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Rev. Martin Neimoller (German, ?-1984):
First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the homosexuals, and I did not speak out because I was not a homosexual.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me. |
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Pericles (Ancient Greek, 495-429 BC):
Grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.
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Socrates (Ancient Greek, 469-399 BC):
The children of today now live in luxury. They have bad manners, they show disrespect for adults, and love to talk, rather than work or exercise. They contradict their parents, chatter in front of company, gobble down their food at the table, and intimidate their teachers.
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Karl Marx (German, 1818-1883):
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but rather under circumstances found, given, and transmitted.
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David E. Sluss (from http://www.cynicscorner.org/voy_5/voy_526.html, 1999):
Voyager’s gross misuse of the prefix “iso-“ continues. In the real world, “iso-“ means “equal.” In the Star Trek world, in which science and language education stop at the fourth grade level, “iso-” is used as a prefix for units of measure, and always seems to imply a large amount (e.g. “4 iso-tons of Robert Beltran”). But this week, Equinox’s engineer frets about having only a few iso-grams of dilithium crystals. I conclude that “iso-,” like so many other words and syllables in the Star Trek world, doesn’t really mean anything, but is used as an interjection, perhaps as a substitute for some crude 20th-Century-style invective. For instance, today, I might say, “There’s only one f^#$ing beer left in the fridge!” In the more genteel and civilized world of the 24th Century, I would say instead: “There’s only one iso-beer left in the fridge!”
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (American, 1929-1968):
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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Thomas Jefferson (American, 1743-1826):
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
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Woody Allen (American, 1935-)
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
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James Joyce (Irish, 1882-1941; from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916):
What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been carried all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals – at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not even one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time, there mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun.
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Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American, 1835-1910; from Life on the Mississippi, 1883):
When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that ever came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
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Ayn Rand (American, 1905-1982; from Atlas Shrugged, 1957):
Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment – just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, on in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience – or to fake – a sense of self-esteem. [. . .] But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises – because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him. [. . .] His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all that he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex – nothing but shame.
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Flip Wilson (American, 1933-1998):
What I had in mind mentioning was an incident that took place recently when I was returning from Chicago by train. I was in my seat and I was very relaxed, very relaxed. And as I sat there, I tried to familiarize myself with my surroundings. And I noticed that the woman across from me in the aisle had her baby with her. Ugly baby. Bad-looking baby. Normally I wouldn’t pass judgment on someone else’s kid, but even if I don’t say it, it’s an ugly baby. In from the other end of the train comes this guy, and he’s had a few. And he stops and he stares. And he says to her, “You know lady, that’s an ugly baby. That’s a bad-looking baby you’ve got there. I bet you save a lot of money with that kid. You don’t need a babysitter; nobody’s gonna bother that kid.” And the lady gets offended – she gets offended. And she snatches the emergency cord and the train comes to a screeching halt, and everyone comes rushing in, even the guy that sells those five-cent sandwiches for a buck-and-a-half. There's a big commotion, and the conductor comes running in, and he says, “What's going on here?” And the woman says, “This man just insulted me. I don't have to spend my money to ride this railroad and be insulted.” And the conductor says, “Ma’am, the Pennsylvania Railroad will go to any length to resolve conflicts between passengers. Perhaps it would be more to your convenience if we were to rearrange your seating and let you sit somewhere else in the coach. And as a small compensation from the railroad, if you will accompany me to the dining car, we will treat you to a complimentary meal, and maybe we'll find a banana for your monkey.”
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Douglas Adams (British, 1952-2001):
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII, and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
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