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Varley's quotes du jour |
1/16/12 Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. |
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1/15/12 [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. |
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1/14/12 Never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't want your mother to hear at your trial. |
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1/13/12 I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes. |
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1/12/12 The difference between chirping out of turn and a faux pas depends on what kind of a bar you're in. |
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1/11/12 If you're so pro-life, do me a favour: don't lock arms and block medical clinics. If you're so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries. |
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1/10/12 When you're eight years old, nothing is any of your business. |
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1/9/12 I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest. |
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1/8/12 Praying is like a rocking chair - it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere. |
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1/7/12 Don't taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek. |
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1/6/12 A mistake is simply another way of doing things. |
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1/5/12 Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention. |
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1/4/12 Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum. |
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1/3/12 One thing the blues ain't, is funny. |
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1/2/12 The other day a friend called and told me they made a porn film using the title of my first movie. I guess you know you've made it when there's a porn parody of a movie you've done. |
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1/1/12 Each of us needs something - food, liquor, pot, whatever - to help us survive. Dracula needs blood. |
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12/31/11 This industry has been really good to me. It's been a great life. I'm not through yet. I'm ready when you are, Mr. DeMille. |
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12/30/11 Show me a guy who can't pitch inside and I'll show you a loser. |
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12/29/11 I love writers. All of my best friends are writers. |
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12/28/11 There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here’s one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you’re gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you’re gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can’t bear to tell themselves isn’t real. It’s the most dangerous lie the country tells itself. |
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12/27/11 Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes. |
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12/26/11 The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes. |
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12/25/11 Nothing says holidays, like a cheese log. |
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12/24/11 The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live. |
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12/23/11 The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics. |
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12/22/11 Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it. |
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12/21/11 I don’t tweet, I don’t go on Facebook. I think there’s too much information about all of us out there. I’m liking the idea of privacy more and more. |
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12/20/11 Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. |
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12/19/11 [O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods. |
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12/18/11 To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world? |
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12/17/11 Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That's Fit to Print,” it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan. |
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12/16/11 There are three faithful friends - an old wife, an old dog, and ready money. |
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12/15/11 The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. |
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12/14/11 Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago. |
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12/13/11 If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe. |
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12/12/11 Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it. |
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12/11/11 Some folks are wise and some are otherwise. |
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12/10/11 It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. |
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12/9/11 Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. |
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12/8/11 Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread. |
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12/7/11 Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself. |
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12/6/11 Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it. |
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12/5/11 It’s time for the wealthy to pay their fair share before the middle class becomes the forgotten class. And it’s time for the banks to give back what they were given. There are those in politics, particularly those on the conservative side, who can’t get enough of telling people that the wealthy one per cent must not be taxed because doing so kills jobs. The real job-killers are corporate greed and political expediency. It’s time for working people in Maine and all across the country to take back the American dream. Stephen and Tabitha King |
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12/4/11 My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a Quaker. |
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12/3/11 I've had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me and the second one didn't. |
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12/2/11 For a change, lady luck seemed to be smiling on me. Then again, maybe the fickle wench was just lulling me into a false sense of security while she reached for a rock. |
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12/1/11 Luck consists largely of hanging on by your fingernails until things start to go your way. |
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11/30/11 Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film. |
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11/29/11 Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck. |
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11/28/11 Some people are so fond of ill luck that they run halfway to meet it. |
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11/27/11 I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike? |
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11/26/11 I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five. |
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11/25/11 Grandma cheated whenever she could. She cheated because it was a much more scientific and surer way of winning than trusting to luck. |
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11/24/11 I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm. |
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11/23/11 I'm already suspicious of anyone who thinks he or she is smart enough to be president. You'd have to have some ego to believe that about yourself. |
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11/22/11 The media works in sound bites. They can make you look like a genius or stupid. |
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11/21/11 During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. |
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11/20/11
The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out. The "student-athlete," just to name one. "Amateurism," just to name another. |
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11/19/11 How many football coaches out there work with "at-risk" kids? How many shoes are there still to drop? Unfair? Ask one Bernard Law, once cardinal archbishop of Boston, if you can pry him out of his current position at the Basilica of Our Lady of the Clean Getaway in Rome. |
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11/18/11 I gravitate towards gravitas. |
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11/17/11 What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke? |
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11/16/11 I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it's very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid. |
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11/15/11 I'm very intelligent. I'm capable of doing everything put to me. I've launched a perfume and want my own hotel chain. I'm living proof blondes are not stupid. |
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11/14/11 It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so. |
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11/13/11 An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise. |
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11/12/11 The quick action by high school staff members in Clinton County in response to reports of a possible sexual assault by Sandusky is in marked contrast to the reaction of top officials at Penn State University, who had actually received a first-hand report of a sexual attack by Sandusky seven years earlier. Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly |
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11/11/11 If dogs could talk it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one. |
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11/10/11 Libraries are a public good and a civic responsibility. They are about our future as much as they are our past....The notion that they could be replaced by Google is tantamount to suggesting that Americans are better off with vending machines instead of farmer's markets....Cut the libraries and you cut everything that goes with them, just as Thomas Jefferson knew well. |
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11/9/11 All men are not created equal but should be treated as though they were under the law. |
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11/8/11 For a candidate who's bullish on personal responsibility, Herman Cain has learned the provisional political value of addressing criticism by assigning blame -- to the media, the political left and at least one of his GOP presidential rivals. They're out to get him. Did Cain really think an electoral process wired to dig up everything from college transcripts to your uncle's barber's tax returns would fail to dislodge the NRA's payouts? |
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11/7/11 Vegetarian -- that's an old Indian word meaning “lousy hunter.” |
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11/6/11 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. |
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11/5/11 An all-male crew of six astronauts -- pale but smiling after 520 days trapped a capsule on the Russian flats -- stumbled back into the light of day Friday morning, following the longest ever simulation of a trip to Mars. Scientists said the experiment mimicked the stress and fatigue of interplanetary travel -- minus the weightlessness, of course. And minus the travel. And minus the success, joy, and sense of accomplishment of having actually traveled anywhere, or actually reached Mars. |
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11/4/11 Leroy bet me I couldn't find a pot of gold at the end, and I told him that was a stupid bet because the rainbow was enough. |
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11/3/11 By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected. |
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11/2/11 Critics say the OWS protesters hate the rich. Come on! Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more. |
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11/1/11 I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka "Christians," and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities. |
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10/31/11 There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. |
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10/30/11 I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead. |
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10/29/11 The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. |
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10/28/11 Some people are like Slinkies. They aren't really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to my face when I push them down a flight of stairs. |
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10/27/11 The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. |
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10/26/11
#
Corporations are not people The National Campaign to Abolish Corporate Personhood and Defend Democracy |
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10/25/11 I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid. From that moment on I can hardly be reproached for making a film that is about stupid people. |
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10/24/11 Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler. |
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10/23/11 Oral Roberts picks up the phone in Oklahoma and a voice says, "I got some good news and some bad news, Oral." Oral says, "Okay, what's the good news?" The voice says, "Oral, this is the Lord!" Oral asks, "...and the bad news?" The voice says, "I'm calling from Salt Lake City." Thanks to Chris Kingsley |
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10/23/11 The hysterical responses from the Rushes of the world are just more signs that these protests are working. I never thought I’d see it, but some of the dukes and earls high up in America’s Great Tower of Bullshit are starting to blink a little bit. They seem genuinely freaked out that OWS doesn’t have leaders or a single set of demands, which in addition to being very encouraging is quite funny. |
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10/22/11 Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid. |
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10/21/11 Elaine May: I am told that Woody Allen has been saying his play has no redeeming social value, which is hard to believe because Woody is usually very modest. On the other hand I have no idea what redeeming social value is. What is your understanding of redeeming social value and which plays had it last season? (Plays from England don't count.) Woody Allen: Not only does my play have no redeeming social value, it has no entertainment value. I wrote this sprightly little one-acter only to test out my new paper shredder. If there is any positive message at all in the narrative it is that life is a tragedy filled with suffering and despair and yet some people do manage to avoid jury duty. May: What is the biggest secret you were told and asked not to repeat? Allen: That it's not a surreal practical joke: those Republican presidential candidates you see lined up for their debates are actually the best minds the G.O.P. has to offer. |
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10/20/11 The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something. |
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10/19/11 The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. |
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10/18/11 It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite. |
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10/17/11 It's absolutely stupid that we live without an ozone layer. We have men, we've got rockets, we've got saran wrap - fix it |
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10/16/11 Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid. |
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10/15/11 The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. |
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10/14/11 In the United States I have always believed that there was a big difference between Conservative and stupid. Boy is it getting harder to prove that one by the minute. |
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10/13/11 Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day. |
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10/12/11 And maybe I'm a little smarter now than I was before for all the stupid things I've done. |
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10/11/11 A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice. |
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10/10/11 I don't know where he lives. I have the feeling he's Canadian. So many people are nowadays. It used to be that no one was Canadian and now simply everybody is. I'm sure it must be a virus. |
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10/9/11 I'm under stress. They killed me on wikipedia. They killed me. And I didn't stay dead long enough to sell no DVDs. I didn't even stay dead long enough - I was too stupid. I should've stayed low. I should've laid low. I could've been gone for a year; I'd have made money. And then I'd have risen from the dead. |
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10/8/11 All day, newsmen have been quoting Jobs' inspiring words through the years, like his engaging keynote announcements, his philosophical 2005 Stanford commencement speech and the soaring rhetoric of the iTunes terms and conditions. But on a personal note, I was one of the few people who could call Steve Jobs a close personal friend, in that he communicated with me once. |
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10/7/11 Herman Cain is a genial, harmless dodo who thinks running a country is just like running a business. But it isn’t. In business, your competitors rarely strive to develop nuclear weapons like Iran (a subject Cain knows almost nothing about). In business, rarely do your competitors have the capacity to clash in ways that could involve the armed forces of the United States, such as China with Taiwan or Israel with its neighbors (two areas of the world that Cain has demonstrated remarkable ignorance about). And in business, you don’t have to feed the hungry, house the homeless or heal the sick. |
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10/6/11 Every election, roughly half the population votes Democrat and the other half votes Republican. Now, I understand why the Republicans get one percent of the vote - the richest one percent. That other 49 percent, someone will have to explain to me. |
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10/5/11 It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. |
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10/4/11 The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself. |
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10/3/11 I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a "learning experience." Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a "learning experience." It makes me feel less stupid. |
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10/2/11 The hands that help are better far than lips that pray. |
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10/1/11 [L]et me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt
Luckily, 99.9 percent of it is garbage. John Varley |
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9/30/11 Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them. |
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9/29/11 Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself. |
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9/28/11 Back then, before it became clear that democracy was best served by a drunken electorate, the bars in New York City were required to close on Election Day. |
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9/27/11 Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. |
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9/26/11 The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it. |
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9/25/11 Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. |
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9/24/11 I'd called [my book] The Girl on the Beach. Knox Burger didn't like it. Go figure. Then somebody, he or I or my agent, came up with Grifter's Game, and that was the one everybody liked. Next thing I knew, it was published as Mona. Years later I learned from Knox that this was publisher Ralph Daigh's idea. He'd bought a painting of a woman's face from an illustrator and wanted a chance to use it on something. If he'd used a portrait of himself, I might be the author of Horse's Ass. |
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9/23/11 Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. |
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9/22/11 If a frog had wings he wouldn't bust his ass a-hoppin'. |
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9/21/11 The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor. |
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9/20/11 All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. |
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9/19/11 Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman. |
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9/18/11 Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely. |
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9/17/11 You can be young without money but you can't be old without it. |
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9/16/11 Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything. |
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9/15/11 In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong. |
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9/14/11 Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends. |
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9/13/11 The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud. |
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9/12/11
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9/11/11 This church was open and seemingly unattended, and it was a throwback in another way as well. The candles in the little side altars were real ones, actual wax candles that burned with an open flame. Lots of churches have switched over to electrified altars. You drop your quarter in the slot and a flame-shaped bulb goes on and stays on for your quarter's worth of time. It's like a parking meter, and if you stay too long they tow away your soul. |
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9/10/11 Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders. |
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9/9/11 Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice. |
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9/8/11 War is the unfolding of miscalculations. |
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9/7/11 I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it. |
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9/6/11 If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it. |
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9/5/11 If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend. |
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9/4/11 It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it. |
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9/3/11 Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy. |
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9/2/11 Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. |
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9/1/11 Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. |
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8/31/11 What happens is, you put a law on the books, sooner or later somebody’s gonna come along dumb enough to enforce it. |
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8/30/11 Stories are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of 'em stink. |
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8/29/11 The trouble with real life is, there’s no reset button. |
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8/28/11 The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion. |
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8/27/11 Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear. |
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8/26/11 To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen. |
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8/25/11 Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. |
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8/24/11 Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue. |
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8/23/11 Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap. |
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8/22/11 Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top. |
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8/21/11 Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. |
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8/20/11 The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. |
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8/19/11 It is not a fragrant world. |
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8/18/11 Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them. Martin Henry Fischer |
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8/17/11 If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. |
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8/16/11 Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness. |
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8/15/11 In politics nothing is contemptible. |
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8/14/11 What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. |
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8/13/11 Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft. |
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8/12/11 Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. |
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8/11/11 A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. |
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8/10/11 At today’s prices, you can’t afford to entrust your health and well-being to anyone but the best doctors available. I have therefore put together a short list of warning signs to indicate that perhaps you have selected a bad doctor: He listens to your heart by holding a drinking glass to your chest. The skeleton in his office has one arm. The aquarium in his waiting room has one or more dead fish. He advises you to drink plenty of solids. |
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8/9/11 Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. |
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8/8/11 In politics the middle way is none at all. |
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8/7/11 If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. |
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8/6/11 Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money. |
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8/5/11 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. |
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8/4/11 It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize. |
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8/3/11 Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe. |
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It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws. |
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8/1/11 Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. |
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7/31/11 Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. |
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7/30/11 Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement. |
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7/29/11 It was all most gringos knew about farming. Food came out of a can or grew in plastic bags and cartons on grocery store shelves. All you had to do was add water and zap it in a microwave. If it had to be picked or killed, they didn't want to do it or see it being done. It was how many of the twelve million Mexicans they now called illegals came to be living in the states. The gringos had borrowed all the money there was from foreign governments. Now they wanted to send all the Mexicans home. If they kept working at it, they could become the first empire in history to starve to death with bumper crops in the fields and feedlots full of cows and chickens, all dying of old age. |
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7/28/11 People who keep dogs are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves. |
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7/27/11 Liberal: a power worshipper without power. |
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7/26/11 True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else. |
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7/25/11 Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. |
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7/24/11 For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency. |
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7/23/11 I looked up my family tree and found three dogs using it. |
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7/22/11 A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours. |
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7/21/11 Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect. |
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7/20/11 My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more. |
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7/19/11 I was a dog in a past life. Really. I'll be walking down the street and dogs will do a sort of double take. Like, Hey, I know him. |
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7/18/11 The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. |
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7/17/11 You are a good person because you fear damnation, I'm a good person without obligation. |
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7/16/11 Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other. |
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7/15/11 A citizen lies to Congress and gets a term in jail. A congressman lies to us and gets another term in office. Drew Sharp, writing about Roger Clemens |
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7/14/11 Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America. |
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7/13/11 We add our voices to the growing storm about the scandalous fact that The Onion has never received a Pulitzer Prize. Here are some of them. There are literally hundreds more from ordinary people on YouTube. Raise your voices! We will be heard! |
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7/12/11 A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down. |
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7/11/11 Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm. |
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7/10/11 I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate. |
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7/9/11 One way to compensate for a tiny brain is to pretend to be dead. |
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7/8/11 War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. |
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7/7/11 Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich. |
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7/6/11 Democracy is not an incident that happens overnight, nor a gift that America can give to the world. It is a culture which needs peace to evolve. |
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7/5/11 What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists. |
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7/4/11 He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. |
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7/3/11 As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion. |
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7/2/11 Life is not that complicated. You get up, you go to work, eat three meals, you take one good shit and you go back to bed. What’s the fucking mystery? |
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7/1/11 It could well be argued that the continuing rights abuses of the present Iraqi regime, if it is allowed to survive, will prove most distressing. This is beyond any doubt. But the West has been required to witness terrible scenes in China, Russia, Vietnam, East Timor, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world. It is simply not possible for the United States to impose humanity on a worldwide scale unless it is prepared to enter into permanent global war. (my italics; JV) Frederick Forsyth, writing in 1993 |
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6/30/11 Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own. |
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6/29/11 I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home. |
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6/28/11 You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn't black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing. You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it. I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I'm trying to do the right thing, and that's where I'm going with this. New York State Senator Roy McDonald Apparently there is at least one Republican left with an ounce of sense. This was concerning the vote on gay marriage in New York. JV |
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6/27/11 Before 9/11 Bin Laden did everything but advertise. Yet he had to blow up the Twin Towers just to get the attention of anyone outside the intelligence community. So what did we do? We invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong madman, and too often used the wrong interrogation techniques on the wrong people—all because our leaders lost contact with the truth. |
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6/26/11 People ask me what I think about that woman priest thing. What, a woman priest? Women priests. Great, great. Now there's priests of both sexes I don't listen to. |
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6/25/11 Research is increasingly showing that illegal drugs may be useful treatments for a wide range of disorders. Compounds in marijuana have shown promise not just for pain patients, but also as treatments for cancer and even possibly preventing Alzheimer's disease. The hallucinogen psilocybin, found in "magic mushrooms," could potentially be useful in helping people overcome addiction and may ease patients' end-of-life fear and anxiety. Research suggests also that MDMA (ecstasy) may be useful for fighting post-traumatic stress disorder. The war on drugs means high barriers for research on all of these substances, which makes it less likely that scientists will pursue their study. Even if these drugs do prove effective for legitimate medical uses, there are even higher barriers for getting them to market. And the race to ban new "legal highs," synthetics that are being brought to the underground market, will mean that more compounds get caught in this trap. |
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6/24/11 Because of the war on drugs, pain patients are treated with skepticism and pain doctors live in fear of being prosecuted for "overprescribing." The end result is that addicts still get their opioids without much trouble, while genuine patients often can't find treatment. Those who do must typically be tracked in a database and must schedule frequent, expensive doctor visits for surveillance like urine testing. |
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6/23/11 The most egregious health effects of the drug war have hit black Americans. The rate of incarceration for drug crimes is 10 times higher in blacks than in whites, even though drug use and dealing rates are the same or even higher for whites. More African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision --- in prison, on parole or probation --- than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War, according to Michelle Alexander, author of /The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness/. And more than 10% of black men between the ages of 20 and 35 are in prison, which keeps them from their families and children. |
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6/22/11 In Mexico alone, nearly 35,000 people have been killed in violence related to the drug trade since the Mexican government decided to go to war, literally, with traffickers. Just in 2010, there were 15,273 drug-related murders. Many of those killed were innocent bystanders. While people tend to think that drug use itself leads to violent behavior, studies show that the vast majority of drug-related violence is connected to drug-trade disputes, not drug highs. Ironically, alcohol is the drug that is pharmacologically most likely to increase violence, but we haven't seen much violence related to the alcohol trade since the end of Prohibition. |
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6/21/11 Although many assume that the popularity of more potent stimulants like crack and crystal meth was a cause of drug war crackdowns, some research suggests that it is actually a result of the war on drugs. When law enforcement targets the drug supply, the most powerful and highly concentrated forms of substances become more attractive to sellers and users, since smaller quantities are generally easier to hide. A similar effect was seen during Prohibition in the U.S., with stronger liquors like moonshine displacing weaker drinks like beer. More potent drugs increase the risk for overdose and often addiction. |
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6/20/11 There is a safe, nontoxic drug called naloxone that can instantly reverse opioid overdose and prevent most of these deaths. But the drug war interferes with saving overdose victims in two ways: first, because witnesses to overdose fear prosecution, they often don't call for help until it's too late. Second, because the drug war supports the belief that making naloxone available over-the-counter or with opioid prescriptions would encourage drug use, the antidote is available only through harm reduction programs like needle exchanges or in some state programs aimed at drug users. |
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6/19/11 Drug warriors' staunch opposition to needle exchanges to prevent the spread of HIV in addicts delayed the programs' widespread introduction in most states for years. A federal ban on funding for these programs wasn't lifted until 2009. Contrast this with what happened in the U.K. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s, the HIV infection rate in IV drug users in the U.K. was about 1%. In New York City, the American epicenter, that figure was 50%. The British had introduced widespread needle exchange in 1986. That country had no heterosexual AIDS epidemic. |
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6/18/11 When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2.3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, "Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different --- and vastly counterproductive." |
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6/17/11 America is the best half-educated country in the world. |
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6/16/11 Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going. |
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6/15/11 Life well spent is long. |
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6/14/11 In this country, a federal grand jury probe is the closest thing to Courts of Inquisition or a Star Chamber that exists. There are few rights, nothing that comes close to cross-examination, and no right to counsel inside the jury room. There are no real rules of evidence. The only thing they can't do is torture you, and on that you must take the government's word. |
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6/13/11 Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion. |
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6/12/11 "There's a much simpler reason for avoiding religion." "What's that?" "Just consider its style--bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans--fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I cannot believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why would I go to a place that a God would not enter?" |
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6/11/11
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6/10/11 In the nineties, politicians eager to pocket million-dollar speaking fees from foreign trade groups embraced the concept of a global economy. They teamed up with Chinese businessmen and Mexican manufacturers and carved out a zone along the U.S. southern border where trade restrictions were virtually eliminated. American politicians sold the country on the concept of our being an information economy, that we no longer needed manufacturing or heavy industry, as if you could drive words and eat sentences. They shipped entire job sectors abroad and then railed at the demise of the middle class. |
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6/9/11 Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. |
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6/8/11 In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. |
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6/7/11 A beginning is the end of something, always. |
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6/6/11 "The process is perfectly straightforward; like shooting fish in a barrel, as your people would say." "I've never tried that," Carmody said. "It is really easy?" "That depends upon the size of the fish and the size of the barrel. It is, for example, nearly effortless to pot a shark in a bathtub; whereas it is a considerable undertaking to bring down a minnow in a hogshead. Scale is everything." |
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6/5/11 "Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a god business, which is called 'religion,' and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that religions sell, but I'm sure you've heard it all before. But I'll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me to be almost exquisitely perverse." "What's that?" "It's the deep, fundamental hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, 'Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and us.' The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and the faculties God has given him." |
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6/4/11 It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin. |
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6/3/11 "Great Scott, man, d'you think I bargained for any of this? I'm shook, man, I'm really shook, believe you me, and I'm only trying to explicate because, if I don't put my hand to the helm, this whole damn ball of wax will come crashing down like a house of kurds." "Cards," Carmody corrected absentmindedly. "Kurds!" the Prize screamed at him. "Man, have you ever seen a house of kurds come tumbling down? Well, I have, and it's not a pretty sight." "Sounds like a whey-out spectacle, Carmody said, and giggled immoderately. |
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6/2/11 Quite in vain did several lawyers point out to him that, if justice really existed, there would be no need for law and lawmakers, and thus one of mankind's noblest conceptions would be obliterated, and an entire occupational group would be thrown out of work. For it is the essence of the law, they told him, that abuses and outrages should exist, since these discrepancies served as proof and validation of the necessity of the law, and of justice itself. |
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6/1/11 Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence. |
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5/31/11 Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations. |
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5/30/11 The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. |
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5/29/11 Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. |
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5/28/11 I've learned a few things from the tea party, both the political one and the one in Alice in Wonderland. From the first, I learned that you can make people angrily shuffle in roughly the same direction if you appeal to their beliefs in poorly defined ways. From the second, I learned that England has some sort of substance called "treacle." |
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5/27/11 Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems. |
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5/26/11 The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn. |
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5/25/11 May 21 was actually the last day of salvation. God won’t be saving anyone, so there will be no more gospel program. Then, in five months, everything will happen on the same day – the earthquake, Rapture, resurrection and destruction of the world. That’s what it looks like now. Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent his $140,000 life savings on bus shelter ads for the Rapture |
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5/24/11 It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. |
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5/23/11 Never make predictions, especially about the future. |
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5/22/11 Welcome to Heaven, brethren. As you know, the world ended yesterday ... wait a minute. What did you say? It didn't? Well, shit. (Okay, I made it up, but I know it's accurate. The last two words, anyway.) |
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5/21/11 February 4, 1962: Take one quintuplified planetary alignment. Sprinkle in an always-mystifying solar eclipse. Stir in a potload of craziness--prayer vigils in Bombay, shelter-stocking in the United States, jittery sky-gazing everywhere--and you've got yourself an all-out Apocalypse Watch. Nothing happens, of course. But the Antichrist was born the next day, at least according to noted psychic Jeane Dixon. |
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5/20/11 As a nation we’re addicted to wishful thinking, staggering from crisis to crisis with the foresight of a two-year-old. Think of all the people who nearly brought us to a worldwide depression: financial parasites, greedy lenders, cowardly regulators, venal politicians, and millions of gullible folks who lived on charge cards and thought they could buy a house for nothing. Or a massive oil spill, where a soulless company was enabled by a spineless bureaucracy that gave them what they wanted, and a populace too blind to see that oil has become like crack. It’s a moral failure on the most profound level, where everyone blames everyone else, and no one looks in the mirror. |
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5/19/11 What Osama never dreamed was that after 9/11 America would go out of its way to save him. Any analyst who wasn’t brain dead knew the World Trade Center was Bin Laden’s work, and certainly not Saddam Hussein’s. We had the son of a bitch on the ropes in Afghanistan, and nearly buried him in rubble in Tora Bora. So what did we do? We redeployed the commandos hunting Bin Laden to find Saddam Hussein; diverted our troops and intelligence assets to Iraq; and gave Al Qaeda fresh recruiting opportunities across the world. In return Bin Laden created a Sunni-Shia civil war that turned our occupation of Iraq into a bloodbath—all for the pleasure of hanging Saddam. The term “crack-smoking stupid” leaps to mind. |
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5/18/11 One of Limbaugh's first lines of attack on May 2nd was to accuse Obama of focusing on himself, as if the killing of Bin Laden was primarily about him. Numerous commentators across the political spectrum praised Obama's televised statement the evening of the raid as a model of dignified understatement. They acknowledged that he hit all the right notes, and spread the credit around, especially to the military and intelligence services. Many people said they felt proud and patriotic listening to him. Not Limbaugh. He counted the times Obama used words like "I," "me" and "my," and emphasized one of his running themes about this president: that he is a full-fledged, pathological narcissist. (Imagine being called a narcissist by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.) |
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5/17/11 If your dog is fat, you aren't getting enough exercise. Unknown |
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5/16/11 I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained. |
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5/15/11 If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you Pope. |
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5/14/11 My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to $3.00 a can. That's almost $21.00 in dog money. Joe Weinstein |
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5/13/11 If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together. |
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5/12/11 It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label. |
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5/11/11 There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. |
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5/10/11 I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was water boarded. It is torture. It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders. |
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5/9/11 There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them. |
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5/8/11 My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one. |
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5/7/11 The 3-D camerawork produces a few flinches — a flying hammer can have that effect — but no flights of wonder. The hero is a likable meathead, none of whose words or actions are the least bit memorable. Nothing in “Thor” is, and I suspect that is not an accident. If you can’t remember what you saw, then there’s no harm in seeing it again. There is no reason to go to this movie, which might be another way of saying there’s no reason not to. Something like that seems to be the logic behind “Thor,” and as a business plan it’s probably foolproof. |
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5/6/11 To call something an “enhanced interrogation technique” doesn't alter the fact that we thought it was torture when the Japanese used it on American prisoners, we thought it was torture when the North Koreans used it, we thought it was torture when the Soviets used it. You know, it's almost the moral equivalent of saying that rape is an enhanced seduction technique. |
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5/5/11 There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong. |
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5/4/11 So many kids are fat drug addicts these days, it's almost as if Rush Limbaugh had puppies. |
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5/3/11 Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts, which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied. |
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5/2/11 A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day. |
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5/1/11 Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. |
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4/30/11 It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize. |
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4/29/11 Wait a second, Rand Paul, just hold on for one second. You're suggesting that Donald Trump --- a man who called for George W. Bush to be impeached; who has donated thousands of dollars to Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Harry Reid, John Kerry, and Rahm Emanuel; who supported universal health care and used to refer to himself as "totally pro-choice"; and who was a registered Democrat as recently as September of 2009 --- might not actually be a legit Republican? You are truly the radical thinker of our time. |
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4/28/11 The dispassionate observer might think that Wednesday’s production of the birth certificate could not fail to bury forever the carefully manufactured controversy of the president’s origin. The facts are now as official as facts can possibly get: Barack Hussein Obama II was born at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, on the island of Oahu in the state of Hawaii. But it is the nature of a conspiracy theory that all information must pass through a very discerning, yet simple, filter. Information that is confirmational is accepted; that which is contradictory is rejected. |
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4/27/11 She thanked the jurors and returned to her seat. It was my turn now. I put my hand down below the table to check my zipper. You have to stand before a jury only once with your fly open and it will never happen again. |
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4/26/11 My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. |
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4/25/11 Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog. |
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4/24/11 Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter. |
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4/23/11 We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. |
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4/22/11 Silence is the wit of fools. |
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4/21/11 Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep. |
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4/20/11 Ryan's plan is the perfect expression of principles of today's Republican Party -- socialism in reverse, a seeming disgust with the unemployed and the struggling, and a complete and total misunderstanding of even the most basic economic principles. It isn't a budget proposal, it's a big "screw you!" to the very notion that government should serve the people and a slap in the face of the idea that we're all in this together. |
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4/19/11 Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours." |
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4/18/11 There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. |
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4/17/11 Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. |
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4/16/11 I am two with nature. |
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4/15/11 Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while. |
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4/14/11 I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up. |
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4/13/11 Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. Dwight D Eisenhower in a letter to his brother |
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4/12/11 The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue. Anonymous |
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4/11/11 Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful. |
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4/10/11 Everybody goes to clinics, to doctors, to hospitals and so on, some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don't have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood, and that's well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does. Jon Kyl (Republican United States Senator and lying sack of shit from Arizona) His remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions. Lying sack of shit Jon Kyl's office, when informed that abortions are actually 3% of what Planned Parenthood does. |
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4/9/11 With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved from the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Celine Dion singing "My Liver Belongs to You" and movie houses playing The Liver is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazón, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less lilting higado, and bumper stickers would proclaim I [liver symbol] MY PEKINGESE. |
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4/8/11 It’s unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder. |
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4/7/11 The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you. |
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4/6/11 There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started. |
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4/5/11 A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down. |
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4/4/11 I was reminded of Clarke's Second Law of Egodynamics: "For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert." |
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4/3/11 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. |
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4/2/11 I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better. |
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4/1/11 I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead. |
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3/31/11 The terms “idiot” and lunatic” were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. “Imbecile” and “feeble-minded person” were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. (When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop.) That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas. |
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3/30/11 It is difficult to sum up the near-death experience in a sentence. Some recall travelling no further than the ceiling, rising away from themselves like a pocket of hot air; others remember hurtling through a sort of tunnel, often toward an all-encompassing light and sometimes toward family or friends. Or occasionally, ex-husbands. A celebrity website reports that Elizabeth Taylor saw Mike Todd during her near-death experience. “He pushed me back to my life,” she is quoted as saying. Whether this was done for her benefit or his was not clear. |
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3/29/11 Don't talk to me about atrocities; all war is an atrocity. |
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3/28/11 I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn't much of a stretch. |
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3/27/11 Abstinence Makes the Church Grow Fondlers Unknown |
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3/26/11 He has Van Gogh's ear for music. |
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3/25/11 It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not. |
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3/24/11 War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. |
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3/23/11 War is the unfolding of miscalculations. |
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3/22/11 I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses... |
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3/21/11 Electricity is really just organized lightning. |
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3/20/11 There must be Religion. Otherwise the poor would murder the rich. |
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3/19/11 The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing. |
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3/18/11 Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices. |
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3/17/11 We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English. |
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3/16/11 Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism. |
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3/15/11 It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. |