,
inner hope that is not dependent on prognoses, and which was the primordial
point of departure in this unequal struggle? Would so many of those small
hopes have "come out" if there had not been this great hope "within," this
hope without which it is impossible to live in dignity and meaning, much less
find the will for the "hopeless enterprise" which stands at the beginning of
most good things?

--Vaclav Havel, _Disturbing the Peace_ (1990), p. 186



I would rather have my child exposed to smallpox, typhus fever, cholera,
or other malignant and deadly diseases than to the degrading influence
of a corrupt teacher. It is infinitely better to take chances with an
ignorant, but pure-minded teacher than with the greatest philosopher
who is impure.

--Karl G. Maeser



We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open
to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.

--William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1966



There are two kinds of people in this world: Those that enter a room
and turn the television set on, and those that enter a room and turn
the television set off.

--Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), "The Manchurian Candidate"
(United Artists; 1962)



Practitioners of the disciplines we study object to our work on the
grounds that we don't have enough training in their disciplines to
criticize their knowledge claims. But can vigorous skepticism, which
courts and philosophers agree should characterize a science, be achieved
by a discipline's practitioners alone?

--Simon Cole, "The Myth of Fingerprints: A forensic science stands trial,"
Lingua Franca vol. 10 no. 8 (Nov. 2000),
http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0011/feature_fingerprints.html



Would you want doctors? Yes, to set bones. We should want a good surgeon
for that, or to cut off a limb. But do you want doctors? For not much
of anything else, let me tell you, only the traditions of the people
lead them to think so; and here is a growing evil in our midst. It will
be so in a little time that not a woman in all Israel will dare to have
a baby unless she can have a doctor by her. I will tell you what to do,
you ladies, when you find you are going to have an increase, go off into
some country where you cannot call for a doctor, and see if you can keep
it. I guess you will have it, and I guess it will be all right, too. Now
the cry is, "Send for a doctor." If you have a pain in the head, "Send
for a doctor;" if your heel aches, "I want a doctor;" "my back aches,
and I want a doctor." The study and practice of anatomy and surgery
are very good; they are mechanical, and are frequently needed. Do you
not think it is necessary to give medicine sometimes? Yes, but I would
rather have a wife of mine that knows what medicine to give me when I am
sick, than all the professional doctors in the world. Now let me tell you
about doctoring, because I am acquainted with it, and know just exactly
what constitutes a good doctor in physic. It is that man or woman who,
by revelation, or we may call it intuitive inspiration, is capable of
administering medicine to assist the human system when it is besieged
by the enemy called Disease; but if they have not that manifestation,
they had better let the sick person alone. I will tell you why: I can
see the faces of this congregation, but I do not see two alike; and if I
could look into your nervous systems and behold the operations of disease,
from the crowns of your heads to the soles of your feet, I should behold
the same difference that I see in your physiognomy-there would be no two
precisely alike. Doctors make experiments, and if they find a medicine
that will have the desired effect on one person, they set it down that
it is good for everybody, but it is not so, for upon the second person
that medicine is administered to, seemingly with the same disease,
it might produce death. If you do not know this, you have not had the
experience that I have. I say that unless a man or woman who administers
medicine to assist the human system to overcome disease, understands,
and has that intuitive knowledge, by the Spirit, that such an article
is good for that individual at that very time, they had better let
him alone. Let the sick do without eating, take a little of something
to cleanse the stomach, bowels and blood, and wait patiently, and let
Nature have time to gain the advantage over the disease. Suppose, for
illustration, we draw a line through this congregation, and place those
on this side where they cannot get a doctor, without it is a surgeon,
for thirty or fifty years to come; and put the other side in a country
full of doctors, and they think they ought to have them, and this side
of the house that has no doctor will be able to buy the inheritance of
those who have doctors, and overrun them, outreach them, and buy them up,
and finally obliterate them, and they will be lost in the masses of those
who have no doctors. I know what some say when they look at such things,
but that is the fact. Ladies and gentlemen, you may take any country
in the world, I do not care where you go, and if they do not employ
doctors, you will find they will beat communities that employ them,
all the time. Who is the real doctor? That man who knows by the Spirit
of revelation what ails an individual, and by the same Spirit knows what
medicine to administer. That is the real doctor, the others are quacks.

--Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Volume 15, pp. 225-226



In art and dream, may you proceed with abandon.
In life, may you proceed with balance and stealth.

--Patti Smith



Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank Thee for this place in
which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us
this day; for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health,
the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful;
for our friends in all parts of the earth.... Give us courage, gaiety, and
the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless
us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not be, give
us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in
peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of
fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.

--Robert Louis Stevenson



Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

--Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack



The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them
against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from
our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger
and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with
care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the
present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to
be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of
them by the artifices of false and designing men.

--Samuel Adams (1722-1803), American Revolutionary Leader



There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
It is 'dead'.

--Jack Cohen



If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your
life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

--Rene Descartes (1596-1650)



When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain,
the British parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor
of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people, that it was the best and most
effectual way to enslave them, but that they should not do it openly
but just weaken them and let them sink gradually.

--George Mason, 1788, in an address to Congress



He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression.

--Thomas Paine, 1795



First and foremost, you can never afford to forget for one moment what
is the object of our forest policy. That object is not to preserve the
forests because they are beautiful, though that is good in and of itself,
nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness,
though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our
forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States of America,
is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional
policy of home-making of our country. Every other consideration comes as
secondary. The whole effort of the government in dealing with the forests
must be directed to this end, keeping in view the fact that it is not
only necessary to start the homes as prosperous but to keep them so.

* * *

Your attention must be directed to the preservation of the forests not,
as an end in and of itself, but as a means of preserving and increasing
the prosperity of this Nation. Forestry is the preservation of forests
by wise use of the forests.

--Theodore Roosevelt, 1903, in a speech to the American Society of Foresters



To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving the
peace.

--George Washington



I am only one man, but I AM one man. I can't do everything, but I can
do SOMETHING. And what I can do, I ought to do. And what I ought to do,
by the Grace of God, I WILL DO!

--Edward Everett Hale



On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there is spirit in a
person and is the measure of what spirit there is.

--Søren Kierkegaard



But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for
whatsoever doth make manifest is light.

--Ephesians 5:13 (KJV)



[F]or I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I
know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all
things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to
suffer need.
    I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

--Philippians 4:11-13 (KJV)



During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a
revolutionary act.

--George Orwell



Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in
the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the
fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could of natural right,
be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one
thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the
action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may
exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment
it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and
the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character,
too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses
the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction
himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,
receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from
one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of
man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly
and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point,
and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being,
incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

--Thomas Jefferson, in an 1813 letter to Isaac MacPherson



Hackers do not feel that leisure time is automatically any more
meaningful than work time. The desirability of both depends on how they
are realized. From the point of a view of a meaningful life, the entire
work/leisure duality must be abandoned. As long as we are living our work
or our leisure, we are not even truly living. Meaning cannot be found
in work or leisure but has to arise out of the nature of the activity
itself. Out of passion. Social value. Creativity.

--Pekka Himanen, in _The Hacker Ethic_



We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly
depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that
almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription
for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later
this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in
our faces.

--Carl Sagan



It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey
to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man
is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once
the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
 
--John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election (1790)



A man of words and not of deeds,
Is like a garden full of weeds.

--old poem quoted by Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jane Mecom, Sept. 16,
1758



It seems, then, that happiness in this life rather depends on internals
than externals; and that, besides the natural effects of wisdom and
virtue, vice and folly, there is such a thing as being of a happy or an
unhappy constitution.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Hugh Roberts, Sept. 16, 1758



Conversation warms the mind, enlivens the imagination, and is continually
starting fresh game that is immediately pursu'd and taken and which would
never have occur'd in the duller intercourse of epistolary correspondence.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Lord Kames, Jan. 3, 1760



There is, however, a prudent moderation to be used in studies of this
kind. The knowledge of nature may be ornamental, and it may be useful, but
if to attain an eminence in that, we neglect the knowledge and practice
of essential duties, we deserve reprehension. For there is no rank in
natural knowledge of equal dignity and importance with that of being a
good parent, a good child, a good husband, or wife, a good neighbour or
friend, a good subject or citizen, that is, in short, a good Christian.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Mary Stevenson, June 11, 1760



Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments;
if we can get rid of the former we may easily bear the latter.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Charles Thomson, July 11, 1765



As to the reports you mention that are spread to my disadvantage, I
give myself as little concern about them as possible. I have often met
with such treatment from people that I was all the while endeavouring to
serve. At other times I have been extoll'd extravagantly when I have had
little or no merit. These are the operations of nature. It sometimes is
cloudy, it rains, it hails; again 'tis clear and pleasant, and the sun
shines on us. Take one thing with another, and the world is a pretty
good sort of a world; and 'tis our duty to make the best of it and be
thankful. One's true happiness depends more upon one's own judgement of
one's self, on a consciousness of rectitude in action and intention,
and in the approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon
the applause of the unthinking undiscerning multitude, who are apt to
cry hosanna today, and tomorrow, crucify him.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jane Mecom, March 1, 1766



Dunces often write satires on themselves, when they think all the while
that they are mocking their neighbours. Let us, as we ever have done,
uniformly endeavour the service of our country, according to the best
of our judgment and abilities, and time will do us justice. Dirt thrown
on a mud-wall may stick and incorporate; but it will not long adhere to
polish'd marble.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Joseph Galloway, November 8, 1766



[Referring to a person who never marries:] An odd volume of a set of
books, you know, is not worth its proportion of the set; and what think
you of the usefulness of an odd half of a pair of scissors? It cannot
well cut any thing.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to John Alleyne, August 9, 1768



God governs; and he is _good_. I pray him to direct you: And indeed
you will never be without his direction, if you humbly ask it, and show
yourself always ready to obey it.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Mary Stevenson, October 28, 1768



It is the persisting in an error, not the correcting it that lessens
the honour of any man or body of men.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to William Strahan, November 29, 1769



I thought it should not be expected of me, to change my political opinions
every time his Majesty thought fit to change his ministers. ... My rule
in which I have always found satisfaction, is, never to turn aside in
public affairs through views of private interest; but to go straight
forward in doing what appears to me right at the time, leaving the
consequences with Providence.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jane Mecom, December 30, 1770 (spelling
modernized)



Upon he whole I am much disposed to like the world as I find it, and to
doubt my own judgment as to what would mend it. I see so much wisdom in
what I understand of its creation and government, that I suspect equal
wisdom may be in what I do not understand. And thence have perhaps as
much trust in God as the most pious Christian.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jane Mecom, July 17, 1771



We get away with nothing. We cannot escape the repercussions of our
actions, however subtle they may be. We cannot get away from ourselves. We
cannot get away from the world we live in. Our decisions, our choices
which underlie our actions & give rise to them, create the world we
inhabit.

--Robert Fripp



All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.

--Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted in _The Conspiracy of Catiline_, by Sallust



One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the mind,
and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God.

--J. Gustav White



It is a serious thing, to live in a society of possible gods and
goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person
you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you
would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption
such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long
we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these
destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities,
it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should
conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves,
all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never
talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations --
these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But
it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit
-- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that
we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must
be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists
between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously --
no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a
real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which
we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies
love as flippancy parodies merriment.

--C.S. Lewis, from _The Weight of Glory_



There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it
reluctantly.

--Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)



Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their
hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt,
without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only
in the God idea, not God Himself.

--Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish philosopher and writer



I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the sentiments
of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbade myself
the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed
opinion, such as "certainly", "undoubtedly", etc. I adopted instead of
them "I conceive", "I apprehend", or "I imagine" a thing to be so or so;
or "so it appears to me at present".

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself
the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing him immediately
some absurdity in his proposition. In answering I began by observing
that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but
in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some difference, etc.

I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations
I engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed
my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction.
I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more
easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me
when I happened to be in the right.

--Benjamin Franklin, autobiography



And do not say, I will study when I have leisure; for perhaps you will
not have leisure.

--Pirke Avot 2:5



Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a
law against it by that time.

--unknown



In describing his invention, the "Franklin" stove, Benjamin Franklin wrote:

"Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove,
as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole
vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it from a principle
which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy
great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an
opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should
do freely and generously."

--Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part VI



Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed
to be doing at the moment.

--Robert Benchley



A novice asked the master: "In the east there is a great tree-structure
that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with
vice-presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying
'Go, Hence!' or 'Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new
names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an
unnatural entity exist?"

The master replies: "You perceive this immense structure and are
disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from
its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming
beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"

--Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"



There is a life of tradition that does not merely consist of conservative
preservation, the constant continuation of the spiritual and cultural
possessions of a community. There is such a thing as a treasure hunt
within tradition, which creates a living relationship to tradition and
to which much of what is best in current Jewish consciousness is indebted
even where it was-and is-expressed outside the framework of orthodoxy.

--Gershom Scholem



The perfect mystic is not an ecstatic devotee lost in contemplation of
Oneness, nor a saintly recluse shunning all commerce with mankind, but
"the true saint" goes in and out amongst the people and eats and sleeps
with them and buys and sells in the market and marries and takes part
in social intercourse, and never forgets God for a single moment.

--Abu Sa`id Ibn Abi-L-Khayr



The time was the 19th of May, 1780. The place was Hartford,
Connecticut. The day has gone down in New England history as a terrible
foretaste of Judgement Day. For at noon the skies turned from blue to
grey and by mid-afternoon had blackened over so densely that, in that
religious age, men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing
before the end came. The Connecticut House of Representatives was in
session. And, as some of the men fell down and others clamored for an
immediate adjournment, the Speaker of the House, one Col. Davenport,
came to his feet. He silenced them and said these words: "The day of
judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no
cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I
wish therefore that candles may be brought."

--Alistair Cooke



The big thieves hang the little ones.

--Czech proverb



Furthermore, in spite of modern efficiency and resource substitution, the
per capita use of resources is extravagant and still growing to the point
where it is more accurate to say that we are living in a hyperindustrial
rather than a postindustrial age. Though they may use very little energy
while on the job [certainly not the case --JCJ], white-collar workers
who drive automobiles in long commutes use more energy getting to and
from work than their nineteenth-century counterparts used in order
to get the job done. One need only add to this the enormous resources
that are used for endless conferences and conventions attended by great
numbers of privileged bureaucrats, consultants and academics, so many of
which serve only as paid mini-vacations for those attending and produce,
for all the energy entailed, far less intellectual payoff than a good
correspondence or reading a good book, and the picture of the resource
profligacy of the so-called post-industrial world is complete.

--Max Dublin, _Futurehype_ (1992)



[Tolstoy] asked not, What does the future hold in store for us? but,
What shall we do and how shall we live?

--Max Dublin, _Futurehype_ (1992)



... all the good computer designs are bootlegged; the formally planned
products, if they are built at all, are dogs!

--David E. Lundstrom, _A Few Good Men From Univac_, MIT Press, 1987



The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity.

--Friedrich Nietzsche



One of the main reasons wealth makes people unhappy is that it gives them
too much control over what they experience.

--Philip Slater



An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because
people refuse to see it.

--James Michener, _Space_



Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither
inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

--Thomas Jefferson



DISCLAIMER:
Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement
of Western industrial civilization.

--author unknown; from /usr/games/fortune on Unix



I hope that every married man has said to himself, "I will be more kind
and generous toward my companion and children. I will control my temper."
I hope that kindness will replace harshness in our conversations one with
another.

I hope that every wife will look to her husband as her dear companion,
the star of her life, her supporter, her protector, her companion with
whom she walks hand in hand "equally yoked." I hope that she will look
to her children as sons and daughters of God, the most significant
contribution she has made to the world, her greatest concern with regard
to their achievements, and more precious than any other thing she has or
could hope for.

I hope that boys and girls will leave this conference with a greater
appreciation for their parents, with more fervent love in their hearts for
those who have brought them into the world, for those who love them most
and are most anxious concerning them.

I hope that the noise of our homes will drop a few decibels, that we will
subdue our voices and speak to one another with greater appreciation and
respect.

--Gordon B. Hinckley, "Till We Meet Again," Ensign, Nov. 2001, 89-90



There are two ways to slice through life; to believe everything or to doubt 
everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

--Alfred Korzybski, Polish-American linguist (1879-1950)



If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about
it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

--Carlyle



If any of us are imperfect, it is our duty to pray for the gift that will
make us perfect. . . . No man ought to say, "Oh, I cannot help this;
it is my nature." He is not justified in it, for the reason that God
has promised to give strength to correct these things, and to give gifts
that will eradicate them. If a man lacks wisdom, it is his duty to ask
God for wisdom. The same with everything else. That is the design of God
concerning His Church. He wants His Saints to be perfected in the truth.
For this purpose He gives these gifts, and bestows them upon those who
seek after them, in order that they may be a perfect people upon the
face of the earth.

--George Q. Cannon, Millennial Star, Apr. 1894, p. 260



XXX



The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing
evil, it multiplies it ... Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder the hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate
... returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper
darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out
hate; only love can do that.

--Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.



We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful
new world. We will see it when we believe it.

--Saul Alinsky



Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as
artificial flowers have to flowers.

--David Parnas



Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones,
as the wind blows out candles and fans fires.

--La Rochefoucauld



The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty
is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a
saving hand while yet there was time.

--George Sutherland, 1862-1942 US Supreme Court Justice



The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense
that high aims are worth-while. Vigorous societies harbor a certain
extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision
of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal,
the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such
an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth-while.

--Alfred North Whitehead, 1963, in _The History of Manned Space Flight_



We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not
necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want
to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on
the disposition to crave knowledge.

--George Will



Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not
imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate.

--William Arthur Ward



Don't spend your precious time asking, "Why isn't the world a better
place?" It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is, "How can
I make it better?" To that there is an answer.

--Leo Buscaglia



Sometimes we feel that the busier we are, the more important we are--as
though our busyness defines our worth. Brothers and sisters, we can spend a
lifetime whirling about at a feverish pace, checking off list after list of
things that in the end really don't matter.

That we do a lot may not be so important. That we focus the energy of our
minds, our hearts, and our souls on those things of eternal significance--
that is essential.

As the clatter and clamor of life bustle about us, we hear shouting to
'come here' and to 'go there.' In the midst of the noise and seductive
voices that compete for our time and interest, a solitary figure stands on
the shores of the Sea of Galilee, calling quietly to us, 'Follow me.'

--Joseph B. Wirthlin, "'Follow Me,'" Ensign, May 2002, 16



If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation
should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of
criminal acts reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so
after a century and a half of trying -- that they must sweep under the
rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the
northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both
Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 -- establishes the repeated,
complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime.

--Orrin Hatch, Utah senator, in a 1982 Senate Report



XXX



From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.
That is the point that must be reached.

--Franz Kafka



There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity.

--Douglas MacArthur



Explaining why an accusation is wrong is always harder than generating one.

--Mike Haire



It is not man who pursues truth, but truth man.

--Shestov



It has long been noticed that juries are pitiless for robbery and full
of indulgence for infanticide. A question of interest, my dear Sir! The
jury is afraid of being robbed and has passed the age when it could be
a victim of infanticide.

--Edmond About



Sensible people agree: A day spent without the thought of death is a
wasted day. The sight of a gravestone, weighty not only in its granite,
allows us perspective on problems as pressing as burnt toast, taxes,
and headcolds.

--Donald Hall



111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321



Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is
the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

--William Pitt, 1783



[A]s a matter of history [philosophy] fails to prove its pretension
to be "objectively" convincing. ... It does not banish differences; it
founds schools and sects just as feeling does. The logical reason of man
operates, in short, in this field of divinity exactly as it has always
operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the
wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions
fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our conviction,
for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith,
and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever
engenders it; it cannot now secure it.

--William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human
Nature_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 344-45.



[O]ne of the lessons of maturity: that sometimes, like Shakespeare's
sonnets, rigid forms produce unexpected creativity.

--Peggy Fletcher Stack, "Mission Accomplished", The Salt Lake Tribune,
Saturday, December 14, 2002.



Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

--Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)



The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate
knowledge of its ugly side.

--James Baldwin



If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is
only owned & not shared.

--St. Augustine



It is moral weakness, rather than villainy, that accounts for most of
the evil in the universe -- and feeble-hearted allies, far rather than
your most powerful enemies, who are likeliest to do you an injury you
cannot recover from.

--Bretta Martyn



UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that
would also stop you from doing clever things.

--Doug Gwyn



Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

--A.J. Liebling



There seems no plan because it is all plan.

--C.S. Lewis



Emigrants arriving pay no Fine or Premium for being admitted to all the
Privileges of Citizens. Those are acquired by two Years Residence.
    No Rewards are given to encourage new Settlers to come among us,
whatever degree of Property they may bring with them, nor any Exemptions
from common Duties. Our Country offers to Strangers nothing but a good
Climate, fertile Soil, wholesome Air, Free Governments, wise Laws, Liberty,
a good People to live among, and a hearty Welcome. Those Europeans who have
these or greater Advantages at home, would do well to stay where they are.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter, January 1784?



But after all, my dear Friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to
ascribe our Success to any superiority in any of those Points. I am too
well acquainted with all the Springs and Levers of our Machine, not to
see, that our human means were unequal to our undertaking, and that,
if it had not been for the Justice of our Cause, and the consequent
Interposition of Providence, in which we had Faith, we must have been
ruined. If I had ever before been an Atheist, I should now have been
convinced of the Being and Government of a Deity! It is he who abases
the Proud and favours the Humble. May we never forget his Goodness to us,
and may our future Conduct manifest our Gratitude.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to William Strahan, Aug. 19, 1784



The shifts of Fortune test the reliability of friends.

--Marcus Tullius Cicero



[K.] hatte neuerdings unter anderem Unerfreulichem eine gewisse
Wehleidigkeit an sich festgestellt, ein fast haltloses Bestreben allen
seinen Wünschen nachzugeben -- nun, in diesem Fall diente diese Untugend
wenigstens einem guten Zweck.

--Franz Kafka, _Der Proceß_



The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by mean of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding.

--Justice Louis O. Brandeis (Olmstead vs. United States)



Law stands mute in the midst of arms.

--Marcus Tullius Cicero



Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial
technology ... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain
the world's democracies, not the world as a whole.

--K. Eric Drexler



Writing, in my experience, consists of long periods of hanging out,
punctuated by the fugue of remorse at the loss of one's powers and wonder
at occasional output in spite of that loss.

--David Mamet, "The Diner", in _Make-Believe Town_ (1996), p. 80



Just as the history of religion is the fight against the people's wish to
reinstitute idolatry, and as our republic's history is the fight against
the masses' wish to lay down the burden of representative democracy
and cough up a king, so, finally, in entertainment we see ourselves,
the audience, clamoring for a repeal of the laws of dramaturgy and a
reversion to entertainment as pure titillation.

--David Mamet, "The Screenplay", in _Make-Believe Town_ (1996), p. 125



We see the prejudices only of times gone by, and even then, only of
others, revealed to us, perhaps, to make us thankful we have none of
our own.

--David Mamet, "It's Necessary for the Scene", in _Make-Believe Town_
(1996), p. 133



We have confounded the right of Universal Expression with the notion
that everyone, therefore, must have something to say.
	That a play is on an Important Topic does not mean that it is a good
play. ...
	That the artist need not have skill, and the performance need not have
meaning, that the audience need not have pleasure, these freedoms produce
and will produce interesting aberrations as Society gropes its way back
to the men and beasts in the Arena.

--David Mamet, "Art as a Helping Profession", in _Make-Believe Town_
(1996), p. 153



"Gutmenschen" versus "Kriegstreiber": dieser reflexhafte Streit 
verabschiedet jede ernsthafte Diskussion, bevor sie überhaupt begonnen 
hat.
	* * *
	Eine Frage allerdings stellen sich deutsche Intellektuelle
praktisch nie: Ob die Ereignisse am Ende womöglich doch anders verlaufen
könnten als sie prophezeit haben, ob aus dem gegenwärtigen Unheil
vielleicht doch noch etwas Gutes und Zukunftsträchtiges erwachsen könnte,
ob es also, wie die Zürcher "Weltwoche" formulierte, etwas Drittes gäbe
zwischen "realitätsblinder Moral und moralvergessener Realpolitik".

--Reinhard Mohr, "Die Alten sagen 'Dresden', die Jungen sagen 'Öl'",
Spiegel Online, 29. März 2003



The land of Egypt was the center of ancient culture, famed for its
pyramids, art, and wise men. But for the Israelites it was nothing more
than "the house of bondage." According to [Benno] Jacob's interpretation,
those words are intended to convey that "if a land of culture has no
room for freedom, then the servant of God renounces [such] culture."
	Thus, the reason the Torah places such emphasis on Egypt being a
"house of bondage" is because later generations are apt to look
back on such ancient Egyptian accomplishments as the building of the
pyramids without taking into account the moral price paid for those
accomplishments: the thousands of slaves who were worked to death in
erecting those architectural marvels. This verse reminds us that Egypt's
massive artistic achievements were built on human slavery and misery.

--Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in _Biblical Literacy_ (1997), summarizing
Nehama Leibowitz summarizing Benno Jacob



Violence stinks, no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then
there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with
a frying pan. Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and
if we weaken for a moment and honor their request, we should regard it
as impulsive philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford,
but shouldn't regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed.

--Tom Robbins



No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts
or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle
of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the
plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding
vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have
grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every
stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with
every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which
we are certain to misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes
mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an
explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible
-- by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always
can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. The
man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic.

--G. K. Chesterton, _William Blake_. London: Duckworth and Co. 131



It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from
falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the
Government from falling into error.

--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954)



We have to be careful what we desire, for the Lord grants us the desires
of our heart.

--Gerald N. Lund, "The Opportunity to Serve," Ensign, May 2002, 85



He who bestows knowledge on the ignorant wastes it,
And he who withholds it from the worthy has done them wrong.

--attributed to Jesus Christ, by Al-Ghazali (1058-1111); _The Niche
of Lights_, Author's Introduction p. 3, tr. David Buchman, 1998



One who considers the realities of these words may become bewildered by
the multiplicity of the words and imagine many meanings. But one to whom
the realities are unveiled will make the meaning a root and the words
a follower. This situation is reversed in the weak, since they search
for the realities from the words.

--Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), _The Niche of Lights_, 2:5, tr. David Buchman,
1998



If some of those who learn from the prophets do so through sheer imitation
of what they hear, while others have a share of insight, the similitude
of the portion of those who imitate is "a report", while the similitude
of the portion of the insightful is "a live coal", "a burning brand",
and "a flame", since the possessor of tasting shares with the prophets
in some states. The similitude of this sharing is "warming oneself",
since only the person who has a fire can warm himself, not the person
who hears a report about fire.

--Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), _The Niche of Lights_, 2:24, tr. David Buchman,
1998



Do not despise one who possesses knowledge which God has bestowed upon
him, because God did not despise him when He bestowed it.

--hadith found in al-Ghazali, _Ihya_, 1:33, 147



Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt.

--Reinhold Niebuhr



Without love intelligence is dangerous;
without intelligence love is not enough.

--Ashley Montagu



Parents cannot give to their children that which they do not possess.

--Delbert L. Stapley, LDS General Conference, April 6, 1971



If there is any one thing that will bring peace and contentment into
the human heart, and into the family, it is to live within our means.

--Heber J. Grant, Relief Society Magazine, May 1932, 302



When we face seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the fulfillment of
righteous responsibilities, we should remember that when we are involved
in the work of the Lord, the obstacles before us are never as great as
the power behind us. We should reach out and climb. Handholds will only
be found by hands that are outstretched. Footholds are only for feet
that are on the move.

--Dallin H. Oaks, "Reach Out and Climb!" New Era, Aug. 1985, 4



The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.

--George Bernard Shaw



Love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be
manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God. A man filled
with the love of God is not content with blessing his family alone,
but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race.

--Joseph Smith, _History of the Church_, 4:227



No one should deny the importance of circumstances, yet in the final
analysis the most important thing is how we react to the circumstances. It
is a tenet of my faith that every normal person has the capacity, with
God's help, to meet the challenge of whatever circumstances may confront
him. One of the most comforting scriptures carries the message that God
will not leave us helpless--ever. (1 Cor. 10:13.)

--Spencer W. Kimball, "Decisions: Why It's Important to Make Some Now,"
New Era, Apr. 1971, 2



The Lord can do remarkable miracles with a person of ordinary ability who
is humble, faithful, and diligent in serving the Lord and who seeks to
improve himself.

--James E. Faust, "On the Edge," New Era, Feb. 1997, 8



When confronted with a decision ask yourself, "How many choices do I have?"
If your choices are numerous, you can be fairly certain your personal
freedom is still intact in that area of your life. However, when you realize
you have only one or two choices, you will know that your freedom has been
greatly reduced. And, when you come to the point where you realize you have
no choice at all you can be sure that your freedom has been totally removed
from you.

--R. Lee Wrights, "Choices: The metric of freedom",
http://www.libertyforall.net/2003/archive/june15/choices.html



Leadership can no more be taught than creativity or how to be a
genius. The Generalstab tried desperately for 100 years to train up
a generation of leaders for the German army, but it never worked,
because the men who delighted their superiors, i.e., the managers, got
the high commands, while the men who delighted the lower ranks, i.e.,
the leaders, got reprimands. Leaders are movers and shakers, original,
inventive, unpredictable, imaginative, full of surprises that discomfit
the enemy in war and the main office in peace. For managers are safe,
conservative, predictable, conforming organization men and team players,
dedicated to the establishment.

--Hugh Nibley, BYU Commencement Address, Aug. 19, 1983



All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest
would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

--John Quincy Adams



We cannot command nature except by obeying her.

--Francis Bacon



Raffiniert ist der Herrgott aber boshaft ist er nicht.

--Albert Einstein



What we see depends on mainly what we look for.

--John Lubbock



The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

--Hilaire Belloc



Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.

--Dr. Johnson



When children become people, they stop seeing what they were able to see
when they were children, they even begin to doubt it, but that doesn't
mean that what they were once able to see no longer exists.

--David Albahari, _Bait_ (2001)



[Four guideposts to live by:] First, glance backward. Second, look
heavenward. Third, reach outward. And fourth, press onward.

--Thomas S. Monson, 22 August 2003, Brigham Young University--Idaho



The first condition of happiness is a clear conscience.

--David O. McKay, "Gospel Ideals", 1954, 498



Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who
want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder
and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many
waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one;
or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

--Frederick Douglas, Letter to an associate, 1849



The most prominent place in Hell is reserved for those who are neutral
on the great issues of life.

--Billy Graham



Christians are fond of asking: "What would Jesus do in this
situation?" Unfortunately, they very rarely come up with the correct
answer, which is: "Something unexpected!"

--Larry Wall, Slashdot interview, 2002-09-06,
http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/09/06/1343222.shtml?tid=145



A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don't take the position so
much because they don't know, but because they don't want to know,
sometimes desperately so.

--Larry Wall, Slashdot interview, 2002-09-06,
http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/09/06/1343222.shtml?tid=145



Like billowing clouds
Like the incessant gurgle of the brook,
The longing of the spirit can never be stilled.

--Hildegard von Bingen



Once the technology is in place, there will always be the temptation to
use it. And it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could
someday facilitate a police state.

--Bruce Schneier, _Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World_,
2000, p. 53



Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be
the most oppressive.

--C.S. Lewis



Don't let go of what you've got hold of, until you have hold of something else.

--First rule of wing walking



All organized bodies have their peculiar evils, weaknesses and difficulties ...

--Joseph Smith, May 26, 1842, _Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith_,
p. 238



All the religious world is boasting of righteousness: it is the doctrine
of the devil to retard the human mind, and hinder our progress, by filling
us with self-righteousness. The nearer we get to our heavenly Father,
the more we are disposed to look with compassion on perishing souls;
we feel that we want to take them upon our shoulders, and cast their
sins behind our backs.

--Joseph Smith, June 9, 1842, _Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith_,
p. 241



An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or
one-and-a-half truths.

--Karl Kraus



It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

--Voltaire



Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And,
like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

--George Washington



Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.

--Abraham Lincoln



I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the rights of
the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power
than by violent and sudden usurpations.

--James Madison



The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of
the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary
dangers from abroad.

--James Madison



Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that
anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and
hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever
must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master
of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

--Winston Churchill



You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace
unless he has his freedom.

--Malcolm X



When anger rises, think of the consequences.

--Confucius



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

--Benjamin Franklin



The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the
transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

--Patrick Henry



The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and
by parts. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good
men to do nothing.

--Edmund Burke



Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of
Freedom.

--W. S. Landor



Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the
government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally
alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The
greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding.

--Louis Dembitz Brandeis



It was our own moral failure and not any accident of chance, that while
preserving the appearance of the Republic we lost its reality.

--Cicero



No one can terrorize the whole nation, unless we all are his accomplices.

--Edward R. Murrow



When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear
the government there is tyranny.

--Thomas Jefferson



Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless
means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

--Paulo Freire



Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
violent. It takes a touch of genius--and a lot of courage--to move in
the opposite direction.

--Ernst F. Schumacher



He who has once begun to live by rapine always finds reasons for taking
what is not his.

--Niccolò Machiavelli



Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

--Thomas Jefferson



In matters of principle, stand like a rock;
in matters of taste, swim with the current.

--Thomas Jefferson



I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems
rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design
something--or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It
should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an
ego trip.

--Roger Zelazny



[The King said to the Little Prince:] One must require from each one the
duty which each one can perform. ... Accepted authority rests first of
all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves
into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to
require obedience because my orders are reasonable.

--Antoine de Saint Exupéry, "The Little Price" (1943), tr. Katherine Woods



The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. ... It will be the end and
there I'll be, wondering what can have brought it on and wondering what
can have ... why it was so long coming.

--Samuel Beckett, "Endgame" (1958)



It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by
eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate
the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is
the case. Civilization advances by extending the numbers of important
operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations
of thought are like cavalry charges in battle -- they are strictly
limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at
decisive moments.

--Alfred North Whitehead



No character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated
attacks, however false.

--Alexander Hamilton



[Satan's] objective is the enslavement of God's children. All of his
enticing, alluring temptations have as their root the destruction of the
individual. In fact, each of us needs consistently to repent and obey
so that the gift of the Savior will satisfy the demands of justice for
even our small errors of commission or omission.
 
--Richard G. Scott, "To Be Free of Heavy Burdens," Ensign, Nov. 2002, 87



Faith exists when absolute confidence in that which we cannot see combines
with action that is in absolute conformity to the will of our Heavenly
Father. Without all three--first, absolute confidence; second, action;
and third, absolute conformity--without these three all we have is a
counterfeit, a weak and watered-down faith.
 
--Joseph B. Wirthlin, "Shall He Find Faith on the Earth?" Ensign, Nov. 2002, 83



I do not know myself and God forbid that I should.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

--Alan Watts



[I]ncoherence is one of the luxuries of impotence. Those who cannot,
or will not, take responsibility themselves feel free to snipe at those
who do.

--The Economist, "Greatest danger, or greatest hope?", Nov. 6, 2003



Be prepared, self-reliant, and independent. Times of plenty are times
to live providently and lay up in store. Times of scarcity are times to
live frugally and draw on those stores.
 
--Keith B. McMullin, "Come to Zion! Come to Zion!" Ensign, Nov. 2002, 96



These stirrings [of conscience] within us originate from a divine source
and, when followed, will help to keep us on course, thus protecting us
from harmful influences and dangerous detours.
 
--Kenneth Johnson, "Yielding to the Enticings of the Holy Spirit," Ensign,
Nov. 2002, 90



A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within
the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the
security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that
the discussion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety
of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be
dishonest. This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession,
and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several
kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lockpicking long before
locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done. If
a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever
maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be,
surely it is in the interest of _honest_ persons to know this fact,
because the _dishonest_ are tolerably certain to be the first to apply
the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to
give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too
earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end,
be better for all parties.

--Charles Tomlinson's _Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks_,
published around 1850



It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the
strongman stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred
by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes
up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms; the great
devotions; and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows
in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he
fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never
be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

--Theodore Roosevelt



Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds
sang except those that sang best.

--Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)



The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on
life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important
than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than
failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It
is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make
or break a company ... a church ... a home. The remarkable thing is we
have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that
day. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play
on the one string we have, and that is our attitude ... I am convinced
that life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it. And so
it is with you ... we are in charge of our attitudes.

--Charles Swindoll



At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed
on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this
is quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration
rather than blinkers it.

--G.L. Glegg, "The Design of Design"



One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.

--Chateaubriand (1768-1848)



Gift welches nicht gleich wirkt, ist darum kein minder gefährliches
Gift--es wirkt oft noch nach Jahren.

--Gotthold Ephraim Lessing



Life laughs loudly.

--Fumbling Planets (Joseph Courtney Empey et al.)



Mehr licht!

--Goethes letzte Worte



Weder Panikmache noch Verharmlosung nützen den Verbrauchern.

--EG Informationen 7/1992



No matter what they say,
no matter what they do,
it's all up to you.

--Black Flag, "It's All up to You", from "In My Head", 1985



If you believe in nothing you'll believe in anything.

--G.K. Chesterton



When such a critic says, for instance, that faith kept the world in
darkness until doubt led to enlightenment, he is himself taking things
on faith, things that he has never been sufficiently enlightened to
doubt. That exceedingly crude simplification of human history is what
he has been taught, and he believes it because he has been taught. I
do not blame him for that; I merely remark that he is an unconscious
example of everything that he reviles.

--G.K. Chesterton, Feb. 13, 1926



[...] we have a suffocating sense of luxury and no sense at all of
liberty. All the pleasure-hunters seem to be themselves hunted. All the
children of fortune seem to be chained to the wheel. There is very little
that really even pretends to be happiness in all this sort of harassed
hedonism.

--G.K. Chesterton, April 28, 1928



Believe me, it is not failing to speak out with promptitude and energy
that is the matter with you; it is having nothing consistent or valuable
to say.

--Matthew Arnold, quoted by G.K. Chesterton



It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that
it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented
so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

--G.K. Chesterton



There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know
how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

--Søren Kierkegaard



When we talk of civilization, we are too apt to limit the meaning of
the word to its mere embellishments, such as arts and sciences; but the
true distinction between it and barbarism is, that the one presents a
state of society under the protection of just and well-administered law,
and the other is left to the chance government of brute force.

--James White, _Eighteen Christian Centuries_, 1889



I believe that under the New Deal our government is swinging too far
to the left, and in doing this they are in reality changing our form
of government from a democracy and leading it toward a totalitarian
state. I believe that it is necessary for the country to continue to
take care of its dependents, particularly the aged, but that it should
use every possible means of making people self-sustaining, rather than
to be dependent wards of the government.
 
--Franklin S. Harris, Senate campaign



You see, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little
empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that
the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best
is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in
laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed
as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the
tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large
assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think
that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.
Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you
forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance,
therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

--Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet"



There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who cannot
do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else.

--Cyrus Curtis



We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them.

--Thucydides



Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was
guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

--Jorge Luis Borges, _The Theologians_



The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings;
the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.

--Winston Churchill



Everyone's got it in him, if he'll only make up his mind and stick at
it. None of us is born with a stop-valve on his powers or with a set
limit to his capacities, There's no limit possible to the expansion of
each one of us.

--Charles Schwab



I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do
better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than
under a spirit of criticism.

--Charles Schwab



The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is
not likely to make money nor find much fun in life.

--Charles Schwab



Nothing is so much calculated to lead people to forsake sin as to take
them by the hand, and watch over them with tenderness. When persons
manifest the least kindness and love to me, O what power it has over
my mind. While the opposite course has a tendency to harrow up all the
harsh feelings and depress the human mind.

--Joseph Smith, _Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith_, 240



The job is almost finished, the goal almost attained, everything
possible seems to have been achieved, every difficulty overcome -- and
yet the quality is just not there. The work needs more finish, perhaps
further research. In that moment of weariness and self--satisfaction,
the temptation is greatest to give up, not to strive for the peak of
quality. That's the realm of the last inch -- here the work is very,
very complex but it's also particularly valuable because it's done
with the most perfect means. The rule of the last inch is simply this
-- not to leave it undone. And not to put it off -- because otherwise
your mind loses touch with that realm. And not to mind how much time
you spend on it, because the aim is not to finish the job quickly but
to reach perfection.

--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, _The First Circle_



An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to
the grand fallacy.

--Weinberg's Principle



I bear personal witness this day of a personal, living God, who knows
our names, hears and answers our prayers, and cherishes us eternally as
children of His spirit. I testify that amidst the wondrously complex
tasks inherent in the universe, He seeks our individual happiness and
safety above all other godly concerns.

--Jeffrey R. Holland, November 2003



The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of
the crow.

--William Blake



Why don't somebody print the truth about our present economic condition?
We spent years of wild buying on credit, everything under the sun, whether
we needed it or not, and now we are having to pay for it, howling like
a pet coon. This would be a great world to dance in if we didn't have
to pay the fiddler.

--Will Rogers



The plural of anecdote is not data.

--Roger Brinner



When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one
by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

--Edmund Burke



Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity.

--Ebner-Eschenbach



Whether weary or unweary, O man, do not rest,
Do not cease your single-handed struggle.
Go on, do not rest.

--An old Gujarati hymn



All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times;
but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly,
till they take root in our personal experience.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)



The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is
that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

--Samuel Butler (1612-1680)



Have any of you fellows ever been to Lobos? Just as well; there's not a
town in the provinces that's not just like all the others--even to the
point of thinking it's different.

--Jorge Luis Borges, "The Night of the Gifts", from _Collected Fictions_,
tr. Andrew Hurley



The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every
class is unfit to govern.

--Lord Acton



If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was
and never will be.

--Thomas Jefferson



We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are
free from great ones.

--La Rouchefoucauld



As to my Domestic Circumstances, of which you kindly desire to hear
something, they are at present as happy as I could wish them. I am
surrounded by my Offspring, a Dutiful and Affectionate Daughter in
my House, with Six Grandchildren, the eldest of which you have seen,
who is now at a College in the next Street, finishing the learned
Part of his Education; the others promising, both for Parts and good
Dispositions. What their Conduct may be, when they grow up and enter
the important Scenes of Life, I shall not live to _see_, and I cannot
_foresee_. I therefore enjoy among them the present Hour, and leave the
future to Providence.
    He that raises a large Family does, indeed, while he lives to
observe them, _stand_, as Watts says, _a broader Mark for Sorrow_;
but then he stands a broader Mark for Pleasure too. When we launch our
little Fleet of Barques into the Ocean, bound to different Ports, we
hope for each a prosperous Voyage; but contrary Winds, hidden Shoals,
Storms, and Enemies come in for a Share in the Disposition of Events;
and though these occasion a Mixture of Disappointment, yet, considering
the Risque where we can make no Insurance, we should think ourselves
happy if some return with Success.

--Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jonathan Shipley, from Philadelphia,
24 February 1786



Wouldst thou enjoy a long Life, a healthy Body, and a vigorous Mind,
and be acquainted also with the wonderful Works of God? labour in the
first place to bring thy Appetite into Subjection to Reason.

--Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1742



Everything in the gospel teaches us that we can change if we need to,
that we can be helped if we truly want it, that we can be made whole,
whatever the problems of the past.

--Jeffrey R. Holland, _Ensign_, Nov. 1997, 66



Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity.
They seem more afraid of life than death.

--James F. Byrnes



Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.

--Karl Wallenda



Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving wordy
evidence of the fact.

--George Eliot



A witty saying proves nothing.

--Voltaire



As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had
to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that
a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding
mistakes in my own programs.

--Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949



We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they
remain fixed, then with good laws that are constantly being altered, that
the lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than
the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule,
states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals.
These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws,
who want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they
feel that they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of greater
importance, and who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country.

--Cleon, Thucydides, III, 37; translation by Rex Warner



After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box.

--Italian proverb



Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. I used to try to
hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about
them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful
in one way or another.

--Edd Dumbill, quoted by Cory Doctorow from Danny O'Brien's "NotCon Recap
of Life Hacks", Imperial College, London, at http://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt



The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause,
while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

--William Stekel



There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct,
or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction
of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those
who have done well under the old condition, and lukewarm defenders in
those who may do well under the new.

--Niccolò Machiavelli (1513)



Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve
other problems.

--Rene Descartes (1596-1650)



Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

--Fred Brooks, _The Mythical Man-Month_



My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the
discharge of a duty by close application thereto, it is worse executed
by two persons and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed
therein.

--George Washington



Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts
can be counted.

--Albert Einstein



"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and
blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You
may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night
listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love,
you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your
honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for
it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is
the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never
be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are
to learn."

--T.H. White, _The Once and Future King_



The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

--Alfred Adler



To those accustomed to the precise, structured methods of conventional
system development, exploratory development techniques may seem messy,
inelegant, and unsatisfying. But it's a question of congruence:
precision and flexibility may be just as dysfunctional in novel,
uncertain situations as sloppiness and vacillation are in familiar,
well-defined ones. Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures
of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very secure
ecological niche.

--Beau Sheil, "Power Tools for Programmers"



You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

--Joseph Conrad



Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.

--La Rochefoucauld



I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and
public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our
independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If
we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our
necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If
we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people,
under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.

--Thomas Jefferson



The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are
simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow
their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual
pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of
western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda
usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if
one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists,
one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval
but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ...

--George Orwell, _Notes on Nationalism_, May 1945



Q: You're clearly the leader of the Linux movement, but what does that
mean? How do you lead? Are you a benevolent dictator, as some have
called you?

A: To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power
over people. Having another person's trust is more powerful than all other
management techniques put together. I have no legal or explicit power. I
only have the power of having people's trust -- but that's a lot of power.

I am a dictator, but it's the right kind of dictatorship. I can't really
do anything that screws people over. The benevolence is built in. I can't
be nasty. If my baser instincts took hold, they wouldn't trust me, and
they wouldn't work with me anymore. I'm not so much a leader, I'm more
of a shepherd. Now all the kernel developers will read that and say,
"He's comparing us to sheep." It's more like herding cats.

--Linus Torvalds, in an interview with Steve Hamm, BusinessWeek online,
August 18, 2004



If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide
the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and
endless sea.

--Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery



Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing
to a building as being maintenance.

--Jim Horning



If a man has a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

--Friedrich Nietzsche



Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us
with politics," respond those who don't want to learn.

--Richard M. Stallman



Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to
make it precise.

--Bertrand Russell



The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money.

--Ed Bluestone



A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a
"Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

--Mahatma Ghandi



The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it
unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility
toward all others. The whole community is married, realizes its essential
unity, in each of its marriages ... What marriage offers -- and what
fidelity is meant to protect -- is the possibility of moments when
what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence
obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long
at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return
of these moments, which gives us the highest joy we can know: that of
union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment).

--Wendell Berry, _The Unsettling of America_, 1977, p. 122



It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

--Alfred Adler



We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean
the same thing.

--Abraham Lincoln



Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than
dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence all things that might lift
them out of resentment-filled illusions of security.

--Alma Mavis Taraza



I've spent almost all of my life with highly intelligent men. They're not
like other men. Their spirit is great and stimulating. They hate strife;
indeed they reject it. Their inventive gifts are boundless. They demand
devotion and obedience. And a sense of humor. I happily gave all of this.
I was lucky to be chosen and clever enough to understand them.

--Marlene Dietrich, on her friendship with Ernest Hemingway



Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by
the President or any other public official.

--Theodore Roosevelt



It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

--George Santayana



It sometimes seems that we live as if we wondered when life was going
to begin. It isn't always clear just what we are waiting for, but some
of us sometimes persist in waiting so long that life slips by--finding
us still waiting for something that has been going on all the time.

There are fathers waiting for a better time to become acquainted with
their sons--perhaps until other obligations are less demanding. But
one of these days these sons are going to be grown and gone, and the
best years for knowing them, for enjoying them, for teaching, and
for understanding them, may also be gone. There are mothers who at
their earliest convenience sincerely intend to become closer to their
daughters--who are going to be more companionable. But time passes,
distance widens, and children grow up and away. There are old friends
who are going to enjoy each other a little more--but the years move on.
There are husbands and wives who are going to be more understanding,
more considerate. But time alone does not draw people closer. There are
men who are going to give up bad habits; there are people who are going
to eat more wisely; there are those who are going to live within their
means--sometime soon. There are those who are going to take more interest
in their government, be more active in service and civic activities. But
when?

There is no reason to doubt all such good intentions--but when in the
world are we going to begin to live as if we understood that this is
life? This is our time, our day, our generation. Heaven and the hereafter
will have its own opportunities and obligations. This is the life in
which the work of this life is to be done. Today is as much a part of
eternity as was any day a thousand years ago or as will be any day a
thousand years hence. This is it--whether we are thrilled or disappointed,
busy or bored! This is life--and it is passing. What are we waiting for?

--Richard L. Evans, Oct. 12, 1947, in Lloyd D. Newell, comp.,
_Messages from Music and the Spoken Word_ (2003), 60-61



My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume
it's true.

--Bill Joy



Most people never fulfill their human promise and potential because
they remain perpetually helpless children overwhelmed by a sense of
inferiority. The feeling of being okay does not imply that the person
has risen above all his faults and emotional problems. It merely implies
that he refuses to be paralyzed by them. He is determined to accept
himself as he is but also to assume more and more control of his life.

--Thomas Harris



Her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give.

--Jane Austen, _Persuasion_, CRW Publishing (Barnes & Noble Books), 2004, p. 109



... fancying herself stronger because her strength was not tried ...

--Jane Austen, _Persuasion_, CRW Publishing (Barnes & Noble Books), 2004, p. 216



My father, a good man, told me, "Never lose your ignorance; you cannot
replace it."

--Erich Maria Remarque



If everyone swept his own doorstep, what a clean world it would be.

--Goethe



As you submit your wills to God, you are giving Him the only thing you
can actually give Him that is really yours to give. Don't wait too long
to find the altar or to begin to place the gift of your wills upon it!
No need to wait for a receipt; the Lord has His own special ways of
acknowledging.

--Neal A. Maxwell, "Remember How Merciful the Lord Hath Been," Ensign, May 2004, p. 46



Reformation of the world begins with reformation of self. It is a
fundamental article of our faith that "we believe in being honest, true,
chaste, benevolent, [and] virtuous" (Articles of Faith 1:13).
     We cannot hope to influence others in the direction of virtue unless
we live lives of virtue. The example of our living will carry a greater
influence than will all the preaching in which we might indulge. We cannot
expect to lift others unless we stand on higher ground ourselves.

--Gordon B. Hinckley, "In Opposition to Evil," Ensign, Sept. 2004, p. 4



To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put
the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the
family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our
personal life, we must first set our hearts right.

--Confucius



You may not even know today what it is that you need to grow in the future, but
if all of your resources are tied up in basic operations, there won't be
anything extra to allow for innovation and experimentation. The ability to
adapt and innovate requires a "loose fit" -- room for growing in a new way.
Rather than spend all its time and money fine-tuning an existing vehicle, for
example, an automobile manufacturer might also be designing another car on the
side: an innovative vehicle based on "feedforward." Innovative design takes
time to evolve, but rest assured, in ten years the "perfect" vehicle of today
will be a thing of the past, and if you don't have the new new thing, one of
your competitors will.

--William McDonough and Michael Braungart, _Cradle to Cradle: Remaking
the Way We Make Things_, North Point Press, 2002



It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

--Rose Macaulay



It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.

--Cervantes



A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.

--Edgar A. Shoaff



Most people exhibit what political scientists call "the conservatism of the
peasantry." Don't lose what you've got. Don't change. Don't take a chance,
because you might end up starving to death. Play it safe. Buy just as much
as you need. Don't waste time.

When we think about risk, human beings and corporations realize in their
heads that risks are necessary to grow, to survive. But when it comes down
to keeping good people when the crunch comes, or investing money in
something untried, only the brave reach deep into their pockets and play
the game as it must be played.

--David Lammers, "Yakitori", Electronic Engineering Times, January 18, 1988



What the future-predictors, the change-analysts, and trend-tenders
say in effect is that with the aid of institute resources, computers,
linear programming, etc. they will deal with the kinds of change that
are not the consequence of the Random Event, the Genius, the Maniac,
and the Prophet. To which I can only say: there really aren't any;
not any worth looking at anyhow.

--Robert Nisbet, in "Commentary", June 1968 (quoted in Gary North's
"Reality Check" issue 435, April 5, 2005)



If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom;
and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it
will lose that, too.

--W. Somerset Maugham



You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but
only for a limited period of time. Why should we think that collectively,
as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

--Ronald Reagan



Signore Gaspare replied: "And what do you say about the game of chess?"

"That is certainly a refined and ingenious recreation," said Federico,
"but it seems to me to possess one defect; namely, that it is possible
for it to demand too much knowledge, so that anyone who wishes to become
an outstanding player must, I think, give to it as much time and study
as he would to learning some noble science or performing well something
or other of importance; and yet for all his pains when all is said and
done all he knows is a game. Therefore as far as chess is concerned
we reach what is a very rare conclusion: that mediocrity is more to be
praised than excellence."

--Baldesar Castiglione, "Etiquette for Renaissance Gentlemen," 1528 A.D.



History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time,
and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always
better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they
are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they
cannot yet.

--Bruce Schneier



I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible
is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about--a book open
to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther
outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages
that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely
natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with
wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the
common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has
considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered
the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold
and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into
wine--which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater
and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight)
is turned into grapes.

--Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation", in _Sex,
Economy, Freedom & Community_ (1993), p. 103



You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will
convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would
do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

--Lyndon Johnson



We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus
and running code.

--Dave Clark, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), 1982



Faith is the exceedingness of the possible over the real.

--William James



Faith is reason grown courageous.

--Wilfred Grenfell



The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

--Alan Kay, in a 1971 meeting at Xerox PARC



The sexuality of community life, whatever its inevitable vagaries,
is centered on marriage, which joins two living souls as closely as,
in this world, they can be joined. This joining of two who know, love,
and trust one another brings them in the same breath into the freedom
of sexual consent and into the fullest earthly realization of the image
of God. From their joining, other living souls come into being, and with
them great responsibilities that are unending, fearful, and joyful. The
marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to
descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental
connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.
     Our present sexual conduct, on the other hand, having "liberated"
itself from the several trusts of community life, is public, like our
present economy. It has forsaken trust, for it rests on the easy giving
and breaking of promises. And having forsaken trust, it has predictably
become political. In private life, as in public, we are attempting to
correct bad character and low motives by law and by litigation. "Losing
kindness," as Lao-tzu said, "they turn to justness." The superstition of
the anger of our current sexual politics, as of other kinds of anger,
is that somewhere along the trajectory of any quarrel a tribunal will
be reached that will hear all complaints and find for the plaintiff;
the verdict will be that the defendant is entirely wrong, the plaintiff
entirely right and entirely righteous. This, of course, is not going
to happen. And because such "justice" cannot happen, litigation
only prolongs itself. The difficulty is that marriage, family life,
friendship, neighborhood, and other personal connections do not depend
exclusively or even primarily on justice--though, of course, they all
must try for it. They depend also on trust, patience, respect, mutual
help, forgiveness--in other words, the _practice_ of love, as opposed
to the mere _feeling_ of love.
     As soon as the parties to a marriage or a friendship begin to
require strict justice of each other, then that marriage or friendship
begins to be destroyed, for there is no way to adjudicate the competing
claims of a personal quarrel. And so these relationships do not dissolve
into litigation, really; they dissolve into a feud, an endless exchange
of accusations and retributions. If the two parties have not the grace
to forgive the inevitable offenses of close connection, the next best
thing is separation and silence. But why should separation have come
to be the virtually conventional outcome of close relationships in
our society? The proper question, perhaps, is not why we have so much
divorce, but why we are so unforgiving. The answer, perhaps, is that,
though we still recognize the feeling of love, we have forgotten how to
practice love when we don't feel it.

--Wendell Berry, _Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community_ (1993), pp. 138-140



I know that for a century or so many artists and writers have felt it
was their duty--a mark of their honesty and courage--to offend their
audience. But if the artist has a duty to offend, does not the audience
therefore have a duty to be offended? If the public has a duty to protect
speech that is offensive to the community, does not the community have
the duty to respond, to be offended, and so defend itself against the
offense? A community, as a part of a public, has no right to silence
publicly protected speech, but it certainly has a right not to listen
and to refuse its patronage to speech that it finds offensive. It is
remarkable, however, that many writers and artists appear to be unable
to accept this obvious and necessary limitation on their public freedom;
they seem to think that freedom entitles them not only to be offensive but
also to be approved and subsidized by the people whom they have offended.

--Wendell Berry, _Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community_ (1993), p. 156



[A]ll of us who defend the freedom of speech [...] are trusting--and
not comfortably--that people who come under the influence of our modern
public arts will yet somehow remain under the influence of Moses and
Jesus. I don't see how anyone can extend this trust without opposing in
every way short of suppression the abuses and insults that are protected
by it. The more a society comes to be divided in its assumptions and
values, the more necessary public freedom becomes. But the more necessary
public freedom becomes, the more necessary community responsibility
becomes. This connection is unrelenting. And we should not forget that
the finest works of art make a community of sorts of their audience. They
do not divide people or justify or flatter their divisions; they define
our commonwealth, and they enlarge it.

--Wendell Berry, _Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community_ (1993), pp. 160-161



[A] community makes itself up in more intimate circumstances than a
public. And the health of a community depends absolutely on trust. A
community knows itself and knows its place in a way that is impossible
for a public (a nation, say, or a state). A community does not come
together by a covenant, by a conscientious granting of trust. It
exists by proximity, by neighborhood; it knows face to face, and it
trusts as it knows. It learns, in the course of time and experience,
what and who can be trusted. It knows that some of its members are
untrustworthy, and it can be tolerant, because to know in this matter
is to be safe. A community member can be trusted to be untrustworthy
and so can be included. (A community can trust its liars to be liars,
for example, and so enjoy them.) But if a community withholds trust,
it withholds membership. If it cannot trust, it cannot exist.

--Wendell Berry, _Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community_ (1993), pp. 161-162



You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something,
sometime in your life.

--Winston Churchill



...one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history
and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments
... occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound
by certain "obvious" methodological rules, or because they unwittingly
broke them.
     This liberal practice, I repeat, is not just a fact of the history of
science. It is both reasonable and absolutely necessary for the growth
of knowledge. More specifically, one can show the following: given
any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are
always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule,
but to adopt its opposite.

--Paul Feyerabend



The distance is commonly very great between actual performances and
speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose that as much as has
been done today may be done tomorrow: but on the morrow some difficulty
emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption,
business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every
long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand
causes that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious
performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the
undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time has an antagonist not
subject to casualties.

--Samuel Johnson (Gibbon's _Miscellaneous Works_)



Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

--Philip K. Dick



Government is the only enterprise in the world which expends in size
when its failures increase.

--Janice Brown



Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

--William Blake



I am opposed to free education as much as I am opposed to taking property
from one man and giving it to another... Would I encourage free schools
by taxation? No!

--Brigham Young, _Journal of Discourses_ 18:357



The map is not the territory.

--Alfred Korzybski



Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from
the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of
resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of
governmental power, not the increase of it.

--Woodrow Wilson



The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to
gain ground.

--Thomas Jefferson



Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have
acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the
silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it
possible for evil to triumph.

--Haile Selassie



Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of
the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they
put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon
absolved from any further obedience.

--John Locke



An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor
does truth become error because nobody sees it.

--Mohandas Gandhi



Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, "What
should be the reward of such sacrifices?" Bid us and our posterity bow
the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap,
to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of
war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If
ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than
the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your
counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May
your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were
our countrymen!

--Samuel Adams



If the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office,
the government will soon be corrupted, laws will be made, not for
the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes. Corrupt or
incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws, the public
revenues will be squandered on unworthy men and the rights of the
citizens will be violated or disregarded.

--Noah Webster



Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are
men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without
thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one;
or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the
exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and
these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows,
or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of
those whom they oppress.

--Frederick Douglass



So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who
wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and
will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and
otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

--Voltaire



The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

--Plato



Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible