Quotes about lot

page 40

Translated in Poems of Akhmatova (1973) by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward
No, not under a foreign heavenly-cope, and
Not canopied by foreign wings
I was with my people in those hours,
There where, unhappily, my people were.
Translated by D. M. Thomas
No, not under the vault of another sky,
not under the shelter of other wings.
I was with my people then,
there where my people were doomed to be.
Translator unknown.
Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987)

Johnny Got His Gun (1938)
Context: No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar. Next time anybody came gabbling to him about liberty — what did he mean next time? There wasn't going to be any next time for him. But the hell with that. If there could be a next time and somebody said "let's fight for liberty", he would say mister my life is important. I'm not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I've got to know in advance what liberty is, and whose idea of liberty we're talking about and just how much of that liberty we're going to have. And what's more mister — are you as much interested in liberty as you want me to be? And maybe too much liberty will be as bad as too little liberty and I think you're a goddamn fourflusher talking through your hat, and I've already decided that I like the liberty I've got right here. The liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with my girl. I think I like that liberty better than fighting for a lot of things we won't get and ending up without any liberty at all. Ending up dead and rotting before my life is even begun good or ending up like a side of beef. Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me, I don't care for some.

Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles" (1992), Ch. 7 : Work, §9 : Sales to Service
Context: The thought system that dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years we may have worked for power, money and prestige. Now all of a sudden we’ve learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don’t know where to search for motivation anymore. If we’re not working in order to get rich, then why are we working at all? What are we supposed to do all day? Just sit home and watch TV?
Not at all, but thinking so is a temporary phase many people go through — when the values of the old world no longer have a hold on us, but the values of the new don’t yet grab your soul. They will. There comes a time, not too long into the journey to God, when the realization that the world could work beautifully if we would give it the chance, begins to excite us. It becomes our new motivation. The news isn’t how bad things are. The news is how good they could be. And our own activity could be part of the unfolding of Heaven on earth. There is no more powerful motivation than to feel we’re being used in the creation of a world where love has healed all wounds.
We are no longer ambitious for ourselves, but are rather inspired by the vision of a healed world. Inspiration rearranges our energies. It sources within us a new power and direction. We no longer feel like we’re trying to carry a football to the finish line, clutching it to our chest and surrounded by hostile forces. We feel instead as though angels are pushing us from behind and making straight our path as we go.

http://www.paulglover.org/0109.html (“Why the United States Will Lose this War,” Ithaca Community News), 2001-09-24
Context: “An empire can do a lot of damage as it flails deeper into quicksand. Wrapping ourselves in flags does not pull us free. Permanent war justifies permanent unquestioned dominance by military and industrial interests.”

Interview in Only Angels Have Wings (April 2004) http://onlyangels.free.fr/interviews/d/dresden_dolls.htm
Context: I write a lot, but it's not all fantastic. There's plenty of terrible crap. We work on a few things at a time, let some things fall away, make changes. We certainly have enough for the next album, which could take at least another year to come out.

The Progressive interview (2010)
Context: There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. … I don’t believe in a perfect world. I don’t believe it’s achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.

1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)
Context: I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction — toward anarchy, poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat.

Seasons in the Sun" (1961), as translated by Rod McKuen from Brel's song "Le Moribond" ·  McKuen performance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY__eaedtOA ·  Beach Boys performance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzjIra9pheU
<p>Goodbye, Michelle, my little one;
You gave me love and helped me find the sun,
And every time that I was down
You would always come around
And get my feet back on the ground.</p><p>Goodbye, Michelle, it's hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky;
Now that the spring is in the air,
With the flowers everywhere,
I wish that we could both be there!</p>
As adapted in the Terry Jacks version (1974)
Context: p> Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife;
Without you I'd have had a lonely life.
You cheated lots of times but then,
I forgave you in the end
Though your lover was my friend.Adieu, Francoise, it's hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky.
Now that spring is in the air
With your lovers ev'rywhere,
Just be careful; I'll be there.</p

" Creating Change" conference of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force http://americablog.com/2012/01/remember-the-words-of-coretta-scott-king-speaking-of-gay-civil-rights.html, Atlanta, Georgia (9 November 2000)
Context: We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say "common struggle" because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination.

Rolling Stone interview (1968)
Context: Having the baby changed my life a lot. I don't want to go on the road, you see. It's actually a matter of economics, much like the Vietnamese war, I guess. I didn't want to go on the road and I wanted to stay home with my baby. I guess I could go to Kansas and be a waitress and support my child that way. But I'd rather live comfortable and I wanted to do more creative work. I didn't just want to be part of a group. I wanted to be able to do television, and a movie if it came up, to sort of diversify myself, to extend myself. Within the framework of a group, that freedom is not possible.

Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb (1993)
Context: To have success in science, you need some luck.
But to succeed in science, you need a lot more than luck. And it's not enough to be smart — lots of people are very bright and get nowhere in life. In my view, you have to combine intelligence with a willingness not to follow conventions when they block your path forward.

Preface to the Second Edition.
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
Context: I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows. For these troubles are the by-products of what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual revolutions of history, a movement which began three centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.

UTI interview (2004)
Context: Geeks seem a lot more willing to treat people based on what they can do rather than who they are.
This isn’t unique to kids, of course. The Internet has an amazingly liberating aspect for everyone from blacks to the blind. So perhaps that’s one reason why I’m especially concerned about draconian proposals for an “Internet Drivers License” or a crackdown on anonymity. Quite aside from the impracticality and ineffectiveness of these proposals, they could have the effect of tagging who people are, and reintroducing those indicators that the Internet has removed.

Source: Larry King Live interview (2010)
Context: The Democrats are going to lose some seats, probably a lot. But not as many as they would have if the tea baggers weren't winning the primaries because I think voters are generally conservative. And when I mean — when I say conservative, I mean they're not comfortable with people who are out there, on the left or the right. And these tea baggers are out there. I've said it before probably on your show. When people get in a voting booth, it's like when they go on an airplane. They get scared. They tend to do things that are conservative in nature, even if they're liberal. … I just think that people — they understand our country is in a lot of trouble. Even people who are angry understand that crazy people are not going to make it better. Christine O'Donnell like all these tea baggers has no plan, no agenda. No policy points. They have one advantage. They're running against Democrats. That's their big advantage.

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)
Context: America isn't easy. America takes work. Today, February 12, is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. He spoke at Gettysburg about a 'new birth of freedom' because we spent the first four score and seven years of our history with fellow Americans held as slaves. President Healy, his siblings, and his mother among them. We have spent the 150 years since Lincoln spoke making great progress, but along the way treating a whole lot of people of color poorly. And law enforcement was often part of that poor treatment. That's our inheritance as law enforcement and it is not all in the distant past.

On creativity versus big businesses, as quoted in in "Alan Moore On Watchmen’s “Toxic Cloud” And Creativity V. Big Business" by Susan Karlin, at Fast Company (2012) http://www.fastcocreate.com/1679856/alan-moore-on-watchmen-s-toxic-cloud-and-creativity-v-big-businesses
Context: There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates. As a result, there's a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies. The same is true of music and cinema. It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you've got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch.

Acceptance speech for the 1970 National Medal for Literature, New York, New York (2 December 1970)
Context: If, in the middle of World War II, a general could be writing a poem, then maybe I was not so irrelevant after all. Maybe the general was doing more for victory by writing a poem than he would be by commanding an army. At least, he might be doing less harm. By applying the same logic to my own condition, I decided that I might be relevant in what I called a negative way. I have clung to this concept ever since — negative relevance. In moments of vain-glory I even entertain the possibility that if my concept were more widely accepted, the world might be a better place to live in. There are a lot of people who would make better citizens if they were content to be just negatively relevant.

Source: From the Danube to the Yalu (1954), p. 175

Holidays in Hell (1989)

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)
Context: In several respects, I consider my father as one of the most interesting men I have known. He was a man of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of any it has been my lot to converse with. None of us will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was) with, all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with a surprising accuracy you often would not guess whence; brief, energetic, and which I should say conveyed the most perfect picture — definite, clear, not in ambitious colors, but in full white sunliglit — of all the dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to render visible which, did not become almost ocularly so. Never shall we again hear such speech as that was. The whole district knew of it and laughed joyfully over it, not knowing how other-wise to express the feeling it gave them; emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet only in description and for the sake chiefly of humorous effect.

The Age for Love
Context: Since that not far-distant time when, tired of being poor, I had made up my mind to cast my lot with the multitude in Paris, I had tried to lay aside my old self, as lizards do their skins, and I had almost succeeded. In a former time, a former time that was but yesterday, I knew — for in a drawer full of poems, dramas and half-finished tales I had proof of it — that there had once existed a certain Jules Labarthe who had come to Paris with the hope of becoming a great man. That person believed in Literature with a capital "L;" in the Ideal, another capital; in Glory, a third capital. He was now dead and buried. Would he some day, his position assured, begin to write once more from pure love of his art? Possibly, but for the moment I knew only the energetic, practical Labarthe, who had joined the procession with the idea of getting into the front rank, and of obtaining as soon as possible an income of thirty thousand francs a year. What would it matter to this second individual if that vile Pascal should boast of having stolen a march on the most delicate, the most powerful of the heirs of Balzac, since I, the new Labarthe, was capable of looking forward to an operation which required about as much delicacy as some of the performances of my editor-in-chief? I had, as a matter of fact, a sure means of obtaining the interview. It was this: When I was young and simple I had sent some verses and stories to Pierre Fauchery, the same verses and stories the refusal of which by four editors had finally made me decide to enter the field of journalism. The great writer was traveling at this time, but he had replied to me. I had responded by a letter to which he again replied, this time with an invitation to call upon him. I went I did not find him. I went again. I did not find him that time. Then a sort of timidity prevented my returning to the charge. So I had never met him. He knew me only as the young Elia of my two epistles. This is what I counted upon to extort from him the favor of an interview which he certainly would refuse to a mere newspaper man. My plan was simple; to present myself at his house, to be received, to conceal my real occupation, to sketch vaguely a subject for a novel in which there should occur a discussion upon the Age for Love, to make him talk and then when he should discover his conversation in print — here I began to feel some remorse. But I stifled it with the terrible phrase, "the struggle for life," and also by the recollection of numerous examples culled from the firm with which I now had the honor of being connected.

The Value of Science (1955)
Context: The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.

Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel (2010), p. 294
Context: Christian anarchism does share a lot with Christian pacifism, but it goes further, especially by carrying this pacifism forward as implying a critique of the violent state. Christian anarchism also shares a lot with liberation theology especially its insistence that Christianity does have very real political implications. But Christian anarchism is critical of liberation theology's emphasis on human agency, of its compromise with violence, and its lack of New Testament references compared to Christian anarchism. In short, while related to at least two important trends within Christian political thinking, Christian anarchism is more radical than both, and thus provides a unique contribution to Christian political thought. … It is a unique political theology, and a unique political theory

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt — all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction — but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I’ve found that I’m a lot like Verne — a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo — who in a way is the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab — goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.

Source: UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling, 2004, p. xxvi

Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 January 1943); p. 25
To Reach Eternity (1989)
Context: I wasn't hit very badly — a piece of shrapnel went thru my helmet and cut a nice little hole in the back of my head. It didn't fracture the skull and is healed up nicely now. I don't know what happened to my helmet; the shell landed close to me and when I came to, the helmet was gone. The concussion together with the fragment that hit me must have broken the chinstrap and torn it off my head. It also blew my glasses off my face. I never saw them again, either, but I imagine they are smashed to hell. If I hadn't been lying in a hole I'd dug with my hands and helmet, that shell would probably have finished me off. The hole was only six or eight inches deep, but that makes an awful lot of difference, and it looked like a canyon.

Context: Why do you think nothing concrete and lasting happened out of the 60s? Lots of people have been saying this lately, and I can't help feeling that the changes were so profound and total that no one remembers that there were changes! The 50s, my friends, happened in a different country than this one. We did not get everything we wanted, no. The world is not perfect now, and is that why some of us think we accomplished nothing? … Try to remember what life was like in the 50s. That's all I can say to that. It's the power structures that are trying to pretend that the change wasn't lasting, so they can convince people that protests and the like are futile now.
But they lie. I'm glad to see that many young people aren't buying it.

On a humorous twitter courtship by Kevin Smith, as quoted in "Amanda Palmer Freaks Out With Evelyn Evelyn" by Scott Thill in WIRED (29 March 2010)
Context: I really like Neil a whole, whole, whole lot, and I really do not want to marry Kevin Smith, even a little. Do you remember the Trojan War, dude? I’m just saying. Can you imagine what a world war between a Neil Gaiman army and a Kevin Smith army would actually look like? Their fans are serious. I predict there would be lots of very high-fallutin’, toilet-based name-calling, confusing many. And possibly foam swords swinging at hockey sticks. Actually, that’s bullshit. There’s no way anybody would leave their Twitter feeds for long enough to pull out a foam sword or a hockey stick. Maybe it’ll be the world’s first full-on digital war and people will just head over to Second Life to duke it out. I hope Neil’s army wins.

Apocalypse Descending (2002)
Context: I've always had numinous dreams, and a lot of them feature a Dionysian character I named The Boy in the Tree. He first came to me when I was seventeen: I had a dream that I was on a flat featureless plane, mist everywhere. Then there was a blinding flash of lightning, deafening thunder, and I fell to the ground. Someone reached out to touch the middle of my forehead with a finger: I opened my eyes, the mist was gone, and there he was: the boy in the tree, this beautiful demonic figure with mocking green eyes. After that he would appear in dreams, sitting up in a tree and talking to me, and I'd have this incredible wave of emotion, a feeling I've only ever had in dreams — the most amazingly intense combination of desire and loss and anticipation. Later I'd think (still dreaming) This is what I will feel when I die. And who knows? Maybe I will.
Then, while researching Winterlong, I found a reference to Dionysios of Boeotia, where the god was called the One in the Tree. So even though I rationally know there's no such thing as a Dionsyian god, or a universal unconscious, it's very, very easy for me to extrapolate them both from my own dream-experience. The roots of these myths of the dying or vegetative god are so ancient and so many that one can wander among them forever, I think, yet never find a single source. And the primary material in Greece is so fascinating and so dark — The Bacchae, what we know of the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries — great stuff for writers.
For me personally, of course, Dionysos embodies all the themes that have always preoccupied me: mutable sexual identity, altered states of consciousness; madness, the theater, ecstacy.

Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Class Warfare, 1995
Context: Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

Holidays in Hell (1989)

The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program Oral History Interview http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html, Advice for Future Entrepreneurs (20 April 1995)
1990s
Context: I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don't blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.

An Old Man http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=39&cat=1
Collected Poems (1992)
Context: He knows he’s aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.
So brief an interval, so very brief. And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,
how he always believed — what madness —
that cheat who said: “Tomorrow. You have plenty of time.”

As quoted in "Ellison: Oracle remains unbreakable" CNN (21 January 2002) http://articles.cnn.com/2002-01-21/tech/oracle.unbreakable.idg_1_oracle-software-chairman-and-chief-software-microsoft-s-exchange?_s=PM:TECH.

"A note about this book, January 9, 2003
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more, they’ve done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever.
Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.

Strange Horizons interview (2004)
Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.

This is the Truth! (1949)
Context: They say I was the greatest natural hitter of all time. Well that's saying a lot with hitters like Wagner, Cobb, Speaker and Ruth around. I had good eyes and I guess that was the reason I hit as well as I did. I still don't use glasses today.

Anarchism And Other Impediments To Anarchy (1985)
Context: My considered judgment, after years of scrutiny of, and sometimes harrowing activity in the anarchist milieu, is that anarchists are a main reason — I suspect, a sufficient reason — why anarchy remains an epithet without a prayer of a chance to be realized. Most anarchists are, frankly, incapable of living in an autonomous cooperative manner. A lot of them aren't very bright. They tend to peruse their own classics and insider literature to the exclusion of broader knowledge of the world we live in. Essentially timid, they associate with others like themselves with the tacit understanding that nobody will measure anybody else's opinions and actions against any standard of practical critical intelligence; that no one by his or her individual achievements will rise too far above the prevalent level; and, above all, that nobody challenges the shibboleths of anarchist ideology.

From a series of interviews with Marco Livingstone (April 22 - May 7, 1980 and July 6 - 7, 1980) quoted in Livingstone's David Hockney (1981) , p. 112
1980s
Context: When conventions are old, there's quite a good reason, it's not arbitrary. So Picasso discovered that, as it were, and I'm sure that for him that was probably almost as exciting as discovering Cubism, rediscovering conventions of ordinary appearance, one-point perspective or something. The purists think you're going backwards, but I know you'd go forward. Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same. The Renaissance is not the same as ancient Greece; the Gothic revival is not the same as Gothic. It might look like that at first, but you can tell it's not. The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.

Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)
Context: It hath been my Lot to live in a time, wherein have been many and great Changes and Alterations. It hath been my endeavour all along, to act by moderate Principles, between the Extremities on either hand, in a moderate compliance with the Powers in being, in those places, where it hath been my Lot to live, without the fierce and violent animosities usual in such Cases, against all, that did not act just as I did, knowing that there were many worthy Persons engaged on either side. And willing whatever side was upmost, to promote (as I was able) any good design for the true Interest of Religion, of Learning, and the publick good; and ready so to do good Offices, as there was Opportunity; And, if things could not be just, as I could wish, to make the best of what is: And hereby, (thro' God's gracious Providence) have been able to live easy, and useful, though not Great.<!--p. clxix

1990s, CNN interview (1999)
Context: My vision for this book and the others in the series is to let people know what kind of commanders we have. You don't pick generals off park benches. … They are experts at what they do and lot of thinking goes into it. And I want to get across to people the intellectual dimension of command, to let people know that it's hard to be a general. And the people we have with general stars on their shoulders are pretty smart and pretty good guys.

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.

Ode interview (2009)
Context: A lot of the arguments about religion going on at the moment spring from a rather inept understanding of religious truth … Our notion changed during the early modern period when we became convinced that the only path to any kind of truth was reason. That works beautifully for science but doesn't work so well for the humanities. Religion is really an art form and a struggle to find value and meaning amid the ghastly tragedy of human life.

Livewire interview (2002)
Context: It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about "old and other times" as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory. When you're young, you're still "becoming", now at my age I am more concerned with "being". And not too long from now I'll be driven by "surviving", I'm sure. I kind of miss that "becoming" stage, as most times you really don't know what's around the corner. Now, of course, I've kind of knocked on the door and heard a muffled answer. Nevertheless, I still don't know what the voice is saying, or even what language it's in.

As quoted in Total Baseball : The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball (2001) by John Thorn, p. 2468
Context: In the end it all comes down to talent. You can talk all you want about intangibles, I just don't know what that means. Talent makes winners, not intangibles. Can nice guys win? Sure, nice guys can win — if they're nice guys with a lot of talent. Nice guys with a little talent finish fourth, and nice guys with no talent finish last.

Academy of Achievement interview (2006)
Context: !-- One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it. … What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality. …  -->Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. … A lot of what I do in theater is cinematic, and a lot of what I do in film is theatrical, but there are different rules to it. … each art form makes me more interested in the other art form because I try and bring in those techniques and those ideas and put them into a different way of using them.

On how he came to be known as "Sergeant York" when he was still technically only a corporal, as quoted in Sergeant York And His People (1922) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19117 by Sam K. Cowan, Ch. I : A Fight In The Forest Of The Argonne.
Context: You know we were in the Argonne Forest twenty-eight days, and had some mighty hard fighting in there. A lot of our boys were killed off. Every company has to have so many sergeants. They needed a sergeant; and they jes' took me.

2010s, 2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil v. Germany (2014)
Context: We're ten minutes into the game, nearly eleventh minute. There's lots of space already on the field. Brazil have to come a little bit tighter, Ian. They can't be so expansive, from back to front. Otherwise? The Germans will cut them to shreds.

On life in hiding from Nazi authorities, p. 48
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then.
I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.

""Annual Report of the League for Improving the Lives of the Rich" in The Crow's Nest (1921)
Context: The rich are not really a bad lot. We must not judge by appearances. If it weren't for their money they would be indistinguishable from the rest of us. But money brings out their weaknesses, naturally. Would it not bring out ours? A moderate addiction to money may not always be hurtful; but when taken in excess it is nearly always bad for the health, it limits one's chance of indulging in nice simple pleasures, and in many cases it lowers the whole moral tone. The rich admit this — of each other; but what can they do? Once a man has begun to accumulate money, it is unnatural to stop. He actually gets in a state where he wants more and more.
This may seem incomprehensible to those who have never suffered from affluence, and yet they would feel the same way, in a millionaire's place. A man begins by thinking that he can have money without being its victim. He will admit that other men addicted to wealth find it hard to be moderate, but he always is convinced that he is different and has more self-control. But the growth of an appetite is determined by nature, not men, and this is as true of getting money as of anything else. As soon as a man is used to a certain amount, no matter how large, his ideas of what is suitable expand. That is the way men are made.

As quoted in Daily Express (7 February 1967), and in Tragically I Was an Only Twin : The Complete Peter Cook (2002) by William Cook, p. 58
Context: I drift very easily into becoming E. L. Wisty. I’ve always felt very closely identified with that sort of personality. He is a completely lost creature, he never works, never moves, has no background and suspects everybody is peering at him and trying to get his secrets out of him. I've never met the man; he came out of me. I’d feel a lot easier if I’d met him and imitated him, as a matter of fact.

O interview (2003)
Context: I'm going to tell you something: There's an element to that passion that I always leave out and that I have recently learned to understand, and it has helped me a lot. … I was okay if it didn't happen. … I didn't realize this before. As long as I knew I did my very, very best, I was okay. I was so okay that when I made the transition from Mexico to Los Angeles, I said to myself I have something now. Is it what I want? No. I was making money, I was an actress, and I was famous. It looked like it's what I wanted, but it was not. And I was wise enough to recognize it. It's what others would think that I'd want, and sometimes that makes you feel it's good enough... To be able to brag a lot on life — that's everybody's dream... But is it your dream? And it wasn't my dream. And so I said that I'm going to leave it. This means I go there, and maybe it doesn't happen. And I am trading this, which looks like it's great, for this nothing that could be anything. … And then I was excited about being brave about it and saying, "What I left didn't grab me by the balls."

No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Context: Consequently, when I got to Toronto, much to my chagrin, I really, really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression. Too much suicide. Too much hardcore substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys. And I just felt frivolous.

Dr. Bock.
The Hospital (1971)
Context: When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved. … We have established the most enormous, medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever! WE CURE NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING! The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes. That's what I mean when I say impotent. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you?... I'm tired. I'm very tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt. And I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that?... And you also understand that the only admissible matter left is death.

10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)
Context: Strong families use the word "we" a lot, but "I" is never forgotten. Family members know they have the freedom to go off on their own, even if the direction is one that "we" have never followed before. The family message is, "We're behind you, so you can be you."

40 min 35 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]
Context: But why had science lost its way in the first place? What appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order. The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy. You could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves. Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.

On using the name "Elvis" as a stage name in The First 10 Years Podcast Series http://www.elviscostello.com/media.aspx - Episode Two
Context: I had a lot of problems with my name … my first name Declan is really not very well known outside of Ireland, MacManus is a name they could never spell... if you think about the names of '76, '77 … I got off kind of lightly — with a name you could live with, you know, in time. … I kind of liked the dare of it. Of course we weren't to know that within a month of my first album actually being issued Elvis Presley would die, and it would actually be a talking point. … Let me put it this way — people don't forget you with that name. It's sort of receded as — and this may sound terribly disrespectful and heretical — but as Elvis Presley has receded as a musical force, people make much less of a case about it. Elvis is a sort of cultural figure but there is no direct line between the music of Elvis Presley and the music of today. There is none whatsoever, he's no influence whatsoever, that I can detect, on music made today. Other than people who consciously retro in styling themselves after his ideas. There is no direct impact in the way that you can hear the influence of The Beatles or Stevie Wonder or numerous other people.

As quoted in I. Milletlerarası Gençlik Kongresi [First International Youth Congress] (1988) by Selçuk University, p. 19
Context: Lasting peace is sought, it is essential to adopt international measures to improve the lot of the masses. The welfare of the entire human race must replace hunger and oppression. People of the world must be taught to give up envy, avarice and rancour.

On how he would like to be remembered (1994)
Context: Oh, I don't know — that's a hell of a question — I don't tend to look at my stuff that way. I just look at it a book at a time. Something like the Amber books are in a different class. I try not to anticipate. I don't know what I'll be writing a few years from now. I have some ideas — I have lots of different things I want to try. I almost don't really care what history thinks. I like the way I'm being treated right now.

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: I’ve known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that.

1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Rollback, p. 46
Dirty truths (1996), first edition
Context: Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.

"Self-Culture", an address in Boston (September 1838)
Context: The path to perfection is difficult to men in every lot; there is no royal road for rich or poor. But difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict. And how much has it already overcome! Under what burdens of oppression has it made its way for ages What mountains of difficulty has it cleared! And with all this experience, shall we say that the progress of the mass of men is to be despaired of; that the chains of bodily necessity are too strong and ponderous to be broken by the mind; that servile, unimproving drudgery is the unalterable condition of the multitude of the human race?

As quoted in "Wilde about the girl" in The Sydney Morning Herald (13 June 2005) http://www.smh.com.au/news/Film/Wilde-about-the-girl/2005/06/12/1118514919678.html
Context: I read a lot of things about myself that aren't true … I've read that I've been with people I've never met. It's nice not to have any attachment, but, likewise, it's nice to have a boyfriend. I'm open to that. But it's hard, when you're working constantly, to spend enough time with someone.

"Don't Fence Me In" (1934) written for a never-released film Adios, Argentina, later used in the film Hollywood Canteen (1944).
Context: Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above.
Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide open country that I love
Don't fence me in Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever but I ask you please
Don't fence me in

Harry Potter in Ch. 65 http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/65/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)
Context: Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies.

To Barack Obama, as quoted in The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), Ch. 5
Context: I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.
But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.

2010s, 2011, Speech at the Gerald R. Ford Foundation (2011)
Context: My argument is that it really matters, if you're interested in peace. If peace is your goal, which it's got to be a goal for any American president, it matters a lot whether people live in a free society.

Grip interview (1997)
Context: Up to '67, the drugs were, uh, soft. Marijuana, and even LSD, I considered soft drugs then. But, then, after '67, needle drugs and the strong amphetamines came in, and that's when the Beatles and Donovan stood up and said, 'Try meditation instead.' And I still stick by that, of course. You've got to be very, very careful. I'm talking about naive days, before the drug barons and the dealers took over. It was once a small, bohemian event. But it was when millions started wanting to get high that it got bad. And when Haight-Asbury turned into Skid Row, the Beatles and me stood up and said, 'Give it a rest.' The answer is that each individual must face the problem by himself. And meditation is an alternative. Meditation is a lot better for you, and it's great to be straight.

Interview 2
Context: Action films are definitely a lot of training and I do a lot of my own stunts, so I definitely am in there for the long haul for the training process. But I love it. Martial arts is something I’ve always loved doing. It’s the only form of exercise that I can deal with. Everything else is really boring and mind-numbing. So for me it’s just really fun. I love to sort of feel like a superhero in that sense, to be able to fly through the air and to be on wires. It just makes me feel like I’m in Magic Mountain or something. I love it.

What an idiot!
Cosmic Jam (tour 1995, DVD 2005, 2006)

Holidays in Hell (1989)

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
Context: I have come to associate a kind of success that we are referring to, to individuals who have a combination of attributes that are often associated with creativity. In a way they are mutants, they are different from others. And they follow their own drummer. We know what that means. And are we all like that? We are not like that. If you are, then it would be well to recognize that there were others before you. And, people like that are not very happy or content, until they are allowed to express, or they can express what's in them to express. It's that driving force that I think is like the process of evolution working on us, and in us, and with us, and through us. That's how we continue on, and will improve our lot in life, solve the problems that arise. Partly out of necessity, partly out of this drive to improve.

Nature and the Greeks (1954)
Context: I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

On her album Marry Me, as quoted in "The PopWatch Interview: St. Vincent's Annie Clark" in PopWatch (11 July 2007)
Context: A lot of the songs have a duality about them; one part is totally sincere, and there's another part that is kind of smirking and making light of it all. Or there's a very dark streak about it.

"Freeway" · Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQF5CXV9cos
Song lyrics, @#%&*! Smilers (2008)
Context: You know it
I know it
Why don't you
Just show it
You got a lot of money but you can't afford the freeway

Tragedy and Triumph of Reason (1985)
Context: In medical science arguments are going on between behaviorists who perceive the function of brain as a multitude of simple and unconscious conditioned reflexes, and cognitivists who insist that humans sensing the surrounding world create its mental image which can be considered as memory of facts.
I do not intend to argue the essence of these processes, all the more so because it has been proved that both types of memory function in the brain. However, I am convinced that those who once saw a nuclear explosion or imagined the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will forever maintain the mental picture of horror-stricken and dust-covered Earth, burned bodies of the dead and wounded and people slowly dying of radiation disease. Prompted by the sense of responsibility for the fortunes of the human race, Einstein addressed the following warning to his colleagues: "Since we, scientists, face the tragic lot of further increasing the murderous effectiveness of the means of destruction, it is our most solemn and noble duty to prevent the use of these weapons for the cruel ends they were designed to achieve".

As quoted in "Space is still the place" by W. Kim Heron in Metro Times (6 June 2007) http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=10582
Context: People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it's like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens. Light and all that — someone made that; it's written that they did. But nobody made the darkness. My music is about dark tradition. Dark tradition means a lot more about than black tradition. There's a lot of division in what they call black. I'm not into division. I'm into coordination, discipline and tradition.

Starting Out, p. 9
Catching the Big Fish (2006)
Context: I started out just as a regular person, growing up in the Northwest. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, studying trees. So I was in the woods a lot. And the woods for a child are magical. I lived in what people call small towns. My world was what would be considered about a city block, maybe two blocks. Everything occurred in that space. All the dreaming, all my friends existed in that small world. But to me it seemed so huge and magical. There was plenty of time available to dream and be with friends.
I liked to paint and I liked to draw. And I often thought, wrongly, that when you got to be an adult, you stopped painting and drawing and did something more serious.

Letter to J. W. Croker (27 July 1842).
Charles Stuart Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel from His Private Papers. Volume II (London: John Murray, 1899), p. 529.

[Carl C. Gaither, Alma E. Cavazos-Gaither, Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations: A Collection of Approximately 27,000 Quotations Pertaining to Archaeology, Architecture, Astronomy, Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Cosmology, Darwinism, Engineering, Geology, Mathematics, Medicine, Nature, Nursing, Paleontology, Philosophy, Physics, Probability, Science, Statistics, Technology, Theory, Universe, and Zoology, https://books.google.com/books?id=zQaCSlEM-OEC&pg=PA29, 5 January 2012, Springer Science & Business Media, 978-1-4614-1114-7, 29]

Interview with Richard B. Sale (1969)
Context: But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.

Is It Bill Bailey? (TV, 1998)

On the Last Day
Context: "And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud in great power and majesty" Luke, xxi. 27.
Thus, my beloved friends, shall the revolutions and kingdoms of this world be brought to a conclusion for ever. Thus shall end all the earthly pursuits which either amused us by their novelty, or seduced us by their charms. Thus shall the Son of Man come. Thus shall be ushered in the great day of his manifestation, the beginning of his reign, the complete redemption of his mystical body. On this day the consciences of all mankind shall be exposed to view a day of calamity and despair to the sinner, but of peace, joy, and consolation to the just. On this day the eternal lot of the whole world shall be decided.

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1996)

On the game of bridge, as quoted in Forbes (2 June 1997); also quoted in The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategy (2000), p. 112
Context: It’s a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from — cards played and not played. These inferences tell you something about the probabilities. It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

On his first encounter with bonobos
The Bonobo in All of Us (2007)
Context: I first saw them in 1978. At the time, I knew a lot about chimps, because I had been studying them. I saw the bonobos at a zoo in Holland, and I thought immediately, they're totally different. The sense you get looking them in the eyes is that they're more sensitive, more sensual, not necessarily more intelligent, but there's a high emotional awareness, so to speak, of each other and also of people who look at them.

Autobiography (1873)
Context: it might even be questioned if the various causes of deterioration which had been at work in the meanwhile, had not more than counterbalanced the tendencies to improvement. I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result. The English public, for example, are quite as raw and undiscerning on subjects of political economy since the nation has been converted to free-trade, as they were before; and are still further from having acquired better habits of thought and feeling, or being in any way better fortified against error, on subjects of a more elevated character. For, though they have thrown off certain errors, the general discipline of their minds, intellectually and morally, is not altered. I am now convinced, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Tangled Up In Blue

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)
Context: When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people. It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably – probably – from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop and it's got to stop fast.

The Progressive interview (2010)
Context: There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. … I don’t believe in a perfect world. I don’t believe it’s achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.

Part Troll (2004)

Quotes, DNC Address (2004)
Context: I love this country deeply, and even though I always look to the future with optimism and hope, I do think it's worth pausing for just a moment as we begin this year's convention, to take note of two very important lessons from four years ago.
The first lesson is this: Take it from me; every vote counts. In our democracy, every vote has power. And never forget that power is yours. Don't let anyone take it away from you or talk you into throwing it away.
And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted. Let's make sure that the Supreme Court does not pick the next President, and that this President is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court.
The second lesson from 2000 is this: What happens in a presidential election matters — a lot. The outcome profoundly affects the lives of all 293 million Americans, and people in the rest of the world, too. The choice of who is president affects your life and your family's future.

"The Lightness Of Being" (25 April 2007) Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah http://robertfulghum.com/index.php/fulghumweb/entry/377_the_lightness_of_being/
Web Journal
Context: The four of us are talking dancing, and laughing, and recalling the joys of being out on the floor and having that timeless feeling that comes from being caught up in the music. "Nobody should miss that," says Dave.
On the face of it, Dave's family and I don't have a lot in common. They're Mormons and Republicans. I'm a Unitarian and a Democrat. When Dave was on the County Council, we were on different sides of some important issues. I grew up a Southern Baptist in Texas where dancing was a mortal sin in the eyes of Almighty God, but coffee was OK. Dave grew up a Latter Day Saint where dancing was considered righteous – but not coffee.
But... we're dancers. And laughers. That's a strong bond right there. And we're committed to being useful in our world. And if you love something, like dancing, and you pass it on, like Dave and his wife do, you've been very useful by my standards. Dancing is a lifetime, equal opportunity sport.
And I will never drive by Dave's garage again without having the finest feelings for the man and his wife and mother who are inside taking good care of their corner of this world. They've added an important dimension to the lives of the young people of their town — that lightness of being that belongs to dancers.

Quoted by Bethanne Patrick for AOL Books in 2006.
Context: For me the most important thing was always that you have something in mind that you want to do, that you enjoy doing, because a lot of people have a job, but they're not happy. I think you have to think about what it is you really want to do in life and pursue that, and do it with fun; have a smile on your face, because then you're happy. You're happy and you can be open, you can be nice with people, and you have a different appearance and feeling of life than when you are in a job you hate. So for me that was always the most important thing.

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

The Bachelor Home Companion (1986)

When asked "What do you think of being called a god?" in "Heavenly Father of the NET", an interview article in NetWorker (Summer 1997); This refers to a statement "if the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel", which appeared in the British magazine The Economist.
Context: I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet. But at the end, that article wasn’t very complimentary, because the author suggested that I wasn’t doing a very good job, and that I ought to be replaced by a "professional."
Of course, there isn’t any "God of the Internet." The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.

"Bill Maher on very scary child predators" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQi-KiO6K2k
Real Time with Bill Maher
Context: That's America for you — a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death. They're called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than in any month in the past three years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go? When will our closeted gay congressmen learn? Our boys aren't for pleasure. They're for cannon fodder. They shouldn't be another notch on your bedpost. They should be a comma in Bush's war. If I hear a zipper, it had better be on a body bag. Why aren't Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we're supposed to be fighting for over there and what the plan is. Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penises were — but at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions. We're the predators. Because we have an entire economy built on asking young people what they want, making the cheapest, sleaziest form of it they'll accept, and selling it to them until they choke on it and die. You know who’s grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, by convincing you they're depressed, hyperactive or suffering from attention-deficit disorder and so they must all get medicated. The drug dealers hooking your kids aren't in South America, they're in the halls of Congress handing out campaign donations to your congressmen. Mark Foley says he never slept with those kids, and I believe him, because American children are so hopped up on pills I doubt any of them could get it up. From 1995 to 2002, the number of children prescribed antipsychotic drugs increased by over 400 percent. Either our children are going insane — which we might look on as a problem — or, more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies. So stop already with the righteous moral indignation about predators — this whole country is trying to get inside your kid's pants because that's where he keeps the money Daddy gave him to stay out of his hair. I don't care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penises because I have some sad news for you: Your kid is so larded out on Cheetos and Yoo-hoo, he can't even see his penis. We live in a country where the ultimate consumer is an obese 16-year-old hooked up at one end to a Big Gulp and at the other to a PlayStation. So many of our kids today are fat drug addicts, it's almost as if Rush Limbaugh had had puppies. In conclusion, we can pretend that the biggest threat to “our children” is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it's Mom and Dad. Because, when your son can't find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying — including the one in which the Marine turns into Lancelot — then the person fucking him is you.