“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
– H.L. Mencken
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” - Raymond Chandler
“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.” - Ray Bradbury
“One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” - Robert Heinlein
“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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” - Thomas Jefferson
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. " - The War of the Worlds
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” - John Rogers
“Listen to me!. That Terminator is out there. It can’t be reasoned with, or bargained with. It doesn’t feel remorse, or pity, or fear,or pain. And it absolutely, will, not, stop until you are DEAD! That’s what it does.That’s ALL it does!” - Terminator
“Only one human captain has survived a battle with a Minbari ship. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, BE SOMEWHERE ELSE!” - Delenn, Severed Dreams, Babylon 5
“Cold be hand and heart and bone,
and cold be sleep under stone:
never more to wake on stony bed,
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.
In the black wind the stars shall die,
and still on gold here let them lie,
till the Dark Lord lifts his hand
over dead sea and withered land.” - Lord of the Rings
“Your race hasn’t even reached Type 1 on the Kardashev scale. It doesn’t control the resources of this one planet, let alone a solar system or a galaxy. The Time Lords were the Type 4 civilization. We had no equals. We controlled the fundamental forces of the entire universe. Nothing could communicate with us on our level. Most races pray to lesser beings than the Time Lords.” ~ The Gallifrey Chronicles
“I will return to the immaterial” she said softly, implacably. “I will go back to where I belong, reclaim my due, even if I have to destroy all the material worlds there are to be free of their grip on me. I will tear whole civilizations apart and dance laughing in their ruins. I will see the end of all the breathing, bleeding, lesser things, if that’s what it takes. And not all the Powers and Dominations there are shall stand against me.” - Angel the descended angel, Drinking Midnight Wine, Simon Green
“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” - Masque of the Red Death
"Revenge ! Revenge? You? The King Under the Mountain is dead and where are his kin that dare seek revenge ? Girion Lord of Dale is dead and I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his son’s son’s that dare approach me ? I kill where I wish and none dare resist. I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today. Then I was but young and tender. Now I am old and strong, strong, STRONG ! Thief in the Shadows. My armor is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings are a hurricane, and my breath . . . DEATH ! " - Smaug, The Hobbit
“The powers that I may wield are vaster than those of many gods that humans have worshiped. There is not a man I meet but I could take his life. There is not a world I pause on that I could not lay waste utterly, or remake as I choose. I am the Lord God, or as much of one as either of you is likely to ever encounter.” : Tuf Voyaging
These are attributed to Albert Einstein:
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
Il y a des millions d’années que les fleurs fabriquent des épines. Il y a des millions d’années que les moutons mangent quand même les fleurs. Et ce n’est pas sérieux de chercher à comprendre pourquoi elles se donnent tant de mal pour se fabriquer des épines qui ne servent jamais à rien? Ce n’est pas important la guerre des moutons et des fleurs? - Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(TRANSLATION: For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it’s not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It’s not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers?)
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats. - H. L. Mencken
Without deviation from the norm, Progress is not possible.
I am wearing a t-shirt with that quote on it right now.
No Carlin yet?
Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
“I am” is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that “I do” is the longest sentence?
So come my friends, be not afraid
We are so lightly here
It is in love that we are made
In love we disappear.
–Leonard Cohen
“We are the beasts that shout love at the heart of the world. Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben!”
A mishmash of Harlan Ellison and Albert Schweitzer.
To give credit where credit is due, I believe Jane Wagner wrote that.
Mine:
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin – it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
– S. J Perelman
jasg
“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catchall for fuckoffs and misfits, a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy, piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn’t prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren’t dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
– Franz Wright
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: ‘My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.’ I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.”
– Edward Gibbon
George Orwell:
“The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
“The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.”
“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.”
“As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”
“If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?”
“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”
“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”
And here’s one Americans of today should bear in mind:
“We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.”
“Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble.”
– Stefan Kanfer
Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
Anonymous
I have this one in a sticky on my computer:
“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
Well, people do tell me I’m unreasonable…
And a couple in my sig as well!