Quote-o-rama:
The Fifteenth Miscellaneous File
"When you make your peace with authority, you become authority." -Jim Morrison "Honestly, if there were a way for me to say that I wish Frank Oz was puppeteering me that didn't sound gross, I would say it." -John Hodgeman, WashingtonPost.com, 2006 "The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception." -E. V. Lucas "The book's thesis can't be overstated: Dubose and Bernstein think Cheney is a threat to the republic on a scale unseen since the Civil War." -Chris Suellentrop, Re: _Vice_ "American voters today are poised to breach Bush's bubble, exposing him to the real world. In the real world, just because he says something doesn't make it so. In the real world, he can't just demonize people who don't agree with him -- he has to work with them. And in the real world, he is the president of all the people, not just his partisan supporters." -Dan Froomkin, 11/7/2006 "We were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble." -Kahlil Gibran "Congressmen are now on their five-week break. Did you know they were off? No, you don't even know when they're working. Anyway, they have five weeks to campaign for their upcoming elections. You know, they're traveling around the country talking about the most dangerous threats to our country - flag-burning and gay marriage." -Jay Leno, 2006 "The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and get on with their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable." -Brennan Manning "The American Dream [is] one of the greatest ideas in the history of human achievement... It thrives today in an age when its core components of freedom and opportunity are open to more Americans than ever before. It holds a real, identifiable place in the American heart and mind, and it informs the aspirations of everyone from farmers to software developers, from detectives to bankers, from soldiers to social workers... It defines us as a people, even as we add to its meaning with each new chapter in our national experience and our individual actions." -Dan Rather "But we shouldn't have to talk about the practicalities of torture, because the real question is moral: What kind of nation are we? What kind of people are we?" -Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, 2006 "There is no greater wealth than wisdom, no greater poverty than ignorance; no greater heritage than culture and no greater support than consultation." -Ali ibn Abi Talib "It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it." -Jeseph Joubert "Who knew, in 2000, that 'compassionate conservatism' meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research? A more accurate term for Mr. Bush's political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism..." -Christopher Buckley, 2006 "I think what an actor has to realize [is that] when you show up an hour late, 150 people have been scrambling to cover for you... There is not an apology big enough in the world to have to make 150 people scramble. It's nothing but disrespect. And Lindsay Lohan is not the only one. A lot of actors show up late as if they're God's gift to the film. It's inexcusable, and they should have their asses kicked." -William H. Macy, 2006 "On the dominant issue of our time, the president is in denial. By most reliable accounts, three and a half years into the U.S. occupation, Iraq is in chaos - if not in a state of civil war, then awfully close. But President Bush insists it's not so. You might think that the enormous gulf between Bush's perceptions and reality on such a life-and-death topic would be, well, newsworthy." -Dan Froomkin, Washington Post, 2006 "The clearsighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it." -Agnes Repplier "Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor." -Clare Boothe Luce "You should avoid making yourself too clear even in your explanations." -Baltasar Gracian "You know what? If you had told me a year ago that the words 'Bon Jovi' would appear on this website, I would have burned my computer, moved to the mountains, and learned Esperanto." -VisualResistance.org "What you see is news, what you know is background, what you feel is opinion." -Lester Markel "It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptation." -Walter Bagehot "There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt, to me anyway, is what makes you human, and without doubt even the righteous lose their grip not only on reality but also on their humanity." -Tilda Swinton "It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true." -Alfred North Whitehead "I'm a realist and so I think regretting is a useless occupation. You help no one with it. But you can't live without illusions even if you must fight for them, such as 'love conquers all.' It isn't true, but I would like it to be." -Marlene Dietrich "History is too serious to be left to historians." -Iain Macleod "Sex is the Tabasco sauce which an adolescent national palate sprinkles on every course in the menu." -Mary Day Winn "Is big hair for guys coming back? Because I've seen a couple of university-age dudes this week with coiffs that looked like Robert Smith's hair battled to the death with Rod Stewart's and one of them partially devoured the other." -Robin D. Laws "If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed a good idea at the time.'" -Dame Rebecca West "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing nothing, than by believing too much." -P.T. Barnum "How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception." -Alfred de Musset "Therein lies a mystery, because it is hard to detail precisely why, in a museum jammed with countless masterpieces, [the Mona Lisa] became the icon. Maybe it's partially because she is, in a place of kings and saints and messiahs, just a woman, rather plain, but full of depth, full of life. No scriptural back story is necessary. It's as though Leonardo had discovered something new, the individual. She's interesting, even noble, even though she is not a queen or a saint, and doesn't ride in a chariot." -Joel Achenbach, 2006 "Show me the country in which there are no strikes and I'll show you that country in which there is no liberty." -Emma Goldman "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." -John Stuart Mill "There are only two kinds of people in this world. One wants to travel back in time to get drunk with pirates. The other simply wants to travel back in time to see what color dinosaurs *really* were." -DieselSweeties.com "Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two." -Arnold J. Toynbee "I'm basically interested in identity, and I still find fascinating the question, 'How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?'" -Tilda Swinton "By the way, if the phrase 'more than just a business relationship' doesn't make your gaydar ping just a little, then you and I have very different agendas in reading Judge Parker, my friend." -JoshReads.com "There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders." -Ralph J. Bunche "Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen." -Dame Rebecca West "Spandex is the No. 1 reason the world doesn't have superheroes. If you've ever walked on Hollywood Boulevard and had a tranny Wonder Woman or a lumpen Captain America offer to pose with you for a picture, then you know: Off the page, humans have just never looked right in those costumes - even in big-budget movies and with big-budget trainers and big-budget codpieces." -Hank Stuever, WashingtonPost.com, 2006 "Materialists and madmen never have doubts." -G.K. Chesterton "To wish to act like angels while we are still in this world is nothing but folly." -St. Theresa of Avila "It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives." -Dorothy Thompson "Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things." -Willa Cather "FUN FACT: Did you know? Alaska is the world's most ultimate state? It is the ultimate state because that is where the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard contacts the planet Earth. (AKA Midgard)" -R. Stevens, DieselSweeties.com "A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side." -Joseph Addison [On his early career.] "I'm proud of those films and even though I've had a career of basically doing failures, or commercial failures, it never felt that way to me." -Johnny Depp, 2006 "The electoral authority in Mexico is completely trustworthy because it is fully in the hands of the citizens." -Vincente Fox, 2006 "No matter how cool your mom is, it will always be uncomfortable to watch a donkey show with her." -Jared "A conscience which has been bought once will be bought twice." -Norbert Wiener "I love it when people get really mean and call you a 'hack'. It's like, don't they see how well these movies are doing? They make an impression around the world. I met this guy in Bali who lives in a hut with a TV, and he loved _The Rock_. That means something, doesn't it?" -Michael Bay "Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom." -Hannah Arendt "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." -Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Scarlet Letter_ "From time to time, I'll draw something up, even if I know, say, ten people will get it. Simply because I think those ten people might just laugh their asses off at it." -John Kovalic, 2006 "The most persistent threat to freedom, to the rights of Americans, is fear." -George Meany "Despite his heartthrob status in real life, Orlando Bloom has consistently functioned as a node of negative energy on-screen, sucking the life force out of all who surround him." -Dana Stevens, Slate.com "The judicious questioning of the conduct and morality of war is the furthest thing from disloyalty: it is an expression of deep patriotism and the essence of responsible citizenship." -Richard Stengel, editor, Time Magazine, 2006 "I believe that people who do not have a favorite dinosaur are people who did not have a proper childhood." -R. Stevens, DieselSweeties.com "I don't know what goes on in their heads out in Hollywood." -Nathan Lane "A beat reporter - digging away on a daily basis - is a fearsome beast." -Dan Froomkin, WashingtonPost.com "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime." -Michael Bay "I have a deep, dark confession to make: when I was a kid, I was really obsessed with _Archie_ comics. There's something about them that makes the teenage lifestyle seem especially fun and glamorous to a 9-to-11-year-old. You think that high school's going to be about dating and friends and wacky contests, rather than humiliation and social exclusion." -JoshReads.com "You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." -Clarence Darrow "Yeah, well, I had a stupid income for what I do." -Angelina Jolie, 2006 "The way of a superior man is threefold; virtuous, he is free from anxieties; wise, he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from fear." -Confucius "To win without risk is to triumph without glory." -Pierre Corneille "If I can go the rest of my life without seeing this 'semi-maverick' construction again, I just might die happy." -Dayv Benzino "There is a Law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish." -Alfred Alder "The history of the world shows that when a mean thing was done, man did it; when a good thing was done, man did it." -Robert G. Ingersoll "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease." -Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address "The strength of the pack is the wolf." -Rudyard Kipling "Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable." -Clare Boothe Luce "I fell in love with the whole ritual. The lights going down, the curtain going up, telling a story to a large group of people in the dark. It was one of those moments where you think, 'I can do that.' You're in control on stage. And I love telling the whole story in one fell swoop. With movies, you never think, 'I nailed it.' In theater you get to go back and do it again, which to me is much more satisfying." -Nathan Lane "Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future." -Jakob Burckhardt "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." -Dwight D. Eisenhower "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." -Abba Eban "Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny." -Carl Schurz "The other day, I was going through the airport security and I was searched by a male security guard. I'm very often referred to as 'sir' in elevators and such. I think it has to do with being this tall and not wearing much lipstick. I think people just can't imagine I'd be a woman if I look like this." -Tilda Swinton "People find life entirely too time-consuming." -Stanislaw J. Lec "One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests." -John Stuart Mill "The Miami Herald had an interesting story about the man in Afghanistan who was sentenced to death after he changed from being a Muslim to a Christian. Now they're making him leave the country. Imagine what would have happened to him if he'd said he thought all religion was nonsense and he was going to be an atheist." -Andy Rooney, _60 Minutes_ "All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma... (We had to witness) wars... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations)... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds." -Stefan Zweig, 1955 "Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence." -Norman Brown "You know who I feel sorry for is Osama bin Laden because all that hating us for our freedom, and now he has to come up with a completely new reason to hate us." -Bill Maher "Dissent is not sacred; the right of dissent is." -Thurman Arnold "On Thursday, the president will follow up his speech by going to the Arizona border, which is historic. It will be the first time he's actually ever shown up with a National Guard unit." -Jay Leno "The president of Iran should remember that Iran can also be wiped off the map." -Shimon Peres, 5/8/2006 "Cheney went even further. He said when they pulled the fish out of the water it greeted them as liberators." -Bill Maher "The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution." -John Adams, 1818 "The White House also issued their recommendation for dealing with the bird flu. The first step, tax cuts for all birds." -Jay Leno "True, there is all sorts of religious extremism all over the place, but the reason for this partly has to do with the fascist attitudes and language of absolutism coming from Washington. It's challenging for people outside of America that Bush was re-elected. It means we're all going to have to work a lot harder to understand what so many more Americans than we thought really want. It's an identity shift in our minds about America and maybe for many Americans as well." -Tilda Swinton "The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety." -Eric Sevareid "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." -Dorothy Parker "Despite President Bush saying last week that the national anthem should only be sung in English, it was revealed several times during his 2000 presidential campaign the song was performed in Spanish. Bush said that his comments last week were based on 'intelligencia malo.'" -Amy Poehler "During the day the people, the police and the army are with the government, but during the night, the people, the police and the army are all with the Taliban and Al Qaeda." -Haji Saifullah, Afghani shopkeeper, 2006 "There's a reason we call them the 10-foot cop. You can see them from blocks away, they're great at crowd control and they're probably the most photographed piece of equipment we have." -Commissioner Raymond Kelly, New York City Police, on their horses "He says he was on Ambien. This is another thing I love about America. Only in America can you call a press conference and say, 'Hey, I wasn't drunk, I was high - on prescription drugs.'" -Bill Maher "A man can become so accustomed to the thought of his own faults that he will begin to cherish them as charming little 'personal characteristics.'" -Helen Rowland "I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq." -Stephen Colbert, 2006, White House Correspondent Dinner "I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the heart-throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses." -Helen Keller, 1903 "Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions." -Ralph Waldo Emerson "When President Bush was in New Orleans, he said 'We pray there is no hurricane coming this year.' This is what we call faith-based disaster planning." -Jay Leno, 2006 "In America, getting on in the world means getting out of the world we have known before." -Ellery Sedgwick "All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble." -William S. Halsey "For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while." -Luther Burbank "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." -Anais Nin, 1937 "Because, at least when it comes to dessert, the coconut is not a food product but a projectile designed to be hurled by monkeys." -Robin D. Laws "One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us." -Kurt Vonnegut, 2004 "George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history." -Sean Wilentz, 2006 "We want consumers to say, 'That's a hell of a product' instead of, 'That's a hell of an ad.'" -Leo Burnett "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -Elbert Hubbard "Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _____ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means 'submission'. The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done." -Timothy Leary "Never practice what you preach. If you're going to practice it, why preach it?" -Lincoln Steffens "The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all - that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open - has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?" -Federico Fellini "It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous." -Charles Dudley Warner, 1873 "Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction." -W.H. Auden "Taste. You cannot buy such a rare and wonderful thing. You can't send away for it in a catalogue. And I'm afraid it's becoming obsolete." -Rosalind Russell "At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right." -Miguel de Unamuno "I don't think it does the reputation of a college any good to have a basketball team that's better known than it's academic standing." -Andy Rooney, _60 Minutes_ "Pop culture... doesn't just tolerate woman-hating, loutish, drunken and angry boy-behavior - it glorifies it." -Dick Meyer, CBSNews.com "It's true information is harder to get these days. When I was growing up there were three networks - three news shows, delivering the same information. You took that information into your home and you formed your own opinions. Now we have 130 channels. You go to the channel that plays to your belief pattern. We start with different sets of facts, it's more polarizing." -George Clooney "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -James Madison "We never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there's no ending to our story. Because we haven't found our deceased." -Wanda Jackson, Katrina survivor, NYTimes.com "Yes, that's the president of the United States talking about deliberately faking a UN overflight in order to provoke a phony confrontation with Saddam - or if that didn't work, trotting out a defector to lie about Iraqi WMD. Honor and dignity, baby, honor and dignity." -Kevin Drum, 2006 "He may accomplish by craft and subtlety, in the long run, what he cannot do by force and violence in the short one." -Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ "The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much." -Amelia Edith Barr "The Senate should stop focusing on all these politics and get to the issue at hand." -President George W. Bush, 2006 "Someone I met years ago explained to me the difference between a personality and an actor, a personality being Eddie Murphy or Roseanne Barr, and an actor being Morgan Freeman and Alfre Woodard or Marlon Brando. And in the shrinking world of sound bites, the Internet, and other mass media, there were going to be fewer actors and more personalities." -Orlando Jones, 2000 "What is more unwise than to mistake uncertainty for certainty, falsehood for truth?" -Cicero "I watch the news on television every night but in the morning I read the newspaper to find out what really happened." -Andy Rooney, _60 Minutes_ "As I see it, in [America] - a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism - the race is on between the decadence and its vitality." -Alistair Cooke "A man is only as good as what he loves." -Saul Bellow "Since the U.S. invasion, there has not been a single day without mortar fire, car bombings or IED attacks." -Richard Engel, NBC, 2006 "The situation for many here has worsened. Since the war, millions of Iraqis no longer have drinkable water. In Baghdad, there's electricity for fewer than eight hours a day, compared to 18 before. And in a country with so much oil, today there are unfathomably long gas lines." -Dan Harris, ABC, 2006 "Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." -Andre Gide "The tradition in this country of a law enforcement agency that had absolute power over people, we've got to break them of that. I think it'll take years. You can't change a cultural mind-set overnight." -Major Andrew Creel, 2006, on Iraq "I'm of two minds about the NAACP, I'll be brutally honest. When I was writing for 'Sinbad' and 'Roc Live,' I remember the pilot for 'Martin' coming on, and a year later, the NAACP giving him an Image Award. A few years later, Martin was under fire for being 'coonish' or whatever the word was people were using. And I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. You give the guy an Image Award three years in a row and then turn on him like that? If that's the role they want to fulfill, they need to send a clearer message. I want balance. I want to see as many black professionals as possible. I don't care if a guy plays a wild, broad, completely downtrodden character, but I also want to see an average joe; the middle class has been completely unrepresented." -Orlando Jones, 2000 "The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality." -Arnold Joseph Toynbee "A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody.'" -James Thurber "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -Bertholt Brecht "We do not acquire humility. There is humility in us - only we humiliate ourselves before false gods." -Simone Weil "There hasn't been such a juicy battle since Jimmy Carter tried to eliminate the three-martini lunch. (This, younger readers, was back when grownups drank something called martinis.)" -Howard Kurtz, WashingtonPost.com "I don't want to be working just for money... then you're no different from a prostitute." -Natalie Portman, 2006 "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular." -Edward R. Murrow "Nearly all our disasters come from a few fools having the 'courage of their convictions.'" -Coventry Patmore "Pleasure is nature's test, her sign of approval." -Oscar Wilde "No one is such a liar as the indignant man." -Friedrich Nietzsche "There've been a lot of questions about commercial films and non-commercial films, and I've never really made that separation in my mind. There's no question that when you read a piece of material, you have ideas about how it should be realised... Certainly when I read the script for _Ocean's Eleven_, I thought if this was realised the way it should, then it would appeal to a lot of people. Then you get involved in a film like _Solaris_ and if you realise it the way it should be realized, then it won't appeal to a lot of people. But what are you going to do? You have to go at it." -Steven Soderbergh "People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history." -J. Danforth Quayle "So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence." -Bertrand Russell "Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harms we do, we do to ourselves." -Mitch Albom "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." -Susan B. Anthony "Ninety percent of films are pretty mediocre, but they have a built-in audience and open on 3,000 screens." -George Clooney "Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions." -Henry R. Luce "In a better, more conserva-friendly America, we'd get not _Brokeback Mountain_ but perhaps a film about a happy, heterosexual family man living in Boston suddenly inspired to abandon his wife and children by the legalization of gay marriage. With the main breadwinner gone, the wife can't afford to pay the bills when the kids get sick. In crucial scenes, she bemoans not the GOP congressional cuts in Medicaid or child support enforcement, but the local state government's lack of enthusiasm for discriminating against gays and lesbians... In the conservative mind, this has all the makings of a hit, if the public's yearning for such fare weren't being stifled once again by the all-powerful liberals." -Matthew Yglesias, CBSnews.com "I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it, and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't." -Lucille Ball "The problem for President Bush is a growing perception that he simply isn't competent. That's the story behind the polling numbers that have declined - bad week by bad week - since February 2005 when the president's approval rating stood at a respectable 52 percent. The predecessor whom Bush has begun to resemble isn't, as many liberal Democrats seem to believe, Richard Nixon. It's Jimmy Carter. Carter's political demise began when the American people, including many Democrats, started to perceive him as in over his head in the Oval Office. That's what may be happening now to Bush." -Alan Abramowitz, WashingtonPost.com "There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind's wheat and the other kind's emeralds." -Edna Ferber "You can't beat your enemy anymore through wars; instead you create an entire generation of people revenge-seeking. These days it only matters who's in charge. Right now that's us - for a while at least. Our opponents are going to resort to car bombs and suicide attacks because they have no other way to win. ...I believe [Rumsfeld] thinks this is a war that can be won, but there is no such thing anymore. We can't beat anyone anymore." -George Clooney "Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door." -Saul Bellow "Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts." -Clarence Day "The bottom of Pandora's Box offered not just hope, but amnesia." -CatAndGirl.com "Would I, growing up, like to have had access to stuff on DVDs like this? Oh God, yeah! It's better than any film school, I think." -Steven Soderbergh, on DVD commentary tracks "The question 'Who ought to be boss?' is like as 'Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?' Obviously, the man who can sing tenor." -Henry Ford "Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic." -Pierre Boutroux "Who could have guessed that our biggest movie star would also be the biggest clown in the three-ring celebrity circus? That the formerly tight-lipped, super-controlled, nary-a-misstep-making Tom Cruise would unravel like a cheap sweater snagged on a bent nail? Holy Moly Moses, he was the perfect storm of celebrity. There he was: on screen, on TV, on the web, grinning, leaping, snapping, fist-pumping, Katie Holmes-impregnating, sonogram-machine-buying, expectation-confounding, celebrity-redefining Tom Cruise. It's like fame was Tom Cruise's cellmate, and last year, he made fame his bitch. One crazy, over-the-top, unbelievable antic at a time." -Fametracker.com "I used to keep in my mind that Iraq will come back one day. Now the Iraq I wish to have cannot come back. There is no core left to rebuild." -Shirouq Abayachi, 2006 "Most of us probably feel we couldn't be free without newspapers, and that is the real reason we want the newspapers to be free." -Edward R. Murrow "NBC spent $613 million to get beaten in the ratings by a CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and, especially, American Idol. (Perhaps the Olympics would get better ratings if they used amateurs again?)" -Best Week Ever "Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof." -Ashley Montague "Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics, in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such, and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit." -Tom Robbins "In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality." -Mary McCarthy "George W. Bush's presidency is another era of overreaction at the expense of constitutional rights, but the prospects for a quick correction are not auspicious. Nothing has helped end earlier bouts of repression so much as the fact that the wars themselves came to a close, and nothing has so exposed our liberties to indefinite jeopardy as the conception of a 'war on terrorism' with no end." -Paul Starr, _American Prospect_ "Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign saying, 'Come right in; there is no one at home' is not the equivalent of hospitality." -John Dewey "But the presidency wasn't intended to function as a publicly traded corporation, nor has it for most of our history. Modern campaigns have profoundly changed modern government, pushing them toward this commercial model. The evolution started with Ronald Reagan and Bush has put it on steroids." -Dick Meyer, CBSNews.com "What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance." -Havelock Ellis "We really can't fault New Line's marketing department for the shocking play for attention - if your movie can be described as a 'Paul Walker vehicle,' you'd probably light your children on fire to distract people from that unfortunate fact." -Defamer.com "In scandal, as in robbery, the receiver is always as bad as the thief." -Lord Chesterfield "The artist and the businessman should cultivate every opportunity to teach and supplement one another, to cooperate with one another, just as the nations of the world must do. Only in such a fusion of talents, abilities, and philosophies can there be even a modest hope for the future, a partial alleviation of the chaos and misunderstandings of today." -Walter Paepcke, 2002 "Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets." -Arthur Miller "To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can have." -Theodore H. White "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." -Pablo Picasso "It's interesting that 'A Visit from Saint Nicholas,' one of the seminal texts of the modern Claus, specifies eight tiny reindeer. I don't know why the miniature aspect of the reindeer has been abandoned. Personally, the idea of big ol' Santa and his big ol' sleigh being hauled around by a bunch of shar-pei sized ungulates comes perilously close to filling me with something vaguely related to Christmas spirit. I think if we're not going to embrace the tininess of the reindeer, we should pick another two-syllable adjective for the poem. I suggest 'angry.'" -BookOfRatings.com "Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true." -Niels Bohr "The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one." -H.L. Mencken "Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason." -Ashley Montagu "As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress." -J. Robert Oppenheimer "In a 58-42 vote on Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Samuel Alito as the nation's next Supreme Court Justice, meaning if you want an abortion, you'd better hop to it." -Tina Fey "A visit to cyberspace is like a visit to the collective consciousness of the world. Alice's journey seems tame by comparison. Our hopes, our dreams, our monumental accomplishments, our frailties, and the everyday business of life is all there to be shared." -Vinton Cerf "Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries." -James Michener "Abolition of capital punishment once and for all will help create a more civilized society. It will rebound to the advantage and honour of the nation." -Dr. Michael Ramsey, 1969 "It was naive of the 19th century optimists to expect paradise from technology - and it is equally naive of the 20th century pessimists to make technology the scapegoat for such old shortcomings as man's blindness, cruelty, immaturity, greed and sinful pride." -Peter F. Drucker
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