Murtaugh: God hates me.
Riggs: Hate him back. It works for me.
“Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage. Be not afraid; neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee, withersoever thou goest.” - Joshua 1:9, KJV
“Kids are great! You can teach them to hate the same things you do, and they practically raise themselves, what with the internet and all.” – Homer J. Simpson
“The earth is hard, but the treasure fine. So deep will I dig.” – Gene Eugene
Something important:
Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.
George C Marshall
Secretary of State
5 June 1946
Harvard Graduation
Something to make you think:
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. - Jacob Bronowski
Two more favorites:
P. J. O’Rourke
A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense.
George Orwell
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf
A ship in the harbor is safe. But that is not what ships are made for.
Lt. Frank Drebin on taking chances in life, from an episode of Police Squad! (later reused in The Naked Gun): “You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan.”
“Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.” 2 Corinthians 12:10
I read that in the bulletin at church one day maybe 10 years ago and kept the bulletin. I kept loving the quote so much that I got it tattooed (the passage name) on my leg.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to tell which was which.”
–George Orwell (Animal Farm)
“If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wonderous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.”
–Q (“Q Who”)
“You don’t like the Goths?”
“No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
“Persecution?” Padway raised his eyebrows.
“Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
“I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
“That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch
Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their
business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t
persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
–L. Sprague deCamp (Lest Darkness Fall)
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread
And having once turned round, walks on
And turns no more his head
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
—Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge
Brrr!
"I used to go around thinking that lie was unfair, and then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair and all the terrible things that happen to us, come because actually deserve them? So now I take comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the Universe”
~Marcus Cole, Babylon 5
“A noble spirit embiggens …”
When I was in architecture school above the doorway of our studio on the doorframe were scrawled the words “Illegitimi non carborundum” in black marker.
When we finished our projects and it was time to haul them down to the presentation area to present them to a jury of professors and visiting architects where you would have to defend your work against their critiques, we would hit the saying with our hands on the way out of studio.
Loosely translated from Latin it means “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
–Herbert Spencer
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who 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 neither know victory nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Isaac Asimov, “Foundation”.
“Fiat justitia et ruat caelum” (Let justice be done though the heavens fall).
I generally find that violence is the first refuge for many incompetent people.
“Culture, born of society, eventually kills society.” Andre Gide - The Immoralist
“When the fox hears the rabbit scream he comes a-runnin’… but not to help.”
-Hannibal
This always makes me think how something that is so much a regular part of nature, can seem so sinister and cruel.
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”
-Stalin
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
-Benjamin Franklin
Sometimes you’re flush and sometimes you’re bust, and when you’re up, it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down, you never think you’ll be up again. But life goes on.
- Blow
“I don’t think I ever really loved you.”
“He expressed himself as well as someone violently in love can be expected to.”
–Pride and Prejudice
"… Who shall remember my house, where shall live
My children’s children, when the time of sorrow is come?
They shall take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords…
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
-A Song for Simeon, T. S. Eliot
[ultra nitpick]
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
[/ultra nitpick]
Sorry, I’m still working on my OCD.
from here, an excellent resource on poets and poetry
In the real world
As in dreams
Nothing is quite
What it seems
–The Book of Counted Sorrows
Don’t know why, but that passage crosses my mind at least once a day…has for years now.