Quote-o-rama:
The Sixteenth Miscellaneous File
"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery "Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press." -Alexander Solzhenitsyn "We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about." -Joseph Campbell "Fiat justitia et pereat mundus. (Let justice be done, though the world perish.)" -Ferdinand I, H.R.E. "The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, 'I was wrong.'" -Sydney J. Harris "This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape." -Willa Cather "Very occasionally, if you really pay attention, life doesn't suck." -Joss Whedon "When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else." -Sam Ervin "It's my job to make sure none of these guys wakes up with seven hookers and a pound of marijuana" -LeRoy Butler, Green Bay Packers "Now, a lot of people have said a guy who can't use a computer is the wrong person for the White House. Last time I checked, the president only needs to know how to press one button." -Stephen Colbert, 8/2008 "Night my banner, and my herald Fear." -Frances Bannerman "If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." -Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 2003 "She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities." -Henry James "I am not a pacifist and I support a professional army. But I oppose the draft even in times of war. If your country cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself when attacked, then it's not worth defending." -Barnard Chazelle, 2008 "My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists." -Jean Rostand "There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter - the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion." -E.B. White, "Here is New York" "Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty." -Henri Frederic Amiel "...The other practitioners of cinematic drivel can rest a little easier now; they can walk in the daylight with their heads held high, a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts. It's okay, they'll tell themselves. I didn't make _Alone in the Dark_." -Rob Vaux "I know what the conservatives think, what the liberals think, what the Democrats think, what the Republicans think. And I try to master both sides of an issue to a point where I'm totally confused as to what I think." -Tim Russert, 2004 "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -Robert A. Heinlein "The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish." -Robert Jackson "After the war, suddenly there was this thing for ugly heroes, so I started going around in profile." _Robert Mitchum "It's little wonder that when Peter Jackson remade King Kong a couple of years ago, he set it in the 1930s rather than updating the setting a la the 1976 remake. It's pretty much the last moment before technology lifted the veil on the whole planet." -Keith Phipps, Onion AV Club "It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem." -Malcolm Forbes "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him. -J.R R. Tolkien, _The Hobbit_ "There's nothing better than a party that turns into a death trap." -Russell T. Davies "Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it." -Stephen L. Carter "People tend to dismiss certain genre films as 'just funny' or 'just scary,' which I find maddening. Making a genuinely funny or scary movie is a considerable achievement in itself. Anybody can get a cheap shock from a black cat leaping out from the darkness, but to sustain a mood of visceral, nerve-jangling terror for two straight hours the way _The Exorcist_ does should not be dismissed as a triumph of empty craftsmanship." -Nathan Rabin, Onion AV Club "I suppose it can be truthfully said that Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity." -Robert G. Ingersoll "There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe could be constructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than trying to discover these secrets." -Ted Simon "The first woman I married said that she never heard a writer tell something exactly as it happened, and I kind of scoffed at that at the time. Thinking about it now, yeah, she's right. We always have a tendency to make it a good story. And I try not to do that anymore, in reaction partially to what's happening politically in this country, where truth doesn't seem to count for anything anymore." -Denny O'Neil, 2008 "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 "Remember when sweeps week indicated that the show was going to pull out its very best? Those were good times, man. Good times." -TelevisionWithoutPity.com "Why don't I work a day in advance, you ask? Well, that's kind of like asking me why I'm a boy. God put what he did where he did, and now I'm prone to thinking of Chuck Norris every few days. I make no apologies. I doubt Chuck would either." -Chris Onstad, 2008 "I believe in transparency. I think the lack of transparency is bad for the country and bad for the president both. To me, that's been one of the great lessons of the Bush Years." -Dan Froomkin, 2008 "The only reason I made a commercial for American Express was to pay for my American Express bill." -Peter Ustinov "Costner, on the other hand, has become synonymous with colossal failure and questionable judgment. From his legendary performance as a pee-drinking man-fish in _Waterworld_ on through to this equally floptastic turn in _Rumor Has It_ (or as Keith and his wife Stevie call it, Everyone Fucks Costner) the question most asked about Costner's bewildering oeuvre is 'WTF?' followed by 'What was he thinking?'" -Nathan Rabin, Onion AV Club "I'm very sleek, like a cheetah. But I am an out-of-shape cheetah." -Michael Ian Black, PostExpress.com, 2007 "Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy." -George Carlin "Seriously, you guys? I *love* Cobra Commander. I mean, that guy was such an unbelievable threat to America that they had to get the best soldiers in the Army, the best Marine, the best sailor in the Navy, the best pilot in the Air Force and *five ninjas* together to stop him, and yet his plans always revolve around nuclear-powered fast food restaurants, mind-control perfume and space-lasers that turn people into lizard cats or something. And if you don't see something truly beautiful in that, then brother, you're on the wrong website." -Chris Sims, the-isb.com "Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm." -John F. Kennedy "Man, kids really seem to love imitating adults. Hence the toy-store sections full of cheap little plastic kiddie versions of pots and pans, vacuum cleaners and scrub-brushes, and briefcases and cell phones, all so Junior can happily pretend to be doing something you yourself would really rather never do again." -Onion AV Club, 2007 "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." -Leo Tolstoy "In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right." -Ellen Goodman "Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night." -Philip K. Dick "I don't begrudge this plot its stupidity or lack of verisimilitude; some of my best friends are stupid and far-fetched." -Dana Stevens, slate.com "And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they're accessible to others is unquestioned, or it's not America." -Dwight David Eisenhower "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -Justice Louis D. Brandeis "In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be." -Hubert H. Humphrey "I tend to be more surprised when Luke Wilson isn't in a movie." -Onion AV Club "He who does not have the courage to speak up for his rights cannot earn the respect of others." - Rene Torres "...The Reagan around which this conservative circle is jerking is a myth, a fabrication, a fiction. The real Reagan raised taxes (or rather engaged in 'revenue enhancements'), presided over a massive recession, cut and ran when faced with bloody terror attacks, talked constantly about a balanced budget and a line-item veto but did nothing about them, and 'won' the Cold War by spending nonexistent money that would be handed down to his heirs, never to be paid off, as if this were somehow more fiscally conservative than the tax-and-spend model with which he vilified Democrats. Reagan's strength as a paragon of conservativism is identical to Christopher Reeve's strength as Superman, a pleasant fiction propped up with special effects and made believable by the empty shell upon which it was impressed." -Leonard Pierce, SadlyNo.com "This homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women and children." -Jerry Falwell "A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven't." -Irvin Cobb "We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it." -Thomas Henry Huxley "One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." -A.A. Milne "I've said it before and I'll say it again: the worst thing any film can do is uplift the human spirit. If a movie even attempts to warm the cockles of my black, shriveled little heart I get fighting mad." -Nathan Rabin, Onion AV Club, 2007 "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." -Joseph Conrad "All good war photographers understand their ultimate client is posterity." -Michael Shaw, BAGnewsNotes.com "The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." -William Jennings Bryan, July 9, 1896 "If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain." -Andre Maurois "At this point Andy Dick and David Arquette have collectively irritated every man, woman and child in God’s United States. If there were a Mount Rushmore of obnoxious jackassery Arquette and Dick's smirking mugs would rest next to hideously oversized visages of Pauly Shore and Carrot Top just waiting to be slapped hard by some agitated fifty-foot-tall giant-ass motherfucker." -Nathan Rabin, avclub.com "I wish 'tort reform' was as dirty as it sounds." -Ana Marie Cox, 2007 "Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." -Brendan Gill "Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses." -Juvenal "What I love most about the Penn & Teller thing is that it's so smart. For me it's sort of like Dennis Miller mated with Houdini." -John Tesh, 2007 "The world will never starve for wonders; but only for want of wonder." -G.K. Chesterton "HD video is beautiful for sports, but it doesn't help comedy, and it doesn't help humans. I hate being shot on HD video, because I look like two Frankensteins raped a Dracula." -Tina Fey, Wired, October 2007 "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." -Romans 12:21 "Seriously: who ever imagined that in the first decade of this new century, Americans would be nonchalantly discussing how *much* torture is acceptable?" -Tom Tomorrow "My old friend Bob Woodward of Watergate fame was once asked how he thought the Watergate story would come out when he first started covering it. He said, 'We had no idea how it would come out, we were just trying to find out what happened.' That's the best advice I can give to any reporter covering anything. If a reporter does that, he or she has done what they are supposed to do." -Bob Schieffer, 2007 "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." -Leo Tolstoy "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." -President Theodore Roosevelt "I realized a long time ago that a belief which does not spring from a conviction in the emotions is no belief at all." -Evelyn Scott "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." -J. Robert Oppenheimer "Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper." -Larry Flynt "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come." -2 Timothy 3:1 "Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can." -Thomas Merton "It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink [at] facts because they are not to our taste." -John Tyndall "In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra." -Fran Lebowitz "I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience." -Martin Buber "The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath." -Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart "How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery." -Ephesians 3:3 "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." -James Madison "One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways." -Bertrand Russell "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." -Frank Zappa "Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch." -Larry Flynt "When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." -Anatole France "Real stories, in distinction from those we invent, have no author. Although history owes its existence to men, it is not 'made' by them." -Hannah Arendt "Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror." -Carlos Fuentes "Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless." -Sinclair Lewis "People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization." -Agnes Repplier "Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does." -Bill Nye "Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want." -Clive Barnes "We are great fools: He has spent his life in idleness. We say, 'I have done nothing today.' Really, have you not lived? This is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. Have you been able to think about and manage your life? You have managed the greatest burden of all. To compose our nature is our responsibility, not to write books. To gain order and tranquility, not to win battles and provinces, is our goal. Our grand and glorious masterpiece is to live suitably." -Michel de Montaigne "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." -Rosa Luxemburg "I can dress as a bloke or dress more girly; I switch easy-peasy. But since I'm trying to be in dramatic television, I've been in bloke mode for these past few years. I'm like a superhero, like the Human Torch. I can do flame on, flame off." -Eddie Izzard, 2007 "I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past." -John Maynard Keynes "The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter." -Mark Twain "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." -Eugene McCarthy "I’ve often wondered, what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by a power from outer space, from another planet. Wouldn't we all of a sudden find that we didn’t have any differences between us at all, we were all human beings, citizens of the world, and wouldn't we come together to fight that particular threat?" -President Ronald Reagan, May 1988 "The only question to ask yourself is, how much are you willing to sacrifice to achieve this success?" -Larry Flynt "I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life." -Anais Nin, 1980 "When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it." -Guillermo del Toro "Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting." -Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco "The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation." -Woodrow Wilson "I've always felt that we shouldn't be afraid of sex and we shouldn't be afraid of violence, because they are part of the world. Why can I not shoot what is the reality of every human couple—heterosexual, bisexual, or whatever? Why am I supposed to be cryptic when it's about sex?" -Paul Verhoeven, 2007 "I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly." -Michel de Montaigne "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." -Aristotle "Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster." -William Randolph Hearst "Any time there's a scandal, we always try and get involved." -Larry Flynt "Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering." -R. Buckminster Fuller "Are they trying to show us the strip would look like if it were acted out by two cut-rate drag queens? Because if they are, I'm honestly kind of intrigued. Im not sure what it would take to get me interested in this storyline, but having it acted out by two cut-rate drag queens is probably on the list somewhere." -JoshReads.com "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas A. Edison "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised." -Marilyn Manson "The good news is that if you go to university, you gain the singular education that allows you to find Eddie Izzard funny." -Warren Ellis "The notion of the single man began in the 1950's. The idea of the bachelor as a separate life was new and obscure." -Hugh Hefner "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -Steven Weinberg "I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. -Richard Feynman "You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do." -David Cronenberg "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." -John Wanamaker "A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood." -Mark Ardis "Being a geek means you're passionate about something and that defines your uniqueness. I would rather be passionate about something than be apathetic about everything." -Masi Oka, 2006 "Anything too stupid to be said is sung." -Voltaire "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." -Richard Feynman "One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?'" -Rachel Carson "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." -Albert Einstein "Life is too short to be living somebody else's dream." -Hugh Hefner "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." -William Hazlitt "Yep, it's sentences like that that make me thing you maybe SHOULDN'T tell folks were your ideas come from." -Dinosaur Comics, qwantz.com "Our goal as journalists is to firmly occupy reality. To be pro-fact. We should not be taken in by the delusions of either the right or the left. Over time, however, that has been reduced to a shorthand version: Occupy the center." -Dan Froomkin, April 2007 "What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable." -Louise Nevelson "If you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman." -Margaret Thatcher "Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not." -Henry Fielding "The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous." -Lin Yutang, 1937 "To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman." -George Santayana "American movies in the last years have gone in the direction of non-confrontational, easy on the audience, pleasant to the audience, escapist, not confronting reality much, or not integrating reality to a strong and harsh degree, like life is. I think life is full of violence, and that has been avoided, I think, perhaps as a reaction to 9/11, because that was too much reality to swallow. People have, after that, been moving to the other side, to the fantasy side." -Paul Verhoeven, 2007 "If you haven't had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature." -Phyllis Battelle "Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine." -Gore Vidal "Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. That is cyberpunk." -Bruce Sterling "It's much more fun [to shop for women's clothes]. You can buy so many shoes. I think women say, 'If I just get enough heels of varying sizes, if a nuclear war comes, I'll have enough shoes.'" -Eddie Izzard, 2007 "The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward." -John Maynard Keynes "I like penguins. I like how contrasty they are. I would also like to be a kangaroo because I like hopping. They're cute and, yet, their hind legs are so powerful and their nails so sharp that they can disembowel opponents." -Mo Rocca, 2006 "You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea." -Medgar Evers "Life is made up of desires that seem big and vital one minute, and little and absurd the next. I guess we get what's best for us in the end." -Alice Caldwell Rice "The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity. We have a tendency it seems to over complicate our lives and forget what's important and what's not. We tend to mistake movement for achievement. We tend to focus on activities instead of results. And as the pace of life continues to race along in the outside world, we forget that we have the power to control our lives regardless of what's going on outside." -Robert Stuberg "We see many who are struggling against adversity who are happy, and more although abounding in wealth, who are wretched." -Tacitus "Creating a family in this turbulent world is an act of faith, a wager that against all odds there will be a future, that love can last, that the heart can triumph against all adversities and even against the grinding wheel of time." -Dean Koontz "Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it." -T.S. Eliot "It is a strange desire, to seek power and lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains, and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing." -Francis Bacon "Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society." -Wes Craven "It is the darling delusion of mankind that the world is progressive in religion, toleration, freedom, as it is progressive in machinery." -Moncure D. Conway "I think it's insane. The media has created a two-year presidential election cycle that's very destructive to American politics. And the political system is complicit. We front-load our primaries so much that four or five states decide who the nominees are going to be. It's over by February. And then we have a God-awful yearlong presidential campaign, general election campaign, which is too long and lends itself to all these negative attacks. If we were to design a system for electing a president, I don't think we could do worse. It's terrible." -Gov. Edward G. Rendell (PA), 2007 "Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd around their shores." -William Blake "Every now and then, it seems reasonable to stop and wonder, 'Where have all the sitcoms gone?' Then one network or another will introduce a new one, it will fall to earth with a sad 'splat,' and you are reminded that perhaps the only thing worse than a bad sitcom is a bad reality show. It's a race too close to call." -Tom Shales, WashingtonPost.com, 2007 "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous." -Molly Ivins, 2007 "Authority without wisdom is like a heavy ax without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish." -Anne Bradstreet "Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." -H. Mumford Jones "In the city, nudity means something. In the wild, it just exists." -Mason Cooley, _City Aphorisms_ T-Rex: Because of how dumb it is, I can never forget that sentence. Utahraptor: I, too, will take it to my grave. -Dinosaur Comics, qwantz.com "No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other." -Jascha Heifetz "The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection." -Henry Ward Beecher "Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult." -Nadia Boulanger "The trouble is that hardly anybody in America goes to bed angry at night." -George J. Stigler "There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for." -Sir Fred Hoyle "The worst thing that an actor can do is go into any project with a lack of respect for the material. You can have an opinion about it, but you have to respect yourself in doing it." -Alfred Molina "If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered." -Stanley Kubrick "In the West Bank, a group calling itself the Lions of Monotheism firebombed four churches, telling the Associated Press, 'The attacks... were carried out to protest the Pope's remarks linking Islam and violence.' The irony - and this is often the case, we find - was completely lost on them." -Jon Stewart, _The Daily Show_, 2006 "Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world." -Grace Paley "Sure I can play the bass. Anyone can play the bass. It's an idiot's instrument. It was invented so the guitarist and drummer would qualify for the carpool lane." _Achewood_ "The force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral." -Nicholas Murray Butler "Every society is violent. And the Maya were no more cruel than any other, especially if you look at their entire history. What if you told the story of our history and didn't mention Pascal or Mozart or science or medicine and just focused on MTV and mass genocide?" -Arthur Demarest "More than any other President that I can think of, [Bush has] really, truly shattered the myth of white supremacy." -Rep. Chuck Rangel, 2007 "If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave." -Cato "Remember, folks, miniseries that are almost purpose-designed to be completely inaccessible to anybody who hasn't been obsessively collecting comics for the better part of twenty-five years are the future fo the industry!" -Christopher Bird, mightygodking.livejournal.com "A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case." -Finley Peter Dunne "You were in Baghdad for six hours! And you weren't even in the real Baghdad - you were in the Green Zone. That's like going to the Olive Garden and saying you've been to Italy." -Jon Stewart, _The Daily Show_, 2006 "...So I'll just say this: If there's a super-villain name better than The Mad Thinker's Awesome Android, then I have yet to hear it. If only he had been designed only for killing..." -Chris Sims, the-isb.blogspot.com "I don't want to be someone who's trying to spin this public image of me. I have had some negative tabloid press, I'm sure you're aware. but I don't like to portray myself as somehow a nice, well-rounded person." -Steve Coogan "The power of the blogosphere, I'd suggest, is not in raw numbers but in ideas that garner attention. And now, for the first time since Gutenberg, you don't need access to a printing press (or radio mike or TV tower) to reach an audience." -Howard Kurtz, WashingtonPost.com Clango: Vengeance isn't forgiveness! Suzie: I know! It's *better.* -DieselSweeties.com "The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves." -Irwin Edman "The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit. It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives." -Rich Lowry, National Review "We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." -Franz Kafka "I have the rest of my life to sit on the beach." -Carl Lewis, 1996 "Basically, our goal is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful." -Larry Page, co-founder, Google.com "I always find it easier to portray myself as being unlikeable and idiotic; to actually play a character that is likeable and engages the audience is far more difficult. It's a more subtle kind of challenge." -Steve Coogan "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." -Will Durant "Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it." -Federico Fellini "Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities. Things appear to assume a broader and more diversified meaning, often seemingly contradicting the rational experience of yesterday. There is a striving to emphasize the essential character of the accidental." -Paul Klee "The real problem is what to do with the problem solvers after the problems are solved." -Gay Talese "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." -Gertrude Stein "The next great step of mankind is to step into the nature of his own mind." -Stanley Kauffmann "The fact that I talk like Dr. Doom to my friends is probably why I have a hard time meeting new people, but that's beside the point." -Chris Sims, the-isb.blogspot.com "Actors say they do their own stunts for the integrity of the film but I did them because they looked like a lot of fun." -Steve Coogan "Nothing is more despicable than a professional talker who uses his words as a quack uses his remedies." -Francois Fenelon "My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed." -Christopher Morley "Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so." -Charles de Gaulle "When you're kind of my size and look the way I do, leading man romantic leads aren't going to come your way." -Alfred Molina "The ultimate aim of the human mind, in all its efforts, is to become acquainted with Truth." -Eliza Farnham "What do years of exposure to insipid sitcoms do to the human brain? Maybe nothing, since they may bypass the brain altogether and register instead in some other internal organ - say, the gallbladder. Shouldn't science be studying this? More to the point, shouldn't TV critics receive the equivalent of combat pay? Or at least free psychiatric counseling and hot chocolate for life at Starbucks?" -Tom Shales, 2006, WashingtonPost.com
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