"You can't just say, 'I don't want to get involved.'
The universe got you involved."
--Hal Lipset, P.I.
"There are no halfway measures against bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism.
It's got to be rejected totally."
--Abraham Foxman, Holocaust survivor.
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education
and catastrophe."
--H.G. Wells
"I love my country far too much to be a nationalist."
--Unknown
"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it."
--Abbie Hoffman
"Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values."
--Jose Ortega y Gasset
"Power corrupts, but absolute power is a blast."
--Junior White House staff
"A housing commission that leans to the right
makes a town healthy, wealthy, and white."
--Lampoon of Berkeley commissioner Christine Reed
"Only the educated are free."
--Epictetus, Discourses
"You can get more done with a kind word and a gun
than you can with a kind word alone".
--Alphonse Capone
"The world is made up of *too many* insensitive, malicious
people unworthy of my attention who by their every word and
action declare themselves an enemy of who and what I
am...and these people make decisions that affect my life.
Fortunately, I have developed the self-confidence and
strength to withstand these things or I wouldn't be here
today...but I'm *still pissed*, and I have every *right* to
that anger."
--Carleton Cornish
"Liberty is a duty, not a right"
--Benito Mussolini
"When you can't say 'fuck,' you can't say 'fuck the government'"
--Lenny Bruce
"Our government is the potent, omnipresent teacher.
For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example."
--Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead
[Note: This is Tim McVeigh's favorite quote,
which he repeated at his trial. Isn't that special?]
"Becoming a politician is the only step down I could
take from being a journalist."
--Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture
"Reagan's idea of a good farm program is 'Hee-Haw'."
--Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture
"Even a little dog can piss on a big building."
--Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics
are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of
doubts."
--Bertrand Russel
"So what are you whining for? I've never understood that
about Republicans. Even when they win, they manage to come
off sounding like an oppressed minority."
--Eric Holeman
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because
plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in
philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have
neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its
pipes nor its theories will hold water."
--John W. Gardner, Forbes magazine, Aug. 1, 1977
"Nearly all men can withstand adversity; If you want to test a man's
character, give him power."
--Abraham Lincoln
"I'm into two-fisted love and I vote."
--Jojo
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
--Cousin Woodman
"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal
drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
--Lyle Myhr
"God, was she a good player. I was so fascinated in watching her
bid and play that I could hardly concentrate on her breasts."
--Senator Bob Packwood (R-OR), commenting on his bridge opponent
in his diaries, as printed in the Washington Post
"[Personhole] is not an acceptable de-sexed word."
--Shirley Dean, councilperson from the Berkeley, (California)
City Council, explaining why the Council changed the wording in a sewer
equipment request back to manhole cover
"Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it
attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and
makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition
law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our
government was founded."
--Abraham Lincoln
"The Twentieth Century has seen increasing visibility of the age-old
phenomenon of the alcoholic turned Prohibitionist. Such people invest
every bit as much time and energy using their newfound crusade against
the 'evils' of 'That Fatal Glass of Beer' as they had in activities
surrounding drinking, blissfully unaware that they have merely exchanged
one set of addictive behavior for another. Almost inevitably, they turn
to false analogy and derisive disbelief when faced with evidence that
the vast majority of people can consume alcohol on a regular basis
without becoming alcoholics."
--Unknown
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under
robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated;
but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for
they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
--C.S. Lewis
"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, or perilous to
conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in
the introduction of a new order of things."
--Niccolo Machiavelli.
"The witch wants quiet, regular, ordinary good government
with everyone happy, plenty of fun and games,
all fear of death being taken away."
--Gerald Brousseay Gardner (famed British witch)
"The problem with the global villiage is
all the global villiage idiots."
--P. Ginsparg
"Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its
mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American
melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick
J. Buchanan hates."
--David Denby, New York magazine film critic
"By refusing to acknowledge the existence of homosexuality,
schools shove heterosexuality down the throats of gay
children. Just because straights make up a larger proportion
of the population doesn't mean you can have every single
second of everything dedicated to you. The schools already
teach a value system that results in 1/3rd of suicides being
gay teens. If anything is immoral...
--Lawrence C. Foard
"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They
forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone."
--Frederic Bastiat
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want
is big enough to take it all away."
--Barry Goldwater
"I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs:
create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have
absolutely no control."
--George L. Roman
"[The] principal House sponsor [of the federal anti-gay-marriage
act, 'The Defense of Marriage Act'], Bob Barr of Georgia, his
district office confirms, has been married three times -- which
raises the question of why the act doesn't contain a
three-strikes-and-you're-out provision."
--New York Times columnist Frank Rich.
"[The] Defense of Marriage Act ... an attack on same-sex
marriages, is sponsored in the house by Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.),
whose interest in conventional marriage is so strong he is now on
his third one. ... [I]f we take our legislative cues from the
Bible -- if you insist -- then what about divorce? Jesus was
adamant that it not be allowed: 'What God has joined together,
let no man put asunder,' he told the Pharisees, adding to the
disciples, 'Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits
adultery.' (see Mark 10 and Matthew 19). Paul, thereafter, wrote
in First Corinthians that the Lord gives charge 'that the wife
should not separate from her husband ... and that the husband
should not divorce his wife.' Should we not recognize divorce as
legitimate? Shall we compel Messrs. Barr, Dole, Gingrich,
Limbaugh and other conservative serial monogamists outspoken in
their opposition to same-sex marriage back into domesticity with
their first spouses?"
--Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn.
"Okay, conservatives have changed my mind. Allowing gay marriage,
I have been persuaded, will destroy the family, weaken Western
civilization, turn America into Sodom and Gomorrah, increase the
trade deficit with Japan, endanger the family farm and promote
tooth decay. The impeccable logic of conservative opponents is
simply too powerful to deny."
--Chicago Tribune columnist Stephen Chapman.
"If you think permitting queer marriage is perceived
as an attack on the family, you ain't seen nuthin' yet."
--Roger B. A. Klorese