Quote-o-rama:
The Second Not As Big Miscellaneous FileOK, these are all really long quotes that don't fit elsewhere.
"Let us not forget that the value of this great system does not lie primarily in its extent or even in its efficiency. Its worth depends on the use that is made of it... For the first time in human history we have available to us the ability to communicate simultaneously with millions of our fellowmen, to furnish entertainment, instruction, widening vision of national problems and national events. An obligation rests on us to see that it is devoted to real service and to develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile." -Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, 1924 on the potential of broadcast radio "We did a show last night about God and religion with Dave Foley, who I love, and we were arguing against this one woman who had a book called I Like Being Catholic. Someone said, 'Oh, boy, a lot of atheists on this panel.' I said, 'I'm not an atheist. There's a really big difference between an atheist and someone who just doesn't believe in religion. Religion to me is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need. But I'm not an atheist, no.' I believe there's some force. If you want to call it God... I don't believe God is a single parent who writes books. I think that the people who think God wrote a book called The Bible are just childish. Religion is so childish. What they're fighting about in the Middle East, it's so childish. These myths, these silly little stories that they believe in fundamentally, that they take over this little space in Jerusalem where one guy flew up to heaven - no, no, this guy performed a sacrifice here a thousand million years ago. It's like, 'Who cares? What does that have to do with spirituality, where you're really trying to get, as a human being and as a soul moving in the universe?' But I do believe in a God, yes." -Bill Maher "One can easily predict that women will stir even more violent debates in the decade to come, as globalization forces both Muslim states and their citizens to redefine themselves and create new cultural identities, rooted more in economics than in religion. The fear of the feminine represents the threat from within; the debate about globalization, the threat from without; and both discussions will necessarily be focused on women. Femininity is the emotional locus of all kinds of disruptive forces, in both the real world and in fantasy." _Scheherazade Goes West,_ by Fatema Mernissi "According to Shahrastani, a Persian writer of the twelfth century, the Ajarida claim that 'A love story cannot be part of the Koran.' This might sound logical, if love is to be considered a threat to the established order, but it is the logic of extremism, not of Islam. And this distinction is crucial if we are the understand what is going on in the Muslim world today. Yes, there are Muslim extremists who will women in the streets of Afghanistan and Algeria, but it is because they are extremists, not because they are Muslim. These same extremists also kill male journalists who insist on expressing different opinions and introducing pluralism into the political dynamic. Islam, both as a legal and cultural system, is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power - and thereore the unknowable 'other.' All the passionate if not hysterical debates about women's rights taking place today in Muslim parliaments from Indonesia to Dakar are in actuality debates about pluralism. These debates relentlessly focus on Umma, the Muslim community. It is no wonder that the first decision of Imam Khomeini, who paradoxically declared Iran a republic in 1979, was to ask women to veil. Elections, yes. Pluralism, no. The Imam knew what he was doing. he knew that an unveiled woman forces the Imam to face the fact that the Umma, the community of believers, is not homogenous." _Scheherazade Goes West,_ by Fatema Mernissi "Can I say one thing? It's all well and good for JR to use Ross Report space to tell us not to bitch out the writers when we perceive crap on our television screen, but it's ANOTHER thing to put something on our television screen that WON'T be perceived as crap instead - I shouldn't have to tell you, the major difference being that one way will make you a heck of a lot more money in the long run, and the other way will alienate enough of your audience that you've become an EX-business. (I don't think it'll go that far, but who ever thought WCW would really go out of business? May we live in interesting times.)" -CRZ, 2001 "Your family, like most postmodern clans, finds itself adrift at a historically signifigant time. The last couple of centuries have marked a radical transition in human lifestyle. We've gone from living in a natural world to living in a manufactured one. For two million years our personalities and cultures were shaped by nature. The generations alive today - who cannot recognize an edible mushroom in the forest or build a fire without matches - are the first to have had their lives shaped almost entirely by the electronic mass media environment." _Culture Jam_, byt Kalle Lasn "Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.) Is planning a ban on smut Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut. And his reverent occiput. Smite. Smoot, smite for Ut., Grit your molars and do your dut., Gird up your l--ns, Smite h-p and th-gh, We'll all be Kansas By and By." -Ogden Nash, 1931 "Technology played a role in 2001, as the movie anticipated, but it was mostly a brute-force application: Planes smashing into buildings, planes dropping daisy cutter bombs and fuel-air explosives, terrorists in the Middle East detonating nail bombs and dynamite. We saw the use of laser-guided munitions, and unpiloted drones that could relay video images of the battlefield to distant warriors, but the war was ultimately won on the ground by tribesmen on horseback." -Joel Achenbach "You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic." -Winston Churchill "First of all, do you see the title graphic for this page? Remember how in Star Wars 4 there was a new hope? If so, step 1 is to forget fucking Star Wars. Enough Star Wars already. Everyone's sick of Star Wars. The only ones who aren't sick of it are the kind of people who are still writing detailed technical criticisms of TV's Small Wonder. In other words, lunatics. How did Star Wars effect Rune? I'm not your Psychic Friend. I have no idea. But I'm sure it somehow contributed to the grey repetitive blandness of the whole thing. Okay, how about this: A priest, a dog, and Tim Gerritsen walk into a bar and see a Rune level designer at work. The Priest says, 'Good Lord, man, why did you make a hundred sewer levels?' The level designer says, 'Those aren't sewers, they're dwarven aqueducts! Oh God, who am I kidding, I was thinking about wookies and I guess I blacked out.'" -Old Man Murray "It all comes down to your objective: Nothing else counts except what you want. How you feel will take care of itself. All that back-story stuff doesn't help. What you get paid for is to stand toe-to-toe with the other actor and get him to do your will. Every scene has two people who want two different things, so there's conflict in every scene. You've got to duke it out, and you've got to get the other person to change his or her mind and do it your way. That's pretty much what every scene is about, getting people to see your point of view. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose." -William H. Macy "There's a peculiar feeling to any good-sized downtown around 3:30 in the afternoon - everything sags, and for a moment it just seems as if every artifice around you will collapse of its own exhaustion. The messengers will realize that no one really needs this document. The smokers will decide not to go back upstairs - what, the world's going to end if they don't finish the memo, file the report? The shopper in the diamond store thinks 'what is this? Clear rocks? What am I thinking?' Bankers look out the window and see a sky as gray as a gravestone; people on buses look out with blank expressions, equally disinterested in their destinations as their origin. Everything seems like a communal pretense, and you wish you didn't have to participate. It seems like a lot of work just to keep us all fed and clothed." -http://www.lileks.com/bleats/ "This love," I said, "this feeling over which you had no control. What is it exactly?" Another silence. Then, wearily: "If you don't know I can't tell you." "There's no defining it, then? No discussion possible? It springs to life, it can't be ignored, and it tears people's lives apart. But we can't say more. It just is." "Words," she murmured. _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "You ceased to be mad when you began to behave as though you weren't in a madhouse, as though you weren't locked up with no real idea when you were getting out again. Once you appeared to accept these conditions as perfectly satisfactory, then you were seen to be improving and they moved you downstairs. This of course is a patient's perspective. From our point of view, the self-control involved in making these calculations and then acting on them is a necessary first step in getting better." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "I'd totally join in this gift thing, but for two things: In german, the first non-arab language I learned, Gift means poison. Christmas is for infidel dogs. Therefore I will not be joining in your poisonous non-getting-to-heaven ways. Infidel dogs. Man, It's good to be me." -Imam S. "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded sense of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing _worth_ a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, - is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated _their_ ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other." -John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), "The Contest In America," Fraser's Magazine, February 1862 "I don't want to destroy the good atmosphere in the room or in the country tonight, but I have to mention one issue that divided this body greatly last year. The last Congress also passed the Brady bill and, in the crime bill, the ban on 19 assault weapons. I don't think it's a secret to anybody in this room that several members of the last Congress who voted for that aren't here tonight because they voted for it. And I know, therefore, that some of you who are here because they voted for it are under enormous pressure to repeal it. I just have to tell you how I feel about it. The members of Congress who voted for that bill and I would never do anything to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms, to hunt and to engage in other appropriate sporting activities. I've done it since I was a boy, and I'm going to keep right on doing it until I can't do it anymore. But a lot of people laid down their seats in Congress so that police officers and kids wouldn't have to lay down their lives under a hail of assault weapon attack, and I will not let that be repealed. I will not let it be repealed." -President Bill Clinton, 1995 State Of The Union address "Mike Mignola said that occult detective Lobster Johnson will be appearing in Hellboy: Conqueror Worm, his four-issue mini-series due from Dark Horse Comics next year. "I love Lobster Johnson," Mignola said. "I was in Italy and I woke up one morning after having an expresso the night before and somehow I got this great name for a character: Lobster Johnson. My wife gave me that look I get all the time - 'I'm married to a retard. But he got us on this great trip to Italy and we'll stay married a little while longer.'" -from _The Daily Buzz_ http://www.fandomshop.com/buzz/ "Both Magneto and Gandalf are characters who must appear to possess some superhuman attributes and abilities. However, part of their charm is that each of them is also recognizably human. As for the physicality of these two icons, I am a little relieved that both movies will take advantage of the latest special effects technology. Throughout my career on stage I have enjoyed playing characters who are much stronger and athletic than I am offstage. As Romeo, which I played when I was 37, I climbed up and down the proscenium arch 8 times a week. Ten years later as Coriolanus, I fought hand-to-hand combat with shield and sword in a sand pit, semi-naked. Last year as Captain Hook I fought the actor playing Peter Pan (40 years my junior) and would have easily defeated him if he hadn't called on a crocodile to support him. Meanwhile I had clambered up the rigging of the Jolly Roger 30 feet above the stage in high-heeled boots and a hook on my left hand. I'm very much looking forward to playing Magneto and a much older Gandalf." -Ian McKellen "Each of us took a turn going up in front of the room to talk about our most embarrassing moments. This was supposed to let the Dating Game staff see how comfortable we would be talking in front of a crowd and, therefore, get an idea of how we would be when the cameras were turned on." "Most people described the time they got so drunk they puked all over their girlfriends or the bad date where their zipper was down all night. I described the time I was standing in a bucket of mashed potatoes in my mother's dress, on a cross, wearing a 3-foot-long latex penis in a knight's helmet, when my friend Michael Gump began hitting me really hard with a dead coyote he had picked up on the road that evening and had turned into a marionette puppet. Then I talked about the time we beat each other with dead fish buck-naked in the bathroom of an all-night diner. This seemed to shock most of the room." -http://www.dailyradar.com/features/showbiz_feature_page_36_1.html "We've learned over the years that if we wanted we could write anything that just felt good or sounded good and it didn't necessarily have to have any particular meaning to us. As odd as it seemed to us, reviewers would take it upon themselves to interject their own meanings on our lyrics. Sometimes we sit and read other people's interpretations of our lyrics and think, 'Hey, that's pretty good.' If we liked it, we would keep our mouths shut and just accept the credit as if it was what we meant all along." -John Lennon "It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; -- all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder. -John Henry Cardinal Newman from The Idea of a University, 1852
Page by: Paul M. M. Jacobus (paul@otd.com)
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