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"Art is the proper task of life." --Friedrich Nietzsche "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." -- Jack London "Never has there been nothing." -- Nick Delonas "Mozart is too easy for beginners and too difficult for artists." -- Artur Schnabel "It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid." -- George Bernard Shaw "To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter." -- Aleister Crowley "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." --Tacitus "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury." --Alexander Tytler "The dignity of man is in free choice." --Max Frisch "A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker." --H.L. Mencken "No human thing is of serious importance." -- Plato "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." -- Voltaire "One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory." -- Rita Mae Brown "I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him." -- Galileo Galilei "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire "The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think." -- Horace Walpole "If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience." -- John Cage "Television is for appearing on - not for looking at." -- Noel Coward "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion." - George Bernard Shaw "The universe existed without a glimmer of consciousness for an eternity, but no one remembers it." -- Nick Delonas "We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action." -- Frank Tibolt "Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." -- Steven Wright "Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." --Mignon McLaughlin "In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks." --Chris Patten "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle "What does not kill us often makes us wish we were dead." - James Mohen "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." --H.L. Mencken "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." -- Henry David Thoreau "The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews." -- William Faulkner "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." -- Oscar Wilde "Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad." -- Diogenes the Cynic "What's another word for Thesaurus?" -- Steven Wright "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." -- Aristotle "The greatest task of democracy -- its ritual and feast -- is choice." --H.G. Wells "It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues." -- Abraham Lincoln "If some asshole comes looking for a fight, let him keep looking." -Nick Delonas "Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity." --Irving Kristol "Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state." --John Dewey "The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." --H.L. Mencken "The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore." --H.L. Mencken "It's hard to keep your underwear clean when you've got more than one ass hole." -- Glen Greene "It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts." --H.L. Mencken "Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt." --Mahatma Gandhi "In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place." --Mahatma Gandhi "In music, the passions enjoy themselves" --Friedrich W. Nietzsche "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." --Thomas Jefferson "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." --H.L. Mencken "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." -- Plato "I always look forward to the opportunity to chop off more heads so that I can earn more money." -- Saeed Al Sayyaf, Saudi Arabia's state executioner "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --H.L. Mencken "It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument." -- William G. McAdoo "Life is short and death eternal. Fortunately, time passes quickly when dead." --Nick Delonas "I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education." --Thomas Jefferson "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." --Judge Gideon J. Tucker "A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady." --Voltaire "It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor." -- Neil Gaiman "Oddly enough, a house of cards is more stable on a foundation of sand." -- Nick Delonas "Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." --Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn "It's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." --Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire "The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously." --Hubert H. Humphrey "If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind." --John Stuart Mill "The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind." -- Humphrey Bogart "The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it." -- Laurence J. Peter "Outstanding financial success is generally the result of intelligence, nerve and luck (in reverse order of importance)." --Nick Delonas "We'd all like to vote for the best man but he's never a candidate." --Kin Hubbard "Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order." --John V. Lindsay "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." --Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) "Ignorance is only a sin when embraced." -- Nick Delonas "Justice will only exist where those not affected by injustice are filled with the same amount of indignation as those offended." --Plato "Fill your days with the dull. You'll seem to live much longer and when the end finally comes, you won't mind so much." -- Mahaviscera "Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves." --Thomas Jefferson "There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." --John Adams "Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency." --H.L. Mencken "It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages." --Friedrich W. Nietzsche "Even if you don't fully understand what's going on, there's much to be said for simply giving it a go." -- Nick Delonas "Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political." --Ignazio Silone "If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law." --Henry David Thoreau "Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge." -- Paul Gauguin "Those constipated all week clog toilets on weekends." -- Nick Delonas "As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman." --Adam Michnik "I am amazed by the depth of cowardice underlying the typical anonymous Internet attack. You've got to be one hell of a yellow belly to go after someone viciously using a pseudonym. Sometimes a personal attack is in order, but you're a despicable coward if you don't undertake it using your own, real name." --Nick Delonas "Never get into a stinking contest with a skunk. You just end up smelling like a skunk and the skunk smells the same as when you started." -- author unknown "Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." --Laurens van der Post "If life were ever lasting and free will real, all would eventually choose death." -- Nick Delonas "I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends." -- Moby "Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific - democratic approach to politics, economic development, and culture." --Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov "It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny." --James Fenimore Cooper "Violence is the last resource of the incompetent." --Salvor Hardin "Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires." --Friedrich Nietzsche "A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." --Henry de Jouvenel "You're better off dead than in a life without bread." -- Nick Delonas (on the Atkins diet) "Performance of one's duties should be independent of public opinion." --Mahatma Gandhi "Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." --Ayn Rand "The inevitable consequence of democracy is a tyranny of stupidity." -- Nick Delonas "All things are difficult before they are easy." -- Dr. Thomas Fuller "It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good." --Marcus Tullius Cicero "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." -- Bill Cosby "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." --Friedrich W. Nietzsche "He that accepts protection, stipulates obedience." --Samuel Johnson "Never, ever, vote for a lawyer." -- Nick Delonas "I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends." -- Moby "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" --Benjamin Franklin "'My Sweet Lord' is a much better song than 'He's so fine.'" -- Nick Delonas "Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four." -- Katharine Hepburn "Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology." --Friedrich W. Nietzsche "The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." --Edmund Burke "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." --Federalist Papers "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin "The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society." --Thomas Jefferson "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." --H.L. Mencken "That government is best which governs least." --Henry David Thoreau "Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." - Robert Heinlein "The problem with ice is it is always frozen." -- Nick Delonas "There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." -- Alfred Korzybski "Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do." -- Dale Carnegie |
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