Quotes about head
page 14

“We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter

Men, Books, Dreams, Sleep

“But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.”

Agatha Christie book Murder on the Orient Express

Source: Murder on the Orient Express

Nature, Personality

“Eddis looked at her minister, curious. “Your head?” she asked.
Attolia explained. “He had to be forcibly dissuaded from strangling his son.”
“So have we all from time to time,” Eddis said seriously.”

Megan Whalen Turner The Queen of Attolia

Source: The Queen of Attolia

Time

“What's wrong?"
I didn't say a word."
Something's up. What is it?"
Nothing."
His head turned, gaze going to mine. "Yeah?"
Yes."
A snort and he returned to his bowl…”

Kelley Armstrong book The Summoning

Source: The Summoning

“Freiherr Hugo Reiss made a notation on his pad. Broach subject with SS General Otto Skorzeny, or better yet Otto Ohlendorf at Amt III of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Didn’t Ohlendorf head Einsatzgruppe D?”

Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle

“I weep for Adonais — he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. I
Adonais (1821)

Tear, Dead

“Leo scratched his head. “Well I dunno about Enchiladas—”
“Enceladus,” Piper corrected.
“Whatever. But Old Potty Face mentioned another name. Porpoise Fear, or something?”
“Porphyrion?” Piper asked. ”He was the giant king, I think.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Fear, Thinking

“all day long
wearing a hat
that wasn't on my head”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

“I made the wrong choice," I whispered.
My mother shook her head.
"A child should never have to choose.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

“How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Soul, Star, Kiss, Light

“So he has no head'
'Thats usually what headless means'
'No head at all?'
'Your really not getting the whole headless thing are you?'
'Its just kind of silly even for us…”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Mortal Coil

“Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Source: Dreamland

“Off with their heads!”

Frank Beddor book The Looking Glass Wars

Source: The Looking Glass Wars

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Fear, Peace

“She stumbled back a step. “Carlos was the…?”
“Panther, aye.”
“He’s a cat?” And her boss was a dog. She shook her head. Was her next door neighbor a goldfish?”

Kerrelyn Sparks (1955) American writer

Source: The Vampire and the Virgin

Dogs, Cats

“Your head is full of kelp.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“I couldn't get Him out of my head. Still can't. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Thinking, Learning, Forgetting

“I loved being in my own head so much, it was getting harder and harder being with other people.”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

Source: Anybody Out There?

Love, People

“And the rest is history,' I said.
Nah.' He shook his head. 'The rest is now.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

History

“Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?"
"Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Source: CryoBurn

Revenge

“I've got a hangover."
"No, you hit your head on the floor."
"I can't stay. I've got to rescue that fool Sophie.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Howl's Moving Castle

Source: Howl's Moving Castle

Fools

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.”

Jennifer Weiner (1970) American writer

Heart

“Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

“Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Books, Parting

“As soon as the guards where gone, I lay down on my stone bench and dumped the king and his threats out of my head without ceremony. They were too unpleasant to worry over anyway.”

Megan Whalen Turner The Thief

Source: The Thief

“As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Chance

“Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

“[S]he leans into this guy and rocks her head like I’m making this music for her, when if I could, I would take it all away and give her as much silence as she’s given me pain.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Pain, Music, Guy, Silence

“I fell out of the hammock while I was sleeping. (Arik)
On your head? (Geary)
Apparently. Good thing it’s hard, huh? (Arik)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: The Dream Hunter

Sleep

“It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Thinking

“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Fools, Spring, Bird

“There's a guy chasing me!" I called as I headed out the door.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Guy

“Each window like a pill'ry appears,
With heads thrust thro' nail'd by the ears.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto III, line 391
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

Appearance

“Do not let your zeal for the cause of democracy deceive you as to the fact of the opaque ignorance in which the great bulk of the people of England are wrapt. If you write for the masses politically, and write soundly and honestly, they will not be able at present to appreciate you, and consequently will not support you…There is no remedy for all this but improved education. Such as the tail and the body are, such will be the character of the head. Nature does not produce such monsters as an ignorant or vicious community, and virtuous and wise leaders. In Scotland you are better off because you are better educated. The great body of the English peasants are not a jot advanced in intellect since the days of their Saxon ancestors. I hope you will join us in a cry for schoolmasters as a first step to Radicalism.”

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

Letter to W. Tait (17 August 1838), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 127.
1830s

People, Education, Hope, Democracy

“This many-headed monster,
The giddy multitude.”

Philip Massinger The Roman Actor

The Roman Actor (1626), Act iii. Sc. 2. Compare: "Many-headed multitude", Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesy, Book ii; "Many-headed multitude", William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, act ii, scene 3; "This many-headed monster, Multitude", Daniel, History of the Civil War, book ii, st. 13.

“Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation’s Edge (1982), Chapter 12 “Agent” section 4, p. 226

Light

“The World War II generation faced threats head-on. Now, by inactivity or through liberal self-loathing, we help those who are trying to kill us.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country after Obama (2016)

War, World, Help

“Stuart Wheeler says women are no good at poker?! If he fancies playing a bit of Heads Up, he knows where to find me.”

Victoria Coren (1972) British writer, presenter and poker player

Responding to Stuart Wheeler's suggestion that women are not good at chess, bridge or poker.
Evening Standard Quote of the Day, Friday 16 Aug 2013, p. 16

Women

“If Boeing got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade?”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 3, Trade, p. 96

“We should not speak of all subjects in one tone and in the same manner. We do not march at the head of a regiment as we walk on a promenade; and we should use the same style in which we should naturally speak of different things in the same way, with the same difference as we should walk, but always naturally, and as is suitable, either at the head of a regiment or on a promenade.”

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs

Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), VII. On Air and Manner

Way, Nature

“Among the unexpected revelations of human nature that suddenly astonish historians, one of the least reasonable was the passionate outburst of religious devotion to the ideal of feminine grace, charity and love that took place here in Normandy while it was still a part of the English kingdom, and flamed up into almost fanatical frenzy among the most hard-hearted and hard-headed race in Europe.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Love, Nature, Passion, Heart

“The marketing director in each department reported directly to the department head and controlled market research and sales. More important, the marketing manager was also responsible for new product development, requesting production schedules, and controlling finished goods inventory.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 234

“The Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of St Germain are kept alive by Bolshevism in Germany. The Peace Treaty and Bolshevism are two heads of one monster. We must decapitate both.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, 1923 https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatinterviews1 1920s

Peace

“They don't know my head's full of me
And that I have my own special thing,
And there's no hole in my head.
Too bad.”

Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978) American folk singer

Song No Hole In My Head

“In boxing, the style has changed over the years from crouching to being more and more vertical. Also people used to jump around, but the modern boxer like Tyson just moves in flat footed to demolish his opponent in a scientific way. In Wing Chun a person does not bob as in boxing. When two beginners fight it doesn't matter how they fight, but against professionals it makes a difference. Even a smaller [person] is better off to keep the body vertical and step back, then to bob and weave. This is because the hand can move faster than the body. Boxing is still like a game because there are rules for how you can hit and how you can't hit. If you attack someone and they bend their head, then in Wing Chun you can still hit them with your hand even without pulling your hand back.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Boxing Source: Comments From Wong Shun Leung and Tsui Shan Ting, by Ray Van Raamsdonk http://www.springtimesong.com/wcqanda.htm

People, Way, Game, Change

“The most successful people in the workplace are those who normally really like and ‘buy-into’ their employer’s mission and vision. In other words such people like what the company wishes to achieve and where it is heading. It is akin to being on a ship and liking what the ship is doing and liking where the ship is heading. Can you imagine being on a ship and not wishing to go where it is heading?”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Page 62 Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Managing Teams in a Week (2013) https://books.google.ae/books?idqZjO9_ov74EC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIIDAB#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Secrets of Success at Work – 50 techniques to excel (2014) https://books.google.ae/books?id4S7vAgAAQBAJ&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIJjAC#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse

People, Imagination, Success

“On the rock stars: Rock stars don’t talk to each other. They’re too important to talk to another one. They’ve all got their own little palace, their own universe, of which they are the head. So how can they possibly go to somebody else’s universe? They can’t handle it. I will one day write the book that shows just how massive some of these egos are. Because I was a slow success, I was meeting people socially whose records I had at home, who were now talking to me on a what-strings-do-you-use level. And very few of them have not disappointed. [Pink Floyd’s] Dave Gilmour is the only one that [hasn’t disappointed]. That paints everyone else as a cunt. Which they are. But Gilmour is fabulous.”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

Henry Yates (2015 December 1) " An Interview With The Straight-Talking, No-F**ks-Given Chris Rea http://teamrock.com/feature/2015-12-01/chris-rea-straight-shooter" by TeamRock 2015

People, Books, Disappointment, Home

“…thousands of little children occupy sleeping quarters with parents and boarders whose every act is visible to all. Morality indeed! Society is much like the ostrich with its head in the sand. It will not look at facts and face the responsibility of its own stupidity.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Children, Stupidity, Parent, Sleep

“They’ll be fine, and wiser for the experience. Young minds are brittle. Oldsters, now, we’ve had some disappointments. We’ve set aside the notion that we’re the center of the universe, so our minds bend with strain instead of meeting it head-on.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 4 “Across the Amathel” section 1 (p. 184)

Disappointment, Universe

“When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach… So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“Return”, p. 55.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Time, Joy

“The little hen poked her head up from the hole she had dug and looked at the crowing rooster. She thoughtfully looked from the rooster in the window sill to the high row of nests that rose against the end wall of the hen house. She started to dig again, but then she hurried through the loose straw to the nests. The time had come to lay an egg.”

Meindert DeJong book Along Came a Dog

Along Came a Dog (1958)

Time, Housing

“I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts. In short, a bit of a crook.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), pp. xix-xx

Books, Way, Science

“This ideal University of Life … would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning—not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

“Reclaiming the Intellectual Life for Posterity,” Liberal Education, vol. 95, no. 2 http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-sp09/le-sp09_MyView.cfm

Life, Marriage, Literature, Question

“My first memory of Nirvana was getting a cassette of demos, which ended up becoming Bleach. Everybody's response was that this was an amazing band and these were amazing songs. It was another indication that the Northwest had something special that you couldn't argue with.
It was pretty shocking to see a threepiece that sounded like that, and trying to get inside the head of a guy who writes a song like "Floyd the Barber" – where does the kernel of a song like that start?
The Seattle scene benefitted from an MTV culture, and it was because of the way Nirvana looked and presented themselves that created this kind of unanimous support worldwide. Rock music had become kind of hedonistic – 35-year-old men taking a helicopter to the stage and dating supermodels, and going out of their way to separate themselves from their audience. Nirvana, more than any other band, rocked way harder, had significant originality, while looking like guys you went to high school with. I think that was their secret. There was an inclusion that was long overdue, and it was what rock was supposed to be about.
The legend isn't simply going to be the way that he took his life; I believe it will always be the songs.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Soundgarden Era

Life, Men, Secret, School

“The final irony is that the vast majority of blacks have turned against the party of emancipation and individual responsibility and now support the party of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws that now imposes dependency and racist quotas. The same Democratic Party that tells them they cannot succeed on their own. The Party that tells them they are not good enough to intellectually compete with whites. And now we have a black candidate spewing the same vile line so that he can become the head overseer. This is the party that tells blacks they need the Democrats as a crutch: the same party that says it is not racist. Perhaps Jefferson Davis did get the last laugh after all. Did he not think that blacks were so inferior to whites that they could not be trusted to look to their own affairs? That without the slave-supporting Democratic Party the black man would be lost and helpless in a world he lacked the intelligence to barely comprehend.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Gerard Jackson, "The Party of Lincoln vs. the Democrats' hate machine" http://brookesnews.com/080906dems.html (9 June 2008), BrookesNews.

World, Law, Intelligence, Support

“Most of the drivers, however, had the sense to stay put, fuming behind their blank windshields as they calculated the cost of repairs and repainting. Practically all of them were armed, but not one was stupid enough to pull a gun. It had been tried during a Trainite demonstration in San Francisco last month. A girl had been shot dead. Others, anonymous in whole-head masks and drab mock-homespun clothing, had dragged the killer from his car and used the same violent acid they applied to glass to write MURDERER on his flesh.
In any case, there was little future in rolling down a window to curse the demonstrators. Throats didn’t last long in the raw air.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

December “A ROOST FOR CHICKENS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Stupidity, Cars, Girl, Sense

“But you can't emphasize "beef", that's like his wanting me to emphasize "in" before "July"! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes

Way

“She hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.”

Joe Haldeman book The Forever War

Source: The Forever War (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 28)

Girl

“I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

Act 1, sc. 5
No Exit (1944)

Tear, Suffering, Hurt

“Bradbury Fisher shuddered from head to foot, and his legs wobbled like asparagus stalks.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Heart of a Goof (1926)

“He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Moore’s Life of Lord Byron (1830)

Love

“The signs on Bell’s door read “J. Bell” and “M. Bell.” I knocked and was invited in by Bell. He looked about the same as he had the last time I saw him, a couple of years ago. He has long, neatly combed red hair and a pointed beard, which give him a somewhat Shavian figura. On one wall of the office is a photograph of Bell with something that looks like a halo behind his head, and his expression in the photograph is mischievous. Theoretical physicists’ offices run the gamut from chaotic clutter to obsessive neatness; the Bells’ is somewhere in between. Bell invited me to sit down after warning me that the “visitor’s chair” tilted backward at unexpected angles. When I had mastered it, and had a chance to look around, the first thing that struck me was the absence of Mary. “Mary,” said Bell, with a note of some disbelief in his voice, “has retired.” This, it turned out, had occurred not long before my visit. “She will not look at any mathematics now. I hope she comes back,” he went on almost plaintively; “I need her. We are doing several problems together.” In recent years, the Bells have been studying new quantum mechanical effects that will become relevant for the generation of particle accelerators that will perhaps succeed the LEP. Bell began his career as a professional physicist by designing accelerators, and Mary has spent her entire career in accelerator design. A couple of years ago Bell, like the rest of the members of CERN theory division, was asked to list his physics speciality. Among the more “conventional” entries in the division such as “super strings,” “weak interactions,” “cosmology,” and the like, Bell’s read “quantum engineering.””

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

Hope, Mathematics, Problem, Study

“Douglas's doctrine of 'popular sovereignty' meant no more than that: in a democracy justice is the interest of the majority, which is 'the stronger'. Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion and one which was not justified merely by the counting of heads.”

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

Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln Douglas Debates http://archive.li/CFqbg (1959), p. xi 1950s

Justice, Democracy, Dependency

“Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is. When allegedly holy men do the exact same thing, then its not called fraud anymore. Its called “revealed truth” instead. That’s quite a double-standard, innit? Like when some minister gets on stage at one of those stadium-sized churches -to state as fact who God is and what God is, and what he wants, hates, needs, won’t tolerate, or will do -for whom, how, and under what conditions; they don’t have any data to show they’re correct about any of it, yet they speak so matter-of-factly. Even when they contradict each other they’re all still completely confident in their own empty assertions! So why do none of these tens of thousands of head-bobbing, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed wanna-believers have the presence of mind to ask, “how do you know that?” Well, for all those who never asked the question, here’s the answer; they don’t know that! There’s no way anyone could know these things. They’re making it up as they go along. These sermons are the best possible example of blind speculation; asserted as though it were truth and sold for tithe. If anyone or everyone else would be called liars for claiming such things without any evidentiary basis then why make exceptions for evangelists? For these charlatans are obviously liars too! The clergy are in the same category of questionable credibility as are commissioned salesmen, politicians, and military recruiters.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8, Youtube (December 25, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, God, Hate, Truth

“I went to a museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Steven Wright Special (1985)

“I’m sick of hearing how far we’ve come. I’m sick of hearing how in some cases women are superseding men, progressing to positions of middle and upper management. Above all, I’m sick of hearing about the pipeline, about the path to the top supposedly thick with women who will, in the fullness of time, be rewarded for their patience and virtue. The following figures speak for themselves: Three percent of Fortune 500 companies are headed by women; 16.8 percent of members of the U. S. Congress are women; 7 percent of tenured engineering faculty in four-year institutions are women. The fact is that so far as leadership is concerned, women in nearly every realm are hardly any better off than they were a generation ago.”

Barbara Kellerman (1939) American academic

Barbara Kellerman in Harvard Business Review; Cited in " Quote of the week: Barbara Kellerman http://theweek.com/articles/494754/quote-week-barbara-kellerman," at theweek.com, April 30, 2010.

Women, Men, Time, Patience

“When I first joined my local library, I read endlessly. I immediately headed for the fantasy section, fairy tales, you name it. As a teen-ager, I read every novel by Kenneth Roberts, who wrote historical novels about the Revolutionary War period. My mother used to read to me. Heidi was one of my childhood favorites.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

The New York Times interview (1994)

War, Reading, Childhood

“The embarrassing truth — the brontosaurus in the broom closet that nobody wants to talk about — is that the Republican Party was never the party of freedom. That Goldwater business in the 1960s was a fluke, immediately snuffed out by "older, wiser heads" in the GOP like those of Nelson Rockefeller, Weeping Willy Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Romney. The Republican Party was created in the 1850s by northeastern mercantilists just like them, to crush the hopes of poor southerners for individual liberty and independence, and keep them bound in serfdom, paying 80 percent of all taxes collected in America.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"The Brontosaurus in the Broom Closet" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle541-20091018-05.html 18 October 2009.

Truth, Hope, Business, Freedom

“By the decree of the Al-mighty an arrow struck Himun in the forehead… (His soldiers) saw how matters stood, and he sustained a complete defeat. When Shah Kuli Beg was told of what had occurred, he came up to the elephant (of Himun) and brought it into the presence of Bairam Khan. Bairam Khan… caused Himun to descend from the elephant and took him before the young and fortunate prince and said, ‘As this is our first success, let your Highness’s own august hand smite this infidel with the sword.’ The Prince, accordingly, struck him and divided his head from his unclean body.”

Hemu (1501–1556) General and Chief Minister of Adil Shah Suri

Ahmad Yadgar. Elliott and Dowson, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, Vol. V, pp. 65-66.

Success

“To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Dubya's Double Dip?" http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html, The New York Times, 2 August 2002 :It should be noted that Krugman was being sarcastic http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/when-someone-says-paul-krugman-called-for-greenspan-to-create-a-housing-bubble-back-in-2002-they-are-trying-to-say-that-they-are-either-a-fool-or-a-liar; two weeks later, he wrote an article http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/16/opinion/mind-the-gap.html warning about the dangers of a housing bubble. The New York Times Columns

Business, Thinking, Fight, Housing

“I have a bit of a consummate victim in my head. That’s who I identify with throughout history. When I was 10 I would draw black eyes on myself because I thought it was cool. You’re so into people who are tragic. You want to be that so badly. But you probably aren’t really the tragic genius that you think you are.”

Peter Wentz (1979) American musician

"This Charming Man," interview, Out.com (August 2008)

People, History, Thinking, Drawing

“We're so familiar with written language that we sometimes forget how outlandish a concept it must have seemed to our ancestors. Writing allowed people to copy and transfer their thoughts and their tribal codes of conduct to others, even unto generations they themselves would not live to personally instruct, affect or control. The words themselves must have seemed alive and immortal and as "holy" as ghosts. Written law was thus a way of mastering time and influencing the future, a weapon greater than fire and steel, I hope you'll agree. When read, the written word made the head buzz and ring and fill up with voices and commands from nowhere, as if God Himself had come thundering down through the symbols, off the page and into the room, fertilising and impregnating the mind with his Ghostly, unmistakable presence.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2005
http://suicidegirls.com/words/Grant+Morrison/
On writing

God, People, Law, Hope

“Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Preface to the first edition of The American Credo : A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)
1920s

Men, Way, Freedom, Change

“Take care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, 'I never whitened a hair of her dear head, I never marked a sorrowful line in her face!' For of all the many things that you can think when you are a man, you had better have that by you, Woolwich!”

Charles Dickens book Bleak House

Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 34

Thinking

“"You have everything, Karnus. Wealth. Power. Seven brothers and sisters. How many cousins? Nieces? Nephews? A father and mother who love you, yet… you are here, drinking alone, killing my friends. Setting the purpose of your life to ending me. Why?"
"Because you wronged my family. No one wrongs the Bellona and lives."
"So it's pride."
"It's always pride."
"Pride is just a shout into the wind."
He shakes his head, voice deepening. "I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind - how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall." He leans forward. "So you see, pride is the only thing."”

Pierce Brown book Golden Son

Source: Golden Son (2015), Ch. 11: Red; Karnus and Darrow

Love, Life, Family, Drink

“Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions.”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

1920s, Lecture on Dada', 1922

Religion, Nature, Passion, Indifference

“It's all in your head — you just have no idea how big your head is.”

Lon Milo DuQuette (1948) American occult writer

Source: The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford (2001), Chapter 8

Idea

“Fame far out-strips all Mischiefs in her course,
Which grows by Motion, gains, by flying, Force;
Kept under first by Fear, soon after shrouds,
Stalking or Earth, her Head amongst the Clouds.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

Fear, Flying

“In our weakness, His strength is ours. In our conflicts, His victories are ours. In our bereavements and sorrows, His grace is ours. He had not where to lay His weary head, that we might have His bosom on which to lean our fevered brows. He endured the cross, and despised the shame, that, instead of weeping and wailing, we might share His immortal blessedness.”

Richard Fuller (minister) (1804–1876) United States Baptist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 246.

Victory

“The problem is all inside your head, she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
Song lyrics, Still Crazy After All These Years (1975)

Way, Lovers, Problem, Help

“He turned his head, reacted in a microsecond, and hit the deck just before a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball zipped past his ear and clanged into the wire backstop. Had the pitch been another inch lower or a few miles an hour faster, he would have been beaned and, at that speed, possibly killed.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Waking Hours: Book 1 in East Salem Trilogy with Pete Nelson (Thomas Nelson), p. 140

Past, Speed

“[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

Books, Birth, Tree, Reading

“Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Letter to Coleridge (August 14, 1800)

Dogs, Question, Heart

“If there is a sentence in the creed which we cannot say together, there is nothing in Christ which we would wish to be different; and heresies of the heart are quite as dangerous, and to me as estranging, as errors in the head.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 112.

Error, Heart, Christ

“Why, Sir, when I have anything to invent, I never trouble my head about it, as other men do; but presently turn over this Book, and there I have, at one view, all that Perseus, Montaigne, Seneca's Tragedies, Horace, Juvenal, Claudian, Pliny, Plutarch's lives, and the rest, have ever thought upon this subject: and so, in a trice, by leaving out a few words, or putting in others of my own, the business is done.”

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) English statesman and poet

Bayes, Act I, sc. i
The Rehearsal (1671)

Men, Books, Business

“For me the ideal Olympics would be to go in with all that pressure, all that attention and have performances that are literally tear-jerking, that make people put their heads down because they’re embarrassed at how emotional they’re getting, that make people want to try sports, talk to their kids, call their f---ing ex-wives—and come away with no medals. I think that would be epic. That would be the perfect thing.”

Bode Miller (1977) American alpine ski racer

Interview with Newsweek, Nov. 2005, pub. 23 Feb. 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11522274/

People, Jerk, Thinking, Tear

“Well I'm starvin' and freezin'
In this measly old bed
(Then I'll crawl across the salt flats
To stroke your sweet head)
Come across the desert,
with no shoes on?
(I love you truly,
or I love no-one)”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Only Skin
Ys (2006)

Love, Shoe

“There are many reasons why the religion of Islam impoverishes western society, but the main one, in my opinion, is that it degrades and debases women, except, of course, for left-wing women, who happily degrade and debase themselves defending Islam, like turkeys defending Christmas. A woman in Islam needs to be covered from head to toe because men are not expected to exhibit any kind of basic self-control. I get a lot of correspondence from angry Muslim males and I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that western women are asking to be raped because of the way they dress. No other religion teaches people to think like this. Recently here in Britain, we've had a rash of Muslim gangs pimping and raping young girls in northern England. I do mean Muslim gangs, and not Asians, as the media keep reporting. There are no Sikhs or Hindus involved in this, and to call them Asians to avoid naming the real problem is a slander on Hindus and Sikhs. These men do it because they regard non-Muslim women as subhuman trash. And this poison is coming directly from their religion, a religion whose values are dictated and imposed by some of the most narrow-minded, psychotic human beings on this planet. And, coming as I do from an Irish Catholic background, believe me, that's saying something.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Name the poison" (22 June 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=sEsWO4xep44 2011

Women, Men, People, Religion

“When you are next out of doors on a summer night, turn your head towards the zenith. Almost vertically above you will be shining the brightest star of the northern skies — Vega of the Lyre, twenty-six years away at the speed of light, near enough to the point of no return for us short-lived creatures. Past this blue-white beacon, fifty times as brilliant as our sun, we may send our minds and bodies, but never our hearts.
For no man will ever turn homewards beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

We'll Never Conquer Space (1960)

Love, Star, Light, Time

“The problem creationists have with evolution is not that it challenges belief in God, because it doesn’t. Their problem is that evolution, -like every other field of science- challenges the accuracy and authority of the storybooks which creationists equate to God. Consequently, they tend to reject science almost entirely, and will often take all the sciences they perceive as threatening, and lump them all together under one heading, which they then refer to as “evolution-ism”. It’s an attempt to minimize the sheer volume of sciences allied against them. This is also part of their intentionally-erected illusion of equality; a false dichotomy that if their legendary folklore isn’t the absolute authority -being both literally and completely true, then God couldn’t create or even exist any other way.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Way, Problem, Science

“Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deducted reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Start of Chapter 29 (at page 237)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

Men, Hate, Imagination, Game

“I needed two working handguns at the same time, as that was how I planned to commit suicide; with two simultaneous shots to the head.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Final Days

Suicide, Time

“Why do I always bang my head against the wall
So sick and tired of doing, doing everything wrong”

Beef Bonanza punk rock musician in The Bones

Flatline Fever
Lyrics

“No honest man or woman in Germany feels responsible for these things. Good Germans took Nazism as a new religion. These people are shocked by the revelations which have shown that Nazism was not idealism, but a means to the performance of criminal acts…
In war a German feels bound to join the ranks without question. Three of my sons were called up. I could not hold back. I wrote from the concentration camp to Admiral Raeder, C. in C. of the Navy, asking to be allowed to return to the submarine service or to do any other service in the Navy. I heard nothing for several months, and then a reply came, not from Raeder but from Keitel, head of the Wehrmacht. He thanked me, but regretted I could not be employed on active service.”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Replying to questions on the atrocities of the concentration camps, at a press conference in Naples, Italy, and confirming that he actually had written a widely publicized letter from such a camp, early in the war, to be permitted to serve in the military (5 June 1945)

War, People, Religion, Feeling