Memorable words for the mindlessness of our age

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) "To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting."

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970 )"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

Andre Gide: (1869-1951) "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again." "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) "And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

An old woman responding to a threat from terrorists in El Salvador, 1982 “You can kill me, you can kill my family, kill my neighbors, but you can’t kill us all.”

Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) "Nothing is more dangerous than a friend without discretion; even a prudent enemy is preferable."

Lady Marguerite Gardiner (1789-1849)"There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world."

Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) "Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."

Will Rogers: (1879-1938) "When people start taking the comedian seriously and the politician as a joke, everything changes." "This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer."

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900-1965) "My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." [Under this definition, Cambridge Massacchusetts, and the state of Massachusetts are not free societies. ed.]

Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965) "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) "Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well."

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."

Viggo Anderson (1946- ) "The eyes carry information to the brain."

Dr. Seuss (1904-1991 Theodor Seuss Geisel) "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."

Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945 Hitler's Minister of Propaganda) "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)"In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."

William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Voltaire (François Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) "Common sense is not so common." "Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one." "Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world."

Michael Bloomberg (1942 - Democrat, Republican, Independent 3-Term Mayor of New York City and Billionaire) "Last time I checked, the pharmaceutical industry doesn't make a lot of money."

George W. Bush, Genocidal murderer, (1946 - ) "Intentions get overwhelmed by perceptions."

John Tudor "Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology."

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) "There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character."
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Winston Churchill (1874-1965) "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."

Michel de Montaigne: (1533-1592) "The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness."

Aldous Huxley: (1894-1963) "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."

T. S. Eliot: (1888-1965) "Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important
They don’t mean to do harm ­
But the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves."

Burt Prelutsky, (1940- Columnist) "Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with a Muslim building a nuclear bomb in Iran."

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947) "An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less."

Henry Kissinger: (1923 - )"In this world it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but to be a friend is fatal."

Socrates: (469BC-399BC) "He is the richest who is content with the least."

Leo Tolstoy: (1828-1910) "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

P.J. O'Rourke (A Parliament of Whores) "Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population- we'd all be married to Mel Gibson."

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Orson Welles (as Harry Lime in The Third Man, 1949) "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace -- and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Tacitus: (c. 56 AD-c. 117) "The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates."

Ralph Waldo Emerson: (1803-1882) "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

Doug Hoffman: (2009 Conservative Party Candidate for US Rep. NY 23rd District) "Congress fiddles while our economy burns. They lack common sense."

Rich Lowry: (On ObamaCare) "A shimmering mirage of wishful thinking and willful dishonesty."

President Obama (as he loses public support.) "We cannot wait any longer [. . .] There comes a time to remember the fierce urgency of right now."


Marek Edelman, leader of Warsaw Ghetto uprising. (1919?-2009) "Man is evil, by nature man is a beast. People have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred."

Adis Medunjanin (24 in January 2010, Queens, NY man accused of training with al Qaeda): "We love death more than you love life."

Edward Moore Kennedy (1932-2009): "Do we operate under a system of equal justice or one for the average citizen and one for the high and mighty?"

Robert Novak: (1931-2009) “Always love your country — but never trust your government!

Calvin Coolidge: (1872-1933) “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Dead Pool: "Opinions are like a**holes. Everybody's got one."

Lyndon Johnson: (1908-1973) “The difference between liberals and cannibals is that cannibals don’t eat their friends and family members.”

Margaret Thatcher: (1925 -) "The problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of others people's money."

John Adams: (1735-1826) "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

Abraham Lincoln: (1809-1865) "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Thomas Jefferson: (1743-1826) "Merchants have no country." “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

James Madison: (1751-1836) “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Mark Twain: (1835-1910) "Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing often and for the same reason."
"It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you think you know for sure that just ain't so."

Maggie Gallagher: (1960 - ) "Politicians can pass a bill saying a chicken is a duck and that doesn't make it true. Truth matters."

Humpty Dumpty (In Alice in Wonderland) "When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to. No more no less."

Groucho Marx: (Julius Henry, 1890-1977) "Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read."

John Adams:  Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Aldous Huxley :Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Fuller Shite: Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get them, get them right, you little fuckers!