November 23, 2002

“If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand,

we would be too simple to understand it.” —Anonymous

“Any man who bows down to no one will some day
be crushed by the burden of his own weight." —Fedor Dostoevskii

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds

from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.” —Oscar Ameringer

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” —George Santayana

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” —Muhammed Ali

“Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment — a question which man

puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change

will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things?

It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of

the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer

“A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at

the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from

behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour.” —Aldous Huxley

December 19, 2002

“The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society

that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people

that make up the biggest proportion of the population— the intelligent ones or the fools?

I think we can agree it’s the fools, no matter where you go in this world,

it’s the fools that form the overwhelming majority.” —Henrik Ibsen

“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious

design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” —Henry David Thoreau

“Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.” —G. B. Shaw

“Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all.

Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society

as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance.

Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities.

Charity separates the rich from the poor;

aid raises the needy and sets him on the same level with the rich.” — Eva Perón

“There are some people who want to throw their arms round you

simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want

to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.” —Robert Lynd

January 31, 2003

“There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme

which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a

desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence,

at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with

the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.” —Victor Hugo

“It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking.” —William Shakespeare

“Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world –it is thin.”

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand

may equip themselves at the expense of joy.” —E. M. Forster

“To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action,

when there’s more reason to fear than to hope.” —Miguel de Cervantes

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch

of a free, meandering brook.” —Henry David Thoreau

“There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard

first out of society, then out of the world.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness

through another man’s eyes.” —William Shakespeare

“Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt, that of the head.” —Arthur Schopenhauer

Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost. —Arthur Schopenhauer

February 12, 2003

“There would be no society if living together depended

upon understanding each other.” — Eric Hoffer

“As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences,

of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick;

there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth.

Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open,

and which serves all men.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to.

There are only two ways by which man can reach it.

One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.” — Oscar Wilde

“Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves,

low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce,

perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes,

lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage,

floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows,

poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, pessaries,

syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.” — Henry Miller

“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history;

such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.” — Mao Zedong

“It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations

—past and present— are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s

hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained

unchanged through the millenia.” — Eric Hoffer

“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man

who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.” — Carl Jung

March 10, 2003

“No one to blame! . . . That was why most people led lives they hated,

with people they hated. . . . How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful

to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.

You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it.

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens?

A terrible thing: no one to blame.” — Erica Jong

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel

no one else has a right to blame us.” — Oscar Wilde

“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.” — Samuel Beckett

“They have a right to censure that have a heart to help.” — William Penn

“Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.” —G. C. Lichtenberg

“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the

imminence of takeover by aliens— and real diseases are useful material.” —Susan Sontag

May 05, 2003

“A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity

of the changes at any moment taking place in it.” —Herbert Spencer

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist,

the great artist, knows how difficult it is.” —Willa Cather

“The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured

the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.” —G. K. Chesterton

“Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of

stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone

unnoticed among liberal economists.” —Noam Chomsky

“What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral,

mental, or physical structure can stand still a year.

It grows— it must grow; nothing can prevent it.” —Mark Twain

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed,

to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten;

the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows:

he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic

and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.” —Vita Sackville-West

June 11, 2003

“Mankind, when left to themselves,

are unfit for their own government.” —George Washington

“Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;

Nought may endure but Mutability.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The lapse of ages changes all things— time, language, the earth,

the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky,

and every thing “about, around, and underneath” man,

except man himself.” —Lord Byron

“The brotherhood of men doen not imply their equality. Families have their fools

and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their

worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to

the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.” —Aldous Huxley

“Man . . . knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings

and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek

and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes

or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all,

he knows little of himself.” —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with

the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” —William Hazlitt

“Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that

children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and

women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.” —George Bernard Shaw

“That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact

that no other creature has yet contested this claim.” —G. C. Lichtenberg

“We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones.

We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.”

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were,

we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.” —John Steinbeck

“It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.” —Eric Hoffer

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.

. . .Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore

never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” —John Donne

July 20, 2003

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man

to elevate his life by conscious endeavour. —Henry David Thoreau

“He that fails in his endeavours after wealth or power will

not long retain either honesty or courage.” —Samuel Johnson

“After all, crime is only a lefthanded form of human endeavor.” —John Huston

“Inscribe all human effort with one word,
Artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete!” —Robert Browning

“The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be

removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself,

together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt.

For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life.” —Hannah Arendt

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.” —José Ortega y Gasset

“Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and

mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it,

and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.”

—Harriet Beecher Stowe

“God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.” —P. D. James

“I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself

that I could pay others to do for me.” —W. Somerset Maugham

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not

to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood,

that anything worth doing is worth doing well. The truth is, many things are worth doing

only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible,

and many other things are not worth doing at all.” —Barbara Ehrenreich

“I’m not out there sweating for three hours every day

just to find out what it feels like to sweat.” —Michael Jordan

August 25, 2003

“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum

of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur

without that abrasive friction of conflict.” —Saul Alinsky

“When is a crisis reached? When questions arise

that can’t be answered.” —Ryszard Kapuscinski

”If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help

make the world safe for diversity.” —John F. Kennedy

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence

and an appeal to the essence of being.” —Albert Camus

“I wouldn’t have turned out the way I was if I didn’t have

all those old-fashioned values to rebel against.” —Madonna

“It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” —T. S. Eliot

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” —John Bradshaw

“There is something that Governments care for far more than human life,

and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall

strike the enemy. Be militant each in your own way.” —Emmeline Pankhurst

“If human beings are to survive in a nuclear age, committing

acts of violence may eventually have to become as embarrassing

as urinating or defecating in public are today.” —Myriam Miedzian

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method

is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.” —Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls

into the pit which he digs for another.” —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

October 2, 2003

“Chronic aspiration produces a subtle form of spiritual estrangement. A sort of mental

superficiality ensues when we become aware there is more but can never seem to get there.

We wait patiently for a master to appear, forgetting that the first master is the soul itself.

We already are that master. Beyond that, the master for whom we wait is the higher mind

which waits for us. Like a mirror, as we approach the higher mind, the monad or master

approaches us. If we wait for a door to open, for a miracle to occur, it never does.

Change occurs as we develop a more sensitive repsonse to abstraction by contemplating

and working with synthesis, oneness, will, divinity, and most especially, the idea of eternity.

Think through the implications of the cosmic fact that Life had no beginning and, therefore,

has no end. We are used to “beginnings” and progress and it is awkward at first

symbollically to wrap our mind around the significance of eternity.

When an incomplete or personal perception of eternity prevents us from realizing

our inherent spiritual maturity, we simply assume it by giving up any illusion of

further “progress”. As oneness and being pervade our thinking, our attitude becomes

sufficiently causal to return us to monadic awareness of the exalting reality of synthesis.

Not up there somewhere but eternally here, now.” ―L. Rae Lake

November 29, 2003

“People demand freedom of speech to make up for

the freedom of thought which they avoid.” ―Kierkegaard

“Human history becomes more and more a race

between education and catastrophe.” ―H.G. Wells

“The difference between ‘involvement’ and ‘commitment’ is like an

eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was ‘involved” ― the pig was ‘committed’.”

―Anonymous

December 07, 2003

“Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.”

―Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards,

and finally he also believes backwards.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche

“A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it

but what has a virtue in it, and accordingly, whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places,

as the tops of mountains, we respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness.

All things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be part of the

original frame of the universe, and of such valor as God himself.” ―Henry David Thoreau

“Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound,
I have by hard adventure found mine own.” ―William Shakespeare

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking

for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.” ―John Irving

“What we have worn out our iron-soled shoes searching for in vain

may come to us without the slightest effort.” ―Chinese proverb

“Our graves that hide us from the searching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,
Only, we die in earnest—that’s no jest.”

―Sir Walter Raleigh

“Roaming through the jungle of “oohs” and “ahs,” searching for a more

agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and

an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.” ―Duke Ellington

January 29, 2004

“Art is good when it springs from necessity.

This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”

—Neal Cassady

“Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention.

Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.”

—E. B. White

“The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

“I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that

individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still

uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.”

—Tennessee Williams

“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates

on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore

best thought of as being in some way supernatural.” —John Berger

“How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of

the poorer class of criminals, so long as children are reared in the

brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.”

—Henry George

“Foul water will quench fire.” —English Proverb

“We do what we must, and call it by the best names.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.” —Oscar Wilde

“Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”

―My Grandma

May 21, 2004

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and wants it down.” ―Robert Frost

“Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other

by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them

but is also their means of communication. It is the same

with us and God. Every separation is a link.” ―Simone Weil

“Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but

are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts

but memories of your imaginings of the facts.” ―Philip Roth

“Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts

are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through

the distorting medium of their own desires.” ―Bertrand Russell

“The more the data banks record about each one of us,

the less we exist.” ―Marshall McLuhan

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information;

when information grows unprofitable, sleep.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin

“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add

to the sum of accurate information in the world.” ―Margaret Mead

“Better be ignorant of a matter than half know it.” ―Publilius Syrus

“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” ―Will Rogers

“In expanding the field of knowledge, we but

increase the horizon of ignorance.” ―Henry Miller

“Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor,

that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that.

How did it become so easy?” ―Allan Bloom

“A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely

more than much knowledge that is idle.” ―Kahlil Gibran

“A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it.

This must be understood from the very beginning.

One must learn from him who knows.” ―George Gurdjieff

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he

that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” ―Ecclesiastes 1:18

“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.” ―e. e. cummings

“Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge” ―Arthur Rimbaud

“Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of life.” ―Lord Byron

“The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.” ―Luc Vauvenargues

July 16, 2004

“Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult

concerning this great goddess?” ―Ludwig van Beethoven

“There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” ―E. H. Gombrich

“I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases,

one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential

to the formation of exceptional gifts.” ―Thornton Wilder

“A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” ―W. B. Yeats

“It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights,

but you can make the whole trip that way.” ―E. L. Doctorow

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

―Robert Bresson

“The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power,

has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise

of the “creative” is the desire to kill. It is the old war between

the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.” ―May Sarton

“The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition.

If one is something one really does not need to make anything

—and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above

the “productive” man a yet higher species.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche

“True creativity often starts where language ends.” ―Arthur Koestler

“Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.” ―Brian Aldiss

“Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.

Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the

radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.”

―Harold Rosenberg

“Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed,

but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free

and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words

involves a process of free creation.” ―Noam Chomsky

“Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong

sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between

Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness.” ―Robertson Davies

“Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the wombs of the mother tongue:

always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious about paternity. They start talking

about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist,

the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists,

infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics

working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature

to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin

“There shall be poets! When woman’s unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when

she shall live for and through herself, man — hitherto detestable — having let her go,

she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be

different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent,

delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.” ―Arthur Rimbaud