Quotes about down
page 56

“"Bapu Gandhi said, 'All religions are true.' I just want to love God," I blurted out, and looked down, red in the face.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi (2001), Chapter 23, p. 76

Love, God, Religion

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.
They're right. It does.
However much you beg it to stop.
It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.
It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life…
All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.
Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.
Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.
And then the world turns…
And somebody falls off…
And oh God it's such a long way down.
Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller…
Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.
We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.
Trying to measure how far we have to fall.
No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives…
Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.
"Time's a great healer."
"At least it was quick.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"The world keeps turning.
Oh Alec—
Alec's dead."
Swamp Thing (1983–1987)

Life, Women, Men, God

“When I came back to Ottawa I found myself faced with a very difficult parliamentary situation… I think it is fair to say that Mr St Laurent, on the basis of private discussions with the Opposition leaders, did not expect any serious division in the House of Commons over our policies on Suez. However, bitter division there was, and we were condemned strongly for deserting our two mother countries. The Conservative attack was led by Howard Green (who in June 1959 was to become Secretary of State for External Affairs). Green accused us of being the "chore boy" of the United States, of being a better friend to Nasser than to Britain and France, and claimed that our government "by its actions in the Suez crisis, has made this month of November 1956, the most disgraceful period for Canada in the history of this nation," and that it was "high time Canada had a government which will not knife Canada's best friends in the back." Any feeling of exaltation and conceit or euphoria at our success in avoiding a general war in the Middle East (if in fact we had avoided it by our actions) was dissipated for me by the vigour of the assaults on my conduct, my wisdom, my rectitude, my integrity, and my everything else by an embattled Conservative Opposition. It was a very vigorous debate reflected in the general election of the next year. But I have always believed, and I think the great weight of Canadian opinion strongly approved what we had done. Further, I am absolutely certain and will remain certain in my own mind that the New Commonwealth would have soon shattered over the issue had the British not backed down.”

Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) 14th Prime Minister of Canada

Memoirs, Volume Two

Wisdom, War, Feeling, History

“Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain", into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Concerning the apparent absurdities of quantum behavior.
chapter 6, “Probability and Uncertainty — the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature,” p. 129
The Character of Physical Law (1965)

“I hope when he dies, he does become a tree. I hope he's in the middle of the wilderness and he's doing his tree thing. Whatever it is trees do. I know they do a lot of work with breezes. And wouldn't it be fantastic if while he was out there just enjoying his treeness, through the woods, a huge sweaty guy with an ax comes long? Sees him… [tree-chopping motions]. Chops him down, smash! Put a chain around him, drag him through the mud and the muck, throw him into a sawmill and grind him up. [Nuzzsaw noise] Then you pound him down into paper, and once he's paper, you print the Bible on him.”

Dane Cook (1972) American actor and comedian

Vicious Circle (2006)

Hope, Guy, Tree

“Men spend their life down here in the worship of petty (or mean) interests and the search of perishable things, and with that ("et avec cela", Fr.) they pretend to perpetuate for all eternity their self ("moi", Fr.) so hardly worthy ("digne", Fr.) of it.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 51.

Life, Men, Search

“I am in the camp that believes that we are on the verge of a monetary collapse given the fact that during the last year up to 70% of the money used to pay our ongoing expenditures were moneys printed up by the Federal Reserve I mean literally out of thin air. Monetary Collapse occurs when we are printing 100% of that money going forward and all of the roll over of treasury is that 15 trillion dollars is out there in existing notes when all of those notes also get rolled over with 100% of that money being printed … that's the monetary collapse. And that’s not something that their going to announce is going to happen two weeks from Thursday that’s just gonna happen literally overnight when we have a complete melt down in the bond market. Which I’m predicting is gonna happen unless we actually balance the federal budget so this is what we are entering into is a real mutual sacrifice on the part of all of us. I would argue let’s have that mutual sacrifice as opposed to all of us having nothing which is what happens during a monetary collapse that our money ends up being worth nothing. That happened in Russia part of that was Afghanistan. We’re not immune to this. We can fix it but we need to do it now and that’s the position that I hold.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement made to representatives of the Pagan Newswire Collective (PNC)
2011-10-16
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganswithdisabilities/2011/10/full-transcript-of-qa-with-presidential-candidate-gary-johnson/
2012-02-24
Economic Policy

Money, Parting

“I am not a great fan of shouting down people or being rude to people, I think we have a situation and a Congress that's way out of touch with where the American people are. People have a right to be angry when Congress gives tax breaks to billionaires and wants to cut nutrition programs for low income pregnant women. You have a right to be angry. Take that out in a constructive way. … I think people have a right to go into a restaurant and have dinner, that's where we got to place our energy. I do know that people are angry. They are angry about these terribly inhumane immigration policies. They're angry about the fact they can't afford prescription drugs. They are angry about tax breaks that go to billionaires. The way to deal with that is exactly what Alexandria did. Organize at the grass roots level. Win elections and get involved in the political process.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

About the Red Hen restaurant controversy. Video online https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bernie-sanders-defends-sarah-sanders-people-have-a-right-to-go-to-a-restaurant-for-dinner/ at Mediaite, 27 June 2018. 2010s, 2018

Women, People, Way, Thinking

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”

George Gordon Byron book Hebrew Melodies

The Destruction of Sennacherib http://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/destruct.html, st. 1. Hebrew Melodies (1815)

Star, Wolf, Sea

“Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love’s name,
Or Beauty’s, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Down, Wanton, Down!," lines 1-4, from Poems 1930-1933 (1933).
Poems

Love, Beauty

“I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life.”

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) American author, historian and broadcaster

Regarding his 95th birthday in "Give 'Em Hell, Mr. Terkel" (16 May 2007) by Amy Goodman http://web.archive.org/web/20070613211416/http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/51990

Life

“What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

as quoted in "Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music", January, 1996; ISBN 0819563110
1990s

People

“And how high is Christ's cross? As high as the highest heaven, and the throne of God, and the bosom of the Father — that bosom out of which forever proceed all created things. Ay, as high as the highest heaven! for — if you will receive it — when Christ hung upon the cross, heaven came down on earth, and earth ascended into heaven.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 171.

God, Christ

“He jumped down, started waving his arms around while he went to squeaking and squealing in one of those languages wizards use so the rest of us will think there is something terribly strange and mystical about what they do, kind of like lawyers.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 41 (p. 412)

Thinking

“In analyzing organization work, a single chart can frequently express more than any amount of detailed written explanation. First of all, clearly define author- ities within your establishment; then chart those authorities simply and graphically, so that every workman knows to whom he is responsible, and every executive knows who is responsible to him. Place this chart conspicuously in every department where each employee can see it. In case of disputed authority, final proof is immediately at hand. There is then no loop-hole through which a neglectful workman, foreman or executive can crawl no longer does he have the excuse that he thought somebody else was going to do it. In clean-cut form, his duties and relations to other men of the organization are laid down once and for all, and responsibility rests on the right man. Failure so to specify responsibilities inevitably means confusion all down the line.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Industrial organization (1914), p. 24-25

Men, Failure

“So if despite that, Hitler prepared war, he perpetrated the greatest lie and betrayal in the world. This trial clearly shows that Hitler did just that. I have no hesitation to state very clearly that Hitler was a liar and a betrayer on a mammoth scale. Even without the death of the 5 million extermination camp victims, Hitler would still go down in history as the greatest villain that ever lived.”

Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) German Nazi official

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Death, War, Lie, World

“Karma is the eternal assertion of human freedom. If we can bring ourselves down by our karma, surely it is in our power to raise ourselves by our own karma.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Freedom

“Do you remember when you were young, and you’d stare at someone on-stage and think ‘Oh my God—he looked right at me?’ I do, so I have this kind of rescue-fantasy thing. When I see kids in the audience I think, ‘Okay, that’s me, and it would be kind of cool if the person on-stage would come down and save me.’ I’m not going to be able to save every one of them, but I’ll do my best, because I genuinely like kids. If I didn’t have my lust for my art, I probably would have ended up working with them.”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

On her teenaged fans, interview with The Georgia Straight (1999)
1996–2005

God, Art, Thinking, Personality

“In fact, their contempt for the native converts was deeper than that for their Hindu subjects. They had all along looked down upon the native converts as Ajlãf (low-born) and Arzãl (base-born) as compared to the Ashrãf (exalted) which distinctive designation they had reserved for themselves….. It was at this critical juncture that the frustrated fraternity of foreign Muslims took a very strategic step. They started swearing by a solidarity with the native Muslims whom they had despised so far. They let loose on the native Muslims an army of mercenary Mullahs recruited, mostly from their own ranks. These Mullahs went about broadcasting the message that ‘Islam was in danger’, and that ‘Hindus were out to enslave and exploit the Muslim minority’. It was in this manner that the residues of Islamic imperialism managed to ‘merge’ themselves with the native converts, and to present themselves at the head of a strong phalanx pitted against whatever historical forces threatened their unjust privileges. Hitherto, the haughty Ashrãf had stood strictly aloof from the abject Ajlãf and the despised Arzãl. Now all of a sudden the latter became the former’s ‘brothers in faith’. This was a tremendous transformation of the political scene in the second decade of the 20th century. … The British never attached more than a nuisance value to this noisy fraternity which had to be befriended or ignored according to the needs of British policy at any time. It was the national leadership which was impressed by this mobilisation of the ‘Muslim masses’ and the pathos of ‘Muslim plight’. They accepted not only separate electorates but also weightages for the ‘Muslim minority’ in many provinces.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Faith, Strong, Time

“While we are laid on the battle plain,
Drenched to the skin by the midnight rain,
Pleasant dreams may thy slumber crown,
As thou sinkest to rest amid silk and down :
But shame beside thy pillow stand!
A German maid shall kiss thee not,
A German song rejoice thee not,
And German wine shall warm thee not!
He who has strength to wield a brand,
Let him draw it now for his father-land!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette (3rd January 1835) Versions from the German (First Series.) - 'The Gathering' — Koerner.
Translations, From the German

Dreams, Kiss, Wine, Drawing

“[M]an knows his own nature, and that which he pursues must surely be his satisfaction? Judging by which measure I determine that the best thing in the world is flying at full speed from pursuit, and keeping up hammer and thud and gasp and bleeding till the knees fail and the head grows dizzy, and at last we all fall down and that thing (whatever it is) which pursues us catches us up and eats our carcasses. This way of managing our lives, I think, must be the best thing in the world—for nearly all men choose to live thus.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

The "thing" which pursues us, we subsequently learn, is either "a Money-Devil" or "some appetite or lust" and "the advice is given to all in youth that they must make up their minds which of the two sorts of exercise they would choose, and the first [i.e. pursuit by a Money-Devil] is commonly praised and thought worthy; the second blamed." (p. 32)
Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), pp. 31–2

Men, World, Way, Nature

“Oaks shall be rent; the Word shall shatter —
Yea, on that fiery day, the Crown,
Even the palace walls shall totter,
And domes and spires come crashing down.”

Heinrich Heine Wartet nur

Wartet nur! [Only Wait!] in Poems for the Times ; also in Poems of Heinrich Heine: Three Hundred and Twenty-five Poems (1917) Selected and translated by Louis Untermeyer, p. 263

“India will have to hang down her head in shame if even one person is left who is said in any way to be untouchable.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

Way, Personality

“Mulder: Sorry, nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted.
Scully: Agent Mulder. I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you.
Mulder: Oh, isn't it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded. So who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?
Scully: Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you. I've heard a lot about you.
Mulder: Oh, really… I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me.”

Chris Carter (1956) American television and film producer, director and writer

Pilot [1.1] (10 September 1993)
The X-Files (1993-2002)

“Everything is contemplated in the mind without meditation. We make a very complicated response. Just to look at a floating branch evokes very complicated objective and nonobjective responses. The artist must slow all this down, mentally. It is this mental experience that makes the representation of beauty possible.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1980 - 2000, The Skowhegan Lecture', 1987

Beauty

“There is another earthquake in Kyoto. We appreciate it lyrically. A slide of dust slips along a roof gully. A large tree of golden petals shakes and the petals drift to the floor. Birds fly up. Bottles of clear liquid in a shop quiver on a shelf. The water in a puddle shimmers reflections up a wall. A collection of grey roof tiles shift and -- ever faster -- begin to slide down a roof slope.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Section 56
8 1/2 Women

Bird, Tree, Water, Flying

“The man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Bush's America: 100 Percent Al-Qaida Free Since 2001" (11 June 2008) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi?article=256. 2008

History

“Did I make you cry
On Christmas day?
Did I let you down
Like every other day?
Did I make you cry
On Christmas day?
Did I let you down
On Christmas day?
...
I stay awake at night
After we have a fight
I'm writing poems about you
And they aren't very nice.”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Did I Make You Cry On Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)" (2005)
Lyrics, Others

Christmas, Fight, Cry, Night

“The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, Foreword, p. vii.

Law, Question

“Public opinion can become polarized into a bimodal distribution with only a few people in the centre and many more lying toward the extremes. But under such circumstances, democracy will probably break down into civil war, and spatial models of party competition will be irrelevant until order is restored.”

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) (1944) author, academic, and political activist

Source: Game Theory and Canadian Politics (1998), Chapter 9, Invasion From The Right: Reform Party in 1993 Election, p. 142.

War, People, Democracy, Lying

“My next proposition is that the North is in the course of acquiring this power to abolish slavery. Is that true? I say, gentlemen, the North is acquiring that power by two processes, one of which is operating with great rapidity-that is by the admission of new States. The public territory is capable of forming from twenty to thirty States of larger size than the average of the States now in the Union. The public territory is peculiarly Northern territory, and every State that comes into the Union will be a free State. We may rest assured, sit, that that is a fixed fact. The events in Kansas should satisfy every one of the truth of that. If causes now in operation are allowed to continue, the admission of new States will go on until a sufficient number shall have been secured to give the necessary preponderance to change the Constitution. There is a process going on by which some of our own slave States are becoming free States already. It is true, that in some of the slave States the slave population is actually on the decrease, and, I believe it is true of all of them that it is relatively to the white population on the decrease. The census shows that slaves are decreasing in Delaware and Maryland; and it shows that in the other States in the same parallel, the relative state of the decrease and increase is against the slave population. It is not wonderful that this should be so. The anti-slavery feeling has got to be so great at the North that the owners of slave property in these States have a presentiment that it is a doomed institution, and the instincts of self-interest impels them to get rid of that property which is doomed. The consequence is, that it will go down lower and. lower, until it all gets to the Cotton States-until it gets to the bottom. There is the weight of a continent upon it forcing it down. Now, I say, sir, that under this weight it is bound to go down unto the Cotton States, one of which I have the honor to represent here. When that time comes, sir, the free States in consequence of the manifest decrease, will urge the process with additional vigor, and I fear that the day is not distant when the Cotton States, as they are called, will be the only slave States. When that time comes, the time will have arrived when the North will have the power to amend the Constitution, and say that slavery shall be abolished, and if the master refuses to yield to this policy, he shall doubtless be hung for his disobedience.”

Henry L. Benning (1814–1875) Confederate Army general

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)

Truth, Fear, Feeling, Distant

“Many Adams came into this world, at the same time and in different places. All the Adams were made in the world with clay from this world except the last Adam who is buried in Arabia. He was the only one made in paradise with clay which was also from paradise. With the exception of this Adam the angels did not bow down before any other Adam. Satan became the enemy of the descendants of this Adam.”

Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi (1941–2001) Pakistani Sufi spiritual leader, poet, author

The Religion of God (2000)

World, Angels, Time

“Foolish critics often betray their ignorance by saying that a painter or a writer "only copies what he has seen, or puts down what he has known." They forget that no man imagines what he has not seen or known, and that it is in the selection of the characteristic details that the artistic power is manifested.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Imagination, Forgetting

“I don't believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

"Bernie Sanders Speech On Democratic Socialism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8R6PgGcTw, (19 November 2015). 2010s, 2015

Family, Wealth

“It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place.”

Frederick Lewis Allen (1890–1954) American historian and editor of Harper's Magazine

Only Yesterday http://books.google.com/books?id=cdmXVzZ5xOsC&q=%22It+is+easier+to+tear+down+a+code+than+to+put+a+new+one+in+its+place%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage, ch. 5, (1931)

Tear

“I've been flyin' down the road,
And I've been starvin' to be alone,
Independent from the scene that I've known.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Albuquerque
Song lyrics, Tonight's the Night (1975)

“It's not the microwave that's the problem, it's what people put into them. I know people lead busy lives but they should try to sit their children down at the table once a week and cook them simple food.”

Raymond Blanc (1949) French chef

In Nicola Woolcock, " Celebrity Chef Dishes Microwave Mothers http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1358173/Celebrity-chef-dishes-microwave-mothers.html", Daily Telegraph (2 October 2001).

Children, People, Food, Business

“So the slave issue really under-laid the tariff issue. But it also happened that in the committee which was scheduling the tariffs, the people in South Carolina, and I think other Southerners, moved to raise the tariffs to this abominable level on the assumption that they would be voted down on the floor of the House. And they got fooled by that. Instead of being voted down, it was voted in. They were hoist by their own petard. But in 1833 a compromise was reached. The tariffs were reduced. Jackson’s Force Bill was repealed, and so there was a peaceful resolution of that.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

People, Peace, Fools, Thinking

“Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 1, Electric Rain, Information in our lives, p. 3

“Cause I was born lonely down by the riverside
Learned to spin fortune wheels, and throw dice
And I was just thirteen when I had to leave home
Knew I couldn't stick around, I had to roam
Ain't good looking, but you know I ain't shy
Ain't afraid to look it girl, hear me out
So if you need some lovin, and you need it right away
Take a little time out, and maybe I'll stay.”

Bob Seger (1945) American singer-songwriter

Ramblin' Gamblin' Man.
Song lyrics, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (1969)

Home, Girl, Learning, Time

“A fellow with a great voice shouted, "Hearken now to the words of the President of the Confederate States of America, the honorable Woodrow Wilson." The president turned this way and that, surveying the great swarm of people all around him in the moment of silence the volley had brought. Then, swinging back to face the statue of George Washington- and, incidentally, Reginald Bartlett- he said, "The father of our country warned us against entangling alliances, a warning that served us well when we were yoked to the North, before its arrogance created in our Confederacy what had never existed before- a national consciousness. That was our salvation and our birth as a free and independent country." Silence broke then, with a thunderous outpouring of applause. Wilson raised a bony right hand. Slowly, silence, of a semblance of it, returned. The president went on, "But our birth of national consciousness made the United States jealous, and they tried to beat us down. We found loyal friends in England and France. Can we now stand aside when the German tyrant threatens to grind them under his iron heel?" "No!" Bartlett shouted himself hoarse, along with thousands of his countrymen. Stunned, deafened, he had trouble hearing what Wilson said next: "Jealous still, the United States in their turn also developed a national consciousness, a dark and bitter one, as any so opposed to ours must be." He spoke not like a politician inflaming a crowd but like a professor setting out arguments- he had taken one path before choosing the other. "The German spirit of arrogance and militarism has taken hold in the United States; they see only the gun as the proper arbiter between nations, and their president takes Wilhelm as his model. He struts and swaggers and acts the fool in all regards."”

Harry Turtledove book The Great War: American Front

Now he sounded like a politician; he despised Theodore Roosevelt, and took pleasure in Roosevelt's dislike for him.
Source: The Great War: American Front (1998), p. 32

People, Pleasure, Fools, Way

“We tend to think of [Hitler] as an idiot because the central tenet of his ideology was idiotic – and idiotic, of course, it transparently is. Anti-Semitism is a world view through a pinhole: as scientists say about a bad theory, it is not even wrong. Nietzsche tried to tell Wagner that it was beneath contempt. Sartre was right for once when he said that through anti-Semitism any halfwit could become a member of an elite. But, as the case of Wagner proves, a man can have this poisonous bee in his bonnet and still be a creative genius. Hitler was a destructive genius, whose evil gifts not only beggar description but invite denial, because we find it more comfortable to believe that their consequences were produced by historical forces than to believe that he was a historical force. Or perhaps we just lack the vocabulary. Not many of us, in a secular age, are willing to concede that, in the form of Hitler, Satan visited the Earth, recruited an army of sinners, and fought and won a battle against God. We would rather talk the language of pseudoscience, which at least seems to bring such events to order. But all such language can do is shift the focus of attention down to the broad mass of the German people, which is what Goldhagen has done, in a way that, at least in part, lets Hitler off the hook – and unintentionally reinforces his central belief that it was the destiny of the Jewish race to be expelled from the Volk as an inimical presence.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

God, People, Age, World

“She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

Music, Grass, Sun, Future

“I was walking down the road the other day, and I couldn't help but notice how beautiful the world is. And I thought to myself "Why would anyone in their right mind bother to take drugs?". Then I remembered I was on drugs, and that was the reason.”

Simon Munnery (1967) British comedian

Attention Scum! (2001), How To Live (2005)

World, Beauty, Help

“We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)

People, World, Fear, Hope

“Well, I'm a standing on a corner
In Winslow, Arizona
And such a fine sight to see,
It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford
Slowin' down to have a look at me.”

Jackson Browne (1948) American singer-songwriter

Take It Easy

Girl

“My life may be much happier to-morrow
Hunger and love that press against the body,
The two eternal needs we recognise,
Desires that so relentlessly pursue one,
May get me down or raise me to the skies
And make me a Don Bradman or Don Juan.”

Gavin Ewart (1916–1995) English poet

"Days of Contempt", line 4, from Poems and Songs (1939)

Love, Life, Hunger

“I have therefore thought that it would be a worthy and very useful thing to reduce the whole of this great art to a complete and orderly form of presentation, and then in different books to lay down and explain the required characteristics of different departments.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Introduction, Sec. 1
De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book IV

Books, Art

“Did Stalin make mistakes? Of course he did. In so long a period filled with heroism, trials, struggle, triumphs, it is inevitable not only for Joseph Stalin personally but also for the leadership as a collective body to make mistakes. Which is the party and who is the leader that can claim to have made no mistakes in their work? When the existing leadership of the Soviet Union is criticized, the comrades of the Soviet leadership advise us to look ahead and let bygones be bygones, they tell us to avoid polemics, but when it comes to Stalin, they not only did not look ahead but they turned right round, completely backward, in order to track down only the weak spots in Stalin's work.”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Speeches, Moscow Address

Personality

“A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes…”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 9.4

Angels, Cars, Star

“No sooner do men settle down to a given set of ideas, a pat-tern of living and of thinking, than fault-finding begins, and fault-finding is the tap-root of revolutions.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: One is A Crowd: Reflections of An Individualist (1952), p. 34

Men, Idea, Thinking

“I pressed play then came a long way from the Mac Book / I heard Raginder on “A. D. H. D.” then scribbled him down in my black book / Thinking one day he’d collaborate with a no name, named Marcus O / with one goal, sign Violinder so then he’ll call my imprint home.”

Marcus Orelias (1993) American actor, rapper, songwriter, author and entrepreneur

Beach Chair feat. Marcus Orelias Beach Chair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Chair_(album) (2014)

Books, Way, Home, Thinking

“The premise is debatable that the perpetration of atrocities is sometimes a patriot's duty; that the poisoning of the public mind with distortion and falsehood designed to inflame passions is sometimes a patriot's duty; that the banishment of a loving Father of all men and the bowing down before a god of war is sometimes a patriot's duty. But if these be obligations resting upon patriots, let them be claimed as such in plain unvarnished language.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Must We Go to War? (1937)

Love, Men, God, War

“I'm proud to publish this book under my own name, though I don't fully understand the mechanics of its production or the nature of the personality I assume in delivering it. I had no conscious work to do on the book at all. I simply went into trance twice a week, spoke in a "mediumistic" capacity for Seth, or as Seth, and dictated the words to my husband, Robert Butts, who wrote them down.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), p. ix

Books, Understanding, Nature, Personality

“She went away, she cut me like a knife.
Hello beautiful thing, maybe you could save my life.
In just a glance, down here on magic street,
Loves a fool's dance
And I ain't got much sense, but I still got my feet.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Girls in Their Summer Clothes"
Song lyrics, Magic (2007)

Love, Life, Beauty, Fools

“My first protocol on rooting in sports is that you should stick with the teams that you grew up with. I know we're a transient society, but that's just it: Continuing to cheer for your original hometown teams is one way of displaying the old-fashioned value of allegiance.
If you grew up in Cleveland, say, and moved somewhere Sun Belt-ish, I know how hard it is, but the measure of whether you are a good person is that you must remain loyal to the Browns and Indians and that team that LeBron James left behind.
That's what's left of roots in America. You must root where your roots were laid down.”

Frank Deford (1938–2017) American sportswriter

It's Good To Root, Root, Root For The Home Team, 2012-10-10, Deford, Frank, 2012-10-10, Morning Edition, National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/2012/10/10/162566872/why-you-should-root-root-root-for-the-home-team,

Way, Fashion, Sport, Sun

“Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we start from the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but but their brains and bodies, the results will be in very many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 354

People, Way

“The division between those who try to learn about the world by manipulating it and those who can only observe it had led, in natural science, to a struggle for legitimacy. The experimentalists look down on the observers as merely telling uncheckable just-so stories, while the observers scorn the experimentalists for their cheap victories over excessively simple phenomena. In biology the two camps are now generally segregated in separate academic departments where they can go about their business unhassled by their unbelievers. But the battle is unequal because the observers' consciousness of what it is to do "real" science has been formed in a world dominated by the manipulators of nature. The observers then pretend to an exactness that they cannot achieve and they attempt to objectify a part of nature that is completely accessible only with the air of subjective tools.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

a reply to critical comments on his article "Sex, Lies and Social Science" in New York Review of Books (4/20/95)].
Sex, Lies, and Social Science (1995)

World, Business, Nature, Learning

“All in the Downs the fleet was moor'd.”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

Sweet William's Farewell to Black-eyed Susan, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“You can see the pains I take to hide the attachment [of the muscles] at the clavicles and sternum, to soften the modeling of the ribs where it seems that the breasts just begin to swell; I try to go about it entirely differently from the usual way, which is above all to show what one knows. As this is not an anatomy lesson, I must bind together as seen in nature everything covering the armatures that make up and support the body, in order to put down only what I experience faced with these tissues of flesh that let one sens the blood beneath, while they reflect the light of the sky. In a word, I must bring to the painting of that breast the same artlessness I would employ in painting a bottle of milk.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Corot explains his making of the painting to his biographer Alfred Robaut, c. 1869; as quoted in Corot, Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 277
about his painting 'Landscape with Figures', also called 'La Toilette', Corot painted in 1859
1860s

Pain, Way, Support, Nature

“No one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength of his own to press forward with a due degree of watchfulness, and the great majority [of Christians] are kept down with such great weakness that they stagger and halt and even creep on the ground, and so make very slight advances.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 22.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“As Mahoba was for some time the headquarters of the early Muhammadan Governors, we could hardly expect to find that any Hindu buildings had escaped their furious bigotry, or their equally destructive cupidity. When the destruction of a Hindu temple furnished the destroyer with the ready means of building a house for himself on earth, as well as in heaven, it is perhaps wonderful that so many temples should still be standing in different parts of the country. It must be admitted, however, that, in none of the cities which the early Muhammadans occupied permanently, have they left a single temple standing, save this solitary temple at Mahoba, which doubtless owed its preservation solely to its secure position amid the deep waters of the Madan-Sagar. In Delhi, and Mathura, in Banaras and Jonpur, in Narwar and Ajmer, every single temple was destroyed by their bigotry, but thanks to their cupidity, most of the beautiful Hindu pillars were preserved, and many of them, perhaps, on their original positions, to form new colonnades for the masjids and tombs of the conquerors. In Mahoba all the other temples were utterly destroyed and the only Hindu building now standing is part of the palace of Parmal, or Paramarddi Deva, on the hill-fort, which has been converted into a masjid. In 1843, I found an inscription of Paramarddi Deva built upside down in the wall of the fort just outside this masjid. It is dated in S. 1240, or A. D. 1183, only one year before the capture of Mahoba by Prithvi-Raj Chohan of Delhi. In the Dargah of Pir Mubarak Shah, and the adjacent Musalman burial-ground, I counted 310 Hindu pillars of granite. I found a black stone bull lying beside the road, and the argha of a lingam fixed as a water-spout in the terrace of the Dargah. These last must have belonged to a temple of Siva, which was probably built in the reign of Kirtti Varmma, between 1065 and 1085 A. D., as I discovered an inscription of that prince built into the wall of one of the tombs.”

Alexander Cunningham

Archaeological Survey of India, Volume I: Four Reports Made During the Years 1862-63-64-65, Varanasi Reprint, 1972, Pp. 440-41. Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1993). Hindu temples: What happened to them. Volume I.

Beauty, Lying, Water, Time

“It started when i heard your song of love
Pouring down like honey from above
I started to spin, i started to move
Just like a needle that is sticking through the same old groove”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Spinning Top".
White Music (1978)

Love

“There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share — black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 14
My Antonia (1918)

Light, Appearance, Sun

“To Santa Fe
Do you need it?
Can you feel it in the same old way?
I can feel it from the mountain top
Runnin' down to the foamy brine
In a rest'rant 'cross a table top
Looking into a glass of wine
Whispering in the evening breeze
Green leaves glist'ning eucalyptus trees
Can you hear them?
Or get near them?”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Santa Fe/Beautiful Obsession
Song lyrics, Wavelength (1978)

Way, Feeling, Mountain, Tree

“In the providential history of mankind, Adam fell on the individual level; Noah fell on the family level; Abraham on the tribal level (clan level); Moses, on the national level; and Jesus, both on the national and worldwide levels. All those things are not a history of victory at all. But when we think of centering on the man Noah -- he kept his faith, trying to carry out his mission for 120 long years -- but we have to excel his faith. Abraham was the father of faith, Moses was a man of faith, Jesus was the son of man, trying to carry out his mission at the cost of his life. But they are, in a way, failures. So, in order for us to accomplish our mission, our whole-sided mission, we must excel them in many ways. It makes it difficult for us to carry out our mission; but when we pour out our whole energy, our whole being, into this providence project, we can get the cooperation of the spirit world, making it possible. We must turn all things upside down like this, making it a reality, and making it a success. Jesus had a strong sense of purpose in his mission, but ours must be even stronger than that.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

"Victory or Defeat" http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoon73/SM730331.htm (1973-03-31)

Life, World, Family, Faith

“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire "international community". We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

Repubblica.it interview, 23 Dec 2016 link http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2016/12/23/news/assange_wikileaks-154754000/

Communication, Housing

“Shykh Nuruddin Mubarak Ghaznavi was the most important disciple of Shykh Shihabuddin Suhrawardi, founder of the second most important sufi silsila after the Chishtiyya, who died in Baghdad in 1235 AD. Ghaznavi had come and settled down in India where he passed away in 1234-35 AD. He served as Shykh-ul-Islam in the reign of Shamsuddin Iltutmish (AD 1210-1236), and propounded the doctrine of Din Panahi. Barani quotes the first principle of this doctrine as follows in his Tarikh-i-Firuzshahi. “The kings should protect the religion of Islam with sincere faith… And kings will not be able to perform the duty of protecting the Faith unless, for the sake of God and the Prophet’s creed, they overthrow and uproot kufr and kafiri (infidelity), shirk (setting partners to God) and the worship of idols. But if the total uprooting of idolatry is not possible owing to the firm roots of kufr and the large number of kafirs and mushriks (infidels and idolaters), the kings should at least strive to insult, disgrace, dishonour and defame the mushrik and idol-worshipping Hindus, who are the worst enemies of God and the Prophet. The symptom of the kings being the protectors of religion is this:- When they see a Hindu, their eyes grow red and they wish to bury him alive; they also desire to completely uproot the Brahmans, who are the leaders of kufr and shirk and owning to whom kufr and shirk are spread and the commandments of kufr are enforced… Owing to the fear and terror of the kings of Islam, not a single enemy of God and the Prophet can drink water that is sweet or stretch his legs on his bed and go to sleep in peace.””

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231
Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi

God, Fear, Peace, Faith

“Of all the ridiculous, unnecessary, stupid things, the Horse Guards had sent tents! Soldiers had always slept in the open! Sharpe had woken in the morning with his hair frozen to the ground, had woken with his clothes sopping wet, but he had never wanted a tent! He was an infantryman. An infantryman had to march, and march fast, and tents would slow them down.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Major Richard Sharpe, p. 40
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Honor (1985)

Stupidity, Horse, Clothes

“They filmed it down in Wexford and I visited the set for about half an hour. I don't usually go near the set, because there's nothing for a writer to do there and you're constantly getting in the way. If I give a book to the movies, it's theirs. Writers often whinge about being betrayed by the movies – I have no sympathy for that. If you don't want a movie to be made, then don't sell your book to the movies.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Books, Way

“Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip … He starts to, um, bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen but he wouldn’t listen to me. … It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘Please stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip. … When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says ‘You better get some ice on that.’ And he turned and went out the door”

Juanita Broaddrick (1942) American nursing home administrator

Clinton Accuser's Story Aired https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/broaddrick022599.htm (February 25, 1999)

Kiss, Time, Cry

“When I was little, every birthday was big — you just couldn't wait to get older. But a lot of great things happened around 30. From 28 to now has been a time of incredible change and growth, deepening and ripening, good stuff. It's been hard too, because when you're going through that stuff you have to go down into the mud. They've been really interesting years.”

Alicia Silverstone (1976) American actress

Alicia Silverstone Interview on Her Age & Health - Redbook, Oct 2009 http://www.redbookmag.com/fun-contests/celebrity/alicia-silverstone-interview

Birthday, Change, Time, Waiting

“The study of economic lift-off is well developed; touch-down has not been considered. There is an asymmetry here which would invite comment if applied to aviation.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. 473, entry on Touch-Down http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

Study

“Conventional physics deals only with closed systems, i. e. systems which are considered to be isolated from their environment… However, we find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 7. Some Aspects of System Theory in Biology, p. 166-167 as quoted in: Eugene Thacker (2004) Biomedia. University of Minnesota Press. p. 150

Nature

“Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction — up, down, sideways — by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …

Time (28 March 1960)

Water, Flying

“I’m always looking for opportunities to explore that freewheeling imagination and insanity of children. To be able to plug in to that and let that carry you in to a performance is such a gas, I have so much fun with that. I love kids; I raised two girls and I love being a parent. Being a parent is hands down the greatest thing of my life, and I loved when they were young because as a parent you can spend that special time with them when they’re young and you can attach your imagination on to their ride and go with them and do what they’re doing. I always loved that and it’s kind of how I approach Patrick. I don’t know if this makes sense, but I guess that’s my approach and that’s what I continue to do because I’m so fortunate to keep going with this character. It’s very satisfying and enjoyable.”

Bill Fagerbakke (1957) American actor

Interview With Bill Fagerbakke: The Voice of Spongebob's Patrick Star http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/spongebob-squarepants/225197/interview-with-bill-fagerbakke-the-voice-of-spongebobs-patrick-star (November 11, 2013)

Love, Life, Children, Imagination

“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

11 April 1834
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Love

“On the way home from school, I’d go two blocks out of my way to pass by Lopez’ Pool Hall to look for cigarette butts that the veteranos had flicked to the sidewalk. They had G. I. hair cuts, their old, spit-shined paratrooper boots and the same khaki uniforms they wore to fight the Japs. I’d pretend not to notice them leaning against the building. With my head down, I’d walk along the gutter and just casually push the longer butts with my toe as if I were kicking a can or a rock … just a barefoot boy with cheek humhumming along the road on a hot summer day in his Huckleberry Finn strides, oh yes!”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 91.

School, Way, Home, Boy

““Can I drive you down to your house?”
The man flicked an expressive glance along the car’s length and shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll walk. There’s still a law of averages.”
And you can take that phrase and carve it on Humanity’s headstone, Fay thought bitterly, but did not reply.”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

The End of Summer, p. 14 (originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1954)
The Unexpected Dimension (1960)

Law, Cars, Housing

“You must never lose your sense of shame. If one is past all shame what is one fit for? One lives like a bird in moult, shedding good qualities like plumes all pointing down to Hell.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach book Parzival

Ir sult niemer iuch verschemn.
verschamter lîp, waz touc der mêr?
der wont in der mûze rêr,
dâ im werdekeit entrîset.
Bk. 3, st. 170, line 16; p. 95.
Parzival

Hell, Bird, Sense, Past

“Latin literature would almost certainly have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of the Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down.”

Thomas Cahill book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found

Literature

“(referring to his drink) I got two straws here, in case one breaks down. You know Crazy Straws, they go all over the place? These fuckin' straws are sane. They never lost their minds. They said "We're going straight to the mouth. That fucker who takes a while to get there? He's crazy."”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

Drink

“We--by whom I mean anyone over sixty--commit two offenses just bu existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk to slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drugs barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", p. 315 (Nook edition)
Cloud Atlas (2004)

World, Business

“If we believe, as we do, in our political theory that the people are the guardians of government, we should not subject our government to the bitterness and hatred of those who have not been born of our tradition and are not willing to yield an increase to the strength inherent in our institutions. American liberty is dependent on quality in citizenship. Our obligation is to maintain that citizenship at its best. We must have nothing to do with those who would undermine it. The retroactive immigrant is a danger in our midst. His discontent gives him no time to seize a healthy opportunity to improve himself. His purpose is to tear down. There is no room for him here. He needs to be deported, not as a substitute for, but as a part of his punishment. There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

People, Law, Tear, Time

“Day after day
They send my friends away
To mansions cold and grey.
To the far side of town
Where the thin men stalk the streets
While the sane stay underground.Day after day,
They tell me I can go.
They tell me I can blow
To the far side of town
Where it's pointless to be high,
'Cause it's such a long way down.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

All the Madmen
Song lyrics, The Man Who Sold the World (1970)

Men, Way

“How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section X (p. 372).

Personality

“When I go down to the manufacturing districts, I know that I shall be returning to a gloomy scene. I know that starvation is stalking through the land, and that men are perishing for want of the merest necessaries of life. When I witness this, and recollect that there is a law which especially provides for keeping our population in absolute want. I cannot help attributing murder to the Legislature of this country—and wherever I stand, whether here or out of doors, I will denounce that system as legislative murder which denies to the people of the land food in exchange for the produce of their industry.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1841/sep/24/supply-distress-of-the-country in the House of Commons (24 September 1841) against the Corn Laws. 1840s

Life, Men, People, Law

“There is but one solution of the problem, and it is to obliterate absolutely all color line. Open up to the Negro as to the white man, the political offices of the country, making but one test, that of mental and moral fitness. Throw down at once the barriers which close out the Negro merely on account of his color from hotel, theater, and railway carriage. Meet your Negro brother as your equal at banquets and in social gatherings. Give him, in one word, and in full meaning of the terms, equal rights and equal privileges, political, civil, and social. I know no color line, I will acknowledge none. The time is not distant when Americans and Christians will wonder that there ever was a race prejudice.”

John Ireland (bishop) (1838–1918) Catholic bishop

[McClarey, Donald R, Father John Ireland and the Fifth Minnesota, The American Catholic, 2012-08-23, https://the-american-catholic.com/2012/08/23/father-john-ireland-and-the-fifth-minnesota/, 2018-02-04] [Source for quote doesn't list primary source., February 2018]

Color, Problem, Distant, Time

“Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone's nightmares come true.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Written on the Body (1992)

Life, Lie, World, Travel

“The puella mother who has never taken up residence in her own body, and therefore fears her own chthonic nature, is not going to experience pregnancy as a quiet meditation with her unborn child, nor birth as a joyful bonding experience. Although she may go through the motions of natural childbirth, the psyche/soma split in her is so deep that physical bonding between her and her baby daughter does not take place. Her child lives with a profound sense of despair, a despair which becomes conscious if in later years she does active imagination with her body and releases waves of grief and terror that resonate with the initial, primal rejection. […] The body that appears in dreams wrapped in fire, encircled by a black snake or encumbered by a fish tail from the waist down, may be holding a death-wish too deep for tears.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Pregnant Virgin (1985), p. 37

Death, Fear, Dreams, Imagination

“I took a walk with my fame down memory lane / I never did find my way back"
Feel no shame / 'coz time's no chain"”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Hey Now
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

Way, Feeling, Memory, Time

“Whenever I hear a campaign talk about a need to energize the base, that's a campaign that's going down the toilet. It's a pretty good indication that they're not eating up any territory, they can't get anybody in the center to support them, they're getting shelled back into their own bunker.”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

In All's fair: love, war, and running for president (2007), with Mary Matalin and Peter Knobler, p. 207

Support

“Mosul is the site of a very famous old Iraqi university. The American forces were refurbishing the place. They were going to tear down some of the outer walls, give this palace to the university. They'd also connected the university to the Internet and to the Web. Helped people contact scholars on the outside world. That was all the job of these very good- humored, very thoughtful officers who were really helping to rebuild the place… I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Interview with Gibson https://web.archive.org/web/20030810014618/http://michaeltotten.com/ (July 2003), Vanity Fair. 2000s, 2003

People, World, Sense, Tear

“There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new. I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even…I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest. What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

Dreams, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“The slave who digs in the mine or labors at the oar can rejoice at the prospect of laying down his burden together with his life; but to the slave of guilt there arises no hope from death. On the contrary, he is obliged to look forward with constant terror to this most certain of all events, as the conclusion of all his hopes, and the commencement of his greatest miseries.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 550.

Life, Death, Hope

“The best part of Nintendo was the codes. We had codes that got us to the end of the game immediately. Why can’t we have that in real life? Just for once I’d like to be on a date with a chick and when she starts talking about her cats, and she’s like “And this cat likes corn, and this one has diarrhea, and this one can fight crime,” I can be like, “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, select start, and I’m in bed with her, and no more cats.””

Kyle Cease (1977) American actor

citation needed

Life, Game, Cats, Fight

“I have more dumb luck thank anybody I know. There must be a convey of guardian angels working twenty-four hours a day looking after me[…] Like the night I first got to Nashville that I laid down in the middle of Broadway, waiting to get run over. It didn't happen […] I could swear they were keeping me alive just to see what I'd get next, I'm glad they feel that way. I'm trying to help them a little more this days.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

[The Facts of Life: And Other Dirty Jokes, 29, Random House Digital, 2003, 9780375758607, Nelson, Willie; McMurtry, Larry]

Angels, Way, Feeling, Waiting

“We multiply whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed.”
Plures efficimur, quoties metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis christianorum.

Tertullian book Apologeticus

Apologeticus, 50, s. 13
Often quoted as ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’
Variant translation: As often as we are mown down by you, the more we grow in numbers; the blood of the Christians is the seed. Another common translation is "The blood of the Martyrs is the seed of Christians."
Apologeticus pro Christianis

“That's the story that went around,
But here's the real low-down:
Put the blame on Mame, boys,
Put the blame on Mame.”

Doris Fisher (1915–2003) American musician

Song Put the Blame on Mame

Boy

“God tells us', wrote Equiano, 'that the oppressor and the oppressed are both in his hands. And if these are not the poor, the broken-hearted, the blind, the captive, the bruised which our Savior speaks of, who are they?' Down through the years, African-Americans have upheld the ideals of America by exposing laws and habits contradicting those ideals. The rights of African-Americans were not the gift of those in authority. Those rights were granted by the author of life and regained by the persistence and courage of African-Americans themselves. Among those Americans was Phillis Wheatley, who was dragged from her home here in West Africa in 1761 at the age of 7. In my country she became a poet and the first noted black author in our nation's history. Phillis Wheatley said, 'In every human breast God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom. It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance'. That deliverance was demanded by escaped slaves named Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, educators named Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DeBois and ministers of the Gospel named Leon Sullivan and Martin Luther King Jr.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

Love, Life, God, Truth

Quotes about down page 56

Quotes about down
page 56