Quotations II Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork? Stanislaw Lec The modern world is a culture of death. Pope John Paul II Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Erich Fromm Albert Camus said future historians would summarize modern man: "He fornicated and read newspapers." The profoundest truths are paradoxical. Lao Tzu We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Thomas Jefferson My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it. Chuang Tzu He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh. Koran Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. Lord Acton In politics.... you need two things: friends, but above all an enemy. Brian Mulroney Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. Mother Teresa We have sunk to such a depth that the restatement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men. George Orwell Genius is having a profound grasp of the obvious. Albert Camus Life is an open secret. Tibetan Buddhist saying We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time. Thomas Stearns Eliot I could talk until about the cows come home about the minority status of Catholics in the North of Ireland. But that ground has been gone over a lot. I would say that the more important Catholic thing is the actual sense of eternal values and infamous vices which our education or formation gives us. There's a sense of profoundness, a sense that the universe can be ashimmer with something , and Catholicism - even if I don't like sentimentalizing it - was the backdrop to that whole thig. The world I grew up in offered me a sense that I was a citizen of the empyrean - the crystalline elsewhere of the world. Seamus Heaney And here I stand with all my lore no wiser than I was before. Faust Yesterday, nine weeks into the NATO bombing of Kosovo/Serbia, an ongoing NPR report on the life of a young Kosovar, had this to say: "The war has gotten to the point where there's nothing to do but stay inside all day and watch television." Chapel Hill bumper sticker: "The Labor Movement: The People Who Brought You The Weekend." One never sees what has been done. One can only see what still needs to be done. Madame Curie (Curie's observation is thoroughly modern. However, humankind has not always experienced this relentless compulsion "to get on to the next thing." Medieval Europeans, for example, sat back and enjoyed their cathedrals. Even moderns suspend busyness-as-usual to gawk at these works of majesty. Take the Orvieto cathedral whose facade is graced with a mural that is as stunning as it is elaborate. The opposite side of Cathedral Square is rimmed by centuries-old stone benches where people sit, look, talk and gawk. There is no pressure to "get on with the program," but rather, unharried enjoyment of the past. The modern assumption that we must always look to the future ensures we will never be conscious of the present. Is our absented-mindedness a good way to live?) In the United Oil Emirate, Abu Dhabi, it is law that all buildings must be razed every 30 years. There is more to life than increasing its speed. Mahatma Gandhi My favorite animal is the mule... He knows when to stop eating --- and he knows when to stop working. Truman Trains stop at the train station. Buses stop at the bus station. I have a workstation. Steven Wright Everybody seems to think I'm lazy. I don't mind, I think they're crazy. John Lennon I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down. Pigs treat us as equals. Winston Churchill A female MP who routinely goaded Churchill, once accused him of being drunk, to which Churchill replied: "Madam, I may be drunk. But tomorrow, I will be sober, and you will still be ugly." Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of birds? Picasso It is easy to be brave from a distance. Aesop It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong. Longfellow (When I taught public school, "inert" students seemed to spend more time and mental anguish suffering from not having taken the little time required to learn. Few behavioral "interventions" are as important as reversing the self-satisfied behavior I call "aggressive ignorance.") Not to know is bad. Not to wish to know is worse. Wolof West African Proverb There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse. Washington Irving (Pleasure is experienced when energy is released. On the one hand are the educated - or, at least, the technically instructed - who release energy by creative bonding, by "associative energy," through "building up." Those who are neither educated nor instructed often access the pleasure of "energy release" through "dissociative energy," by breaking bonds, through witless destruction.) There's small choice in rotten apples. Shakespeare I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head. Theodore Roosevelt The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates I was really too honest a human to be a politician and live. Socrates, upon drinking hemlock What has made this nation great? Not heroes but households. Sarah Josepha Hale To sing and dance well is to be well-educated. Plato Service is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time. Marian Wright Edelman We make our friends. We make our enemies. God sends us our neighbors. G. K. Chesterton Love your enemies. Do good to those persecute you. Y'eshua, the Nazarene Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe. Lao Tzu Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. Alfonso X, King of Spain (1221 - 1286) One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. May Sarton "The Community Stories Project," by Janice Hodges, Independent, 6/23-29/99 "'I received a lot of flak for not having any type of academic requirements,' says Delia Gamble, program coordinator for the 1997 and 1998 projects. But she says her main objective was to get students into the program and doing the work, regardless of how they did in school. 'We've had people with learning disabilities, attitude problems and dropouts, but it all worked out.'" (Such flak shows how "schooled" people oppress the relatively "unschooled." America's "meritocracy" is not based on excellence but on the willingness of "the mediocre" to sit quietly in State-assigned seats, and, furthermore, to pay for "the privelege." Real excellence - excellence that breaks the box, winged excellence that flies higher than any glass ceiling - is a threat to the "meritocratic" system of which schooling and credentialing comprise the foundation. A.A.) The fate of empires depends on the education of youth. Aristotle It is a greater work to educate a child... than to rule a state. William Emery Channing Tis education forms the common mind: Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined. Alexander Pope Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. William Butler Yeats Achieve excellence in some way. Then you will not sorrow when you see excellence in others. Rumi I only hire people whose language I don't understand. Americans don't care about their work. (A general contractor from Hillsborough, North Carolina, explaining why he only employs Hispanics.) In the baby lies the future of the world... His father must take him to the highest hill to see what his world is like. Mayan Proverb He who does not love his wife dishonors himself. Mexican Proverb The greater part of any happiness - or misery - depends on our disposition and not on our circumstances. Martha Washington Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money. It lies... in the thrill of creative effort. F. D. Roosevelt What you really value is what you miss, not what you have. Borges He who has never failed cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. Melville History teaches us that men and nations will behave wisely once they have exhausted all other possibilities. Abba Eban Susan Goodman: What excuses do people offer for bad behavior? Laura Schlesinger: "I did this because I was hurt or upset or needy." Hey, if I acted on the range of feelings I have, I'd be pregnant and people would be dead. Interview, Fall, '99 Excusers are losers. Stelton Mitchell, former second baseman for the Houston Astros, and my "master teacher" at Berkeley High. A.A. To Martha Washington's grand-daughter (who was on the brink of marriage), George wrote: "Experience will convince you that there is no truth more certain than that all our enjoyments fall short of our expectations; and to none does it apply with more force, than to the gratification of the passions." The difference between a spiritual good and a material good is that the material good tends to disappoint in the instant of its attainment. Augustine of Hippo (paraphrase) The notion of obeying... "a higher law" rather than the traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian one. Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a race one. Just as the Soviet cadres were taught to justify the most revolting crimes in the name of a moralistic class warfare, so the SS acted in the name of race --- which Hitler insisted was a far more powerful and central human motivation than class. Service to the race, as opposed to the Marxist proletariat, was the basis of Nazi Puritanism. Paul Johnson Marxist theory cannot ... make absolute distinctions between violence against a race and violence against a class... As he saw it, races, peoples and nations were subjected to the same Hegelian processes as classes. (Marx) often discussed with Engels the notion of inferior... races... Engels liked to quote a saying of Hegel's that "residual fragments of peoples" always become "fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution." Thus you could have a reactionary people as well as a reactionary class --- a thought which appealed strongly to Stalin as well as Hitler, and indeed to Mao Zedong... when he dealt... with that reactionary little people, the Tibetans. Paul Johnson There is, indeed, no place for mercy in determinist systems such as Marxism. Mercy, like free will, is an anti-determinist idea... So-called "history," as the dynamic of Marxism, has no mercy because it is an impersonal idea and mercy implies a person. The notion of "socialism with a human face," though superficially attractive, is self-contradictory in terms of Marxism. Mercy is thus greater than justice and it can be so because it is non-deterministic and embodies free will. Paul Johnson (Hitler) hated Christianity and showed a justified contempt for its German practitioners. Shortly after assuming power, he told Hermann Rauschning that he intended to stamp out Christianity in Germany "root and branch." "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both." ... "Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished..." Paul Johnson Orwell... was an almost classic case of the Old Intellectual in the sense that for him a political commitment to a utopian, socialist future was plainly a substitute for a religious idealism in which he could not believe. God could not exist for him. He put his faith in man but, looking at the object of his devotion too closely, lost it. Paul Johnson Orwell has always put experience before theory... Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivaled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Paul Johnson "Put them side by side and our Jesus is better than their Jesus." CBS Television CEO Leslie Moonves on the two mini-series about Jesus on NBC and CBS |
