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Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini (24 March 1874 – 31 October 1926) was a Hungarian-born American stage magician, escapologist, stunt performer, actor, film producer and investigator of spiritualist claims; born Erik Weisz he used the name Ehrich Weiss until legally changing his name to "Harry Houdini" in 1913.

Quotes

 * Disloyalty in trusted servants is one of the most disheartening things that can happen to a public performer. But it must not be thought that I say this out of personal experience: for in the many years that I have been before the public my secret methods have been steadily shielded by the strict integrity of my assistants, most of whom have been with me for years. Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter. But then, so far as I know, I am the only performer who ever pledged his assistant to secrecy, honor and allegiance under a notarial oath.
 * Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920)

 * Rosabelle — answer — tell — pray, answer — look — tell — answer, answer — tell.
 * The secret message devised with his wife to test spiritualist séances should he or she die. In their secret stage-code it spells out the word: "BELIEVE". Quoted in Death and the Magician : The Mystery of Houdini (1981) by Raymund Fitzsimons, p. 166

 * I'm tired of fighting, Dash. I guess this thing is going to get me.
 * Last words, to his brother Theo, in Grace Hospital of Detroit, Michigan (30 October 1926), quoted in Houdini, The Man Who Walked Through Walls (1959) by William Lindsay Gresham, p. 286, and in Final Séance : The Strange Friendship between Houdini and Conan Doyle (2001) by Massimo Polidoro, p. 204

 * I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death. That's what attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the 'human fly' who scales the walls of the same building.
 * As quoted in The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (1993) by Ruth Brandon, p. 153

Quotes about Houdini

 * Alphabetized by author

 * Rosabel believe Not even eternity Can hold Houdini!
 * Kate Bush, in "Houdini" on The Dreaming (1980)

 * The effects produced at some of Houdini's "seances" were brilliant, and had he claimed the possession of genuine psychic powers he would have made a fortune.
 * John Clucas Cannell, The Secrets of Houdini (1973), page 17

 * He had the essential masculine quality of courage to a supreme degree. Nobody has ever done and nobody in all human probability will ever do such reckless feats of daring. His whole life was one long succession of them.
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Strand Magazine (August 1927) Vol. 74, p. 134

 * Houdini, the great transitional figure between "magical" acts and ingenious tricks, was at pains to explain that everything he did was a trick; he offered rewards, never collected, for any "supernatural" act he could not explain. The Amazing Randi carries on in the same tradition, bending spoons as easily as Uri Geller. And yet in Houdini's time, there were those who insisted he was doing real magic; how else could his effects be achieved? Daniel Mark Epstein wrote about the Houdini believers in a 1986 issue of the New Criterion, which I read as I read everything I can get my hands on about Houdini. The thing was, Houdini really did free himself from those fetters and chains and sealed trunks dropped into the river, and survived the Chinese Water Torture (an effect used prominently in The Prestige night after night). But there were those who argued his tricks were physically impossible, and thus must be supernatural.
 * Roger Ebert, in a review for ''The Prestige (7 September 2007)

 * People either didn't believe Houdini when he said that his tricks on film were real, or they didn't care. Illusion became big bigness, and the magicians were out of work.
 * John Leonard, in "Books of the Times" in The New York Times (6 July 1981)

 * I'm not here for long, catch me or I go Houdini.
 * Dua Lipa, "Houdini" (2023)

 * As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.
 * David Mitchell, in Interview "David Mitchell at Writers and Readers week, New Zealand" at ABC.net (30 March 2008)

title: Harry Houdini


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title: User talk:Zenith87~enwikiquote


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Bob Hope

Leslie Townes Hope, KBE, KC*SG, KSS (May 29, 1903 – July 27, 2003), best known as Bob Hope, was a British-American entertainer, having appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, on radio and television, films and in army concerts.

Quotes

 * Thanks to our brave allies: you gallant Russian bear, you British everywhere.
 * Introduction to his World War II performances.
 * Obituary, The Economist, August 2, 2003

 * I was on the way to my hotel, and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction.
 * He arrived in Saigon on the day that Vietcong agents blew up an American officers' billet.
 * New York Times obituary, July 28, 2003

 * I know I'm in England because this morning, my stomach got up two hours before I did and had a cup of tea! I've had so much tea, I slosh when I walk! You have to drink tea - I've tasted the coffee!
 * During a radio broadcast recorded in the UK. (During a broadcast in the Soviet Union, Bob re-used the first section, replacing 'England' with 'Russia' and 'cup of tea' with 'Bowl of Borscht')
 * Audio recording of radio broadcast.

Misattributed
[Misattributed: Actor not credited as writer.]
 * You mean like Democrats?
 * In the film  The Ghost Breakers (1940), in reference to another character's description of zombies: "you see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring."

About Bob Hope

 * In alphabetical order by author or source.

 * Bob Hope will go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim, providing they have a camera there and three people. He'll go to the opening of a market to receive an award. He'd get an award from Thom McCan for wearing their shoes. It's pathetic. It's a bottomless pit. A barrel that has no floor. He must be a man who has an ever-crumbling estimation of himself. He's constantly filling himself up. He's like a junkie – an applause junkie. What happens to those people when they can't get up and do their shtick, God only knows. Bob Hope, Christ, instead of growing old gracefully or doing something with his money, be helpful, all he does is he has an anniversary with the President looking on. It's sad. He gets on an airplane every two minutes always going someplace. It didn't bother him at all to work the Vietnam War. Oh, he took that in his stride. He did his World War II and Korean War act. "Our boys" and all that. He’s a pathetic guy.
 * Marlon Brando, Playboy (January 1979); reproduced in The Playboy Interview (1981) edited by G. Barry Golson, p. 629

 * For years, as I've said, Bob has worked hard for our family's sake to cut our traveling to a minimum. But there are some 300,000 miles he and I shared that we wouldn't take back for anything. I mean the world-famous Bob Hope Holiday Tours to the armed forces stationed in remote outposts overseas, made on behalf of the U.S.O. "Go with us one time, Anita, and it will get into your blood," Bob Hope suggested in 1960, the first year Bob and I were married. "You'll never play to a greater audience."
 * Anita Bryant, Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory (1970). Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, p. 98

 * No doubt the funniest exploit I was involved in was dropping leaflets on the Bob Hope Christmas show at Cu Chi in 1969. Our company was assigned to provide perimeter security and air cover for the show, so none of our guys would get to see it. The night before, some enlisted men came to me with boxes of small white leaflets upon which they had written messages welcoming Bob Hope to Cu Chi. Three platoons had stayed up all night making these things, and they begged me to drop them on the show, since they knew I'd be up there. I told them it was closed airspace and you can't do that without getting into big trouble, but in a weak moment I let them talk me into it. Sure enough, in the middle of the show, I took a sharp turn, ignored the controller in my earphones, who wanted to know what I thought I was doing, and we dropped the leaflets. If you watch the videotape of that show, you can see Hope looking up as the leaflets came down. The next day, I was called in front of the CO, but he let me off when I explained why I had done it. In 1975, I was finishing my college degree at Saint Martin's in Olympia, Washington. Nobody could figure out who to get for a graduation speaker, so I suggested Bob Hope. Everyone said, "Great, you go get him." It took some time, working through his assistants, but I finally got him on the phone and explained that I was the guy who dropped the snow on his show at Cu Chi. "Why'd you do that?" he immediately asked. When I explained how I couldn't turn the troops down, he said, "Okay, I'll speak at your graduation." And he did. I was his escort the whole day, and he continued to pepper me with questions.
 * Joe Finch, Our Vietnam Wars: As Told By 100 Veterans Who Served (Self-published, 2018) by William F. Brown (editor and contributing author), p. 219

 * In his prime, the young comic walked onto a stage with the confidence of a man who owned it, and by the time he walked off, he did.
 * [http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3030403/Guest-Commentary-Hope-Everlasting-Press.html Obituary, Television Week (August 4, 2003).

title: Bob Hope


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Buster Keaton

Joseph Frank Keaton VI (4 October 1895 – 1 February 1966) was American actor and filmmaker, often called The Great Stone Face, he was the first person ever called "Buster", acquiring the nickname from Harry Houdini who saw him take a fall down some stairs as an infant.

Quotes

 * We used to get arrested every other week — that is, the old man would get arrested.
 * On his underage working in stage shows, in The Detroit News (4 December 1914)

 * The funny thing about our act is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises … the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment.
 * Interview in The Detroit News (4 December 1914)

 * A picture without falls is as bad as Niagara in the same fix.
 * Interview in Picture-Play magazine (December 1920) "Six Interviews with Buster Keaton"

 * Marriage is fine as an institution, but bad as a habit.
 * Interview in Motion Picture (October 1921) "Six Interviews with Buster Keaton"

 * Our hero came from Nowhere — he wasn't going Anywhere and he got kicked off Somewhere.
 * The High Sign (1921, co-written with Edward F. Cline)

 * If one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I'll jump out the window.
 * As "Calvero's Partner" in Limelight (1952)

 * Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?
 * Interview with Studs Terkel (1960)

Quotes about Keaton

 * One who never smiled, carried a face as still and sad as a daguerreotype through some of the most preposterously ingenious and visually satisfying comedy ever invented. That was Buster Keaton.
 * James Agee in "Comedy's Greatest Era" in Life magazine (5 September 1949), p. 75

 * Perhaps because ‘dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than ‘dry’ wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.
 * James Agee in "Comedy's Greatest Era" in Life magazine (5 September 1949), p. 85

 * He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply "silent" of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.
 * James Agee in "The last fade-out on the Great Stone Face : Buster Keaton" in Life magazine (11 February 1966), p. 63

 * No other comedian could do as much with the dead-pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood.
 * James Agee in "The last fade-out on the Great Stone Face : Buster Keaton" in Life magazine (11 February 1966), p. 63

 * The older Keaton got, the more one could see eternity in his look.
 * Robert Benayoun

 * The screen was just a white sheet. They had this flickering machine. That was the first time I saw this angel with a white face and these beautiful eyes. I knew this was something special. It was the first time I saw Keaton. He wore a flat pancake of a hat, and I just couldn't believe the man's grace.
 * Mel Brooks, as quoted in ''It's Good to Be the King : The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks' (2008), by James Robert Parish, p. 26

 * I could tell you that those wonderful stories were 90% Buster's... I was often ashamed to take the money, much less the credit.
 * Clyde Bruckman, co-writer on several of Keaton's films, as quoted in "The Lyric Poet Of The Silent Screen : A Profile of Buster Keaton" by Chris Wood at FIlmMonthly.com (16 July 2001)

 * What a creative genius — what an inventor… A guy like that, you just sit back and say, okay, I'll never get there!
 * Jim Carrey, as quoted in "The Lyric Poet Of The Silent Screen : A Profile of Buster Keaton" by Chris Wood at FIlmMonthly.com (16 July 2001)

 * I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster.
 * Jackie Chan, quoted in "The Lyric Poet Of The Silent Screen : A Profile of Buster Keaton" by Chris Wood at FIlmMonthly.com (16 July 2001)

 * Watch his beautiful, compact body as it pirouettes or pretzels in tortured permutations or, even more elegantly, stands in repose as everything goes crazy around it. Watch his mind as it contemplates a hostile universe whose violent whims Buster understands, withstands and, miraculously, tames. Watch his camera taking his picture (Keaton directed or supervised all his best films); it is as cool as the star it captured in its glass... The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all — intuitively.
 * Richard Corliss in Time magazine

 * There are moments in many of his movies that are just poetic...  In doing silent movies, no one had done this yet!
 * Billy Crystal, as quoted in "The Lyric Poet Of The Silent Screen : A Profile of Buster Keaton" by Chris Wood at FIlmMonthly.com (16 July 2001)

 * For me its Buster Keaton's face, with maybe his little hat on... It's being able to look into his eyes and see that sad face.
 * Geena Davis, as quoted in "The Lyric Poet Of The Silent Screen : A Profile of Buster Keaton" by Chris Wood at FIlmMonthly.com (16 July 2001)

 *  He was doing stuff that was surreal.
 * Richard Dreyfus, as quoted in "The Lyric Poet Of The Silent Screen : A Profile of Buster Keaton" by Chris Wood at FIlmMonthly.com (16 July 2001)

 * It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask. His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes for it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornados, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders, and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising, how without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness. Because he was funny, because he wore a porkpie had, Keaton's physical skills are often undervalued … no silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton. Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own.
 * Roger Ebert, in The Great Movies II (2005), p. 94

 * * Another 'great,' and I use that word very carefully, not the way Milton Berle uses it. One of the reasons I love Buster so much is because he lives comedy as well as practices it. Some of his things are better than Chaplin's.
 * Stan Laurel, as quoted in Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy (1961) by James McCabe, p. 241

 * With his dark, sensitive looks, his face in repose evoking years of quiet contemplation, he resembled a mixture of Buddhist monk and fashion model. He offered the ideal face and acting style for motion pictures, proving less is more. He would become a master of knowing when to do nothing at all.
 * Marion Meade

 * Maybe the trouble is that modern comics strive too hard to be sophisticated and knowing. What we've lost over the years is innocence and, as Keaton and company prove, innocence is an integral part of comedy.
 * Barry Norman

 * Buster Keaton... will be around forever, because it's unlikely that human beings will ever go out-of-date the way special effects do. Keaton running and clambering onto a moving Civil War train in The General is infinitely more exciting than Christian Slater jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding locomotive in Broken Arrow because what Keaton does is real, and the camera captures and preserves his feats for posterity. In Broken Arrow we never see Slater (or the stuntman, for that matter) leaping from the helicopter to the train. Instead there are several cuts, and we must suspend our disbelief and assume that the feat has been accomplished. Which means that it's no feat at all.
 * Anthony Puccinelli in Lost Action Hero: Supercop

 * What Keaton did physically, is actually quite startling when you discover that he did all of his own stunts… The famous one is when the house falls. He had to stand on a mark. I'm told it was a nail — if he moved an inch to one side he would have been crushed to death.
 * Kevin Spacey, as quoted in "The Lyric Poet Of The Silent Screen : A Profile of Buster Keaton" by Chris Wood at FIlmMonthly.com (16 July 2001)

title: Buster Keaton


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Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman (August 29, 1915 – August 29, 1982) was a Swedish actress. With a career spanning five decades, Bergman won numerous accolades, including three Academy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, four Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a Volpi Cup. She is one of only four actresses to have received at least three acting Academy Awards (only Katharine Hepburn has four). In 1999, the American Film Institute recognised Bergman as the fourth greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

Quotes

 * What is happiness? It depends on two assets, which fortunately I have. They are good health and a short memory.
 * The Real and the Unreal (1961) by Bill Davidson, p. 174

 * It's not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying.
 * Halliwell's Filmgoer's and Video Viewer's Companion

 * A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
 * "Webster's Electronic Quotebase," ed. Keith Mohler, 1994
 * "An Uncommon Scold," by Abby Adams, 1989

 * I've never sought success in order to get fame and money; it's the talent and the passion that count in success.
 * "The Last Word - A Treasury of Women's Quotes," by Carolyn Warner, 1992

 * I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.
 * "An Uncommon Scold," by Abby Adams, 1989.

 * I think my life has been wonderful. I have done what I felt like. I was given courage and I was given adventure and that has carried me along. And then also a sense of humor and a little bit of common sense. It has been a very rich life.
 * 2007: Movie Icons, ISBN 9783822822081, page 174 , Verlag Taschen GmbH

Quotes about Bergman

 * For me, Ingrid is a wonderful mother and Roberto, a wonderful father. You should see them with their children. There was nothing intellectual about it. They were like animals with their young, so tactile and sensual. The joy of touching the baby's skin! They were always rolling around on the floor with the twins and the little boy. Once, I remember watching Ingrid doing that, and I thought to myself, "This is just like a mother dog with her puppies."
 * , "Anatomy of a Scandal," The Real and the Unreal (1961) by Bill Davidson, p. 147

 * Before anything else, she is an actress. I believe that any great artist is an artist first. For example, my father was an artist before he was a husband and a father. Yes, I must say it. Ingrid is that way, too. But she also has many admirable qualities as a woman. She is so honest that she will always prefer a scandal to a lie. If she's at a party and people are talking about a writer who is unknown to her, she'll come out flatly and say, "I haven't read him." But at the same time, she understands more than many people who pretend to be knowledgeable. While she admits her limitations, she has great instinct and understanding.
 * Jean Renoir, "Anatomy of a Scandal," The Real and the Unreal (1961) by Bill Davidson, p. 149

title: Ingrid Bergman


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Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010) was an American recreational mathematician, magician, skeptic, and author of the long-running "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981.

Quotes

 * A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?
 * The Dover Math and Science Newsletter May 16, 2011

 * I can say this. I believe that the human mind, or even the mind of a cat, is more interesting in its complexity than an entire galaxy if it is devoid of life.
 * Martin Gardner, puzzle master extraordinaire obituary by Colm Mulcahy, BBC News Magazine, October 21, 2014

 * Mathematical magic combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.
 * Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery (1956), p. ix

 * The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.
 * Introduction to The Annotated Alice (1960) // The Annotated Alice. The Definitive Edition (1999), by Lewis Carroll (Author, Christ Church College, Oxford), John Tenniel (Illustrated by), Martin Gardner (Editor, Introduction and notes by), page viii

 * There are, and always have been, destructive pseudo-scientific notions linked to race and religion; these are the most widespread and damaging. Hopefully, educated people can succeed in shedding light into these areas of prejudice and ignorance, for as Voltaire once said: "Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities."
 * Bernard Sussman, "Exclusive Interview with Martin Gardner", Southwind (Miami-Dade Junior College), Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 1968)

 * In many cases a dull proof can be supplemented by a geometric analogue so simple and beautiful that the truth of a theorem is almost seen at a glance.
 * "Mathematical Games", in Scientific American (October 1973); also quoted in Roger B. Nelson, Proofs Without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking (1993), "Introduction", p. v

 * Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.
 * From a book review in The New York Times (9 May 1976), also quoted in The American Mathematical Monthly (December 1994)

 * I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph.D. I said I didn't have one and he looked startled. "You mean you're in the same racket I am," he said, "you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?" That's really what I do.
 * Quoted in Sally Helgeson, "Every Day", Bookletter, Vol. 3, No. 8 (6 December 1976), p. 8

 * There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
 * The Mathematical Magic Show (1978)

 * Ever since I was a boy, I've been fascinated by crazy science and such things as perpetual motion machines and logical paradoxes. I've always enjoyed keeping up with those ideas. I suppose I didn't get into it seriously until I wrote my first book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I was influenced by the Dianetics movement, now called Scientology, which was then promoted by John Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction. I was astonished at how rapidly the thing had become a cult.
 * "Interview: Martin Gardner" by Scot Morris in Omni, Vol. 4, No. 4 (January 1982)

 * As I have often said, electrons and gerbils don't cheat. People do.
 * "Science: Why I Am Not A Paranormalist", in The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (1983)

 * Ideologues of all persuasions think they know how the economy will respond to the Administration's strange mixture of Lafferism and monetarism. Indeed, their self-confidence is so vast, and their ability to rationalize so crafty, that one cannot imagine a scenario for the next few years, that they would regard as falsifying their dogma. The failure of any prediction can always be blamed on quirky political decisions or unforeseen historical events.
 * "The Laffer Curve", Knotted Doughnuts and other Mathematical Entertainments (1986)

 * The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.
 * Notes of a Fringe-Watcher, "The Tragedies of False Memories" Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1994)

 * Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine—in fact one shudders to imagine—a child of today reading and enjoying it.
 * The Annotated Snark (1962), Introduction, p. 15

 * Debunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle. One takes comfort from the fact there is no Gresham's laws in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad.
 * The Night Is Large (1996), Introduction to Part III, Pseudoscience p. 171

 * Bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society. We see this happening now in the rapid rise of the religious right and how it has taken over large segments of the Republican Party.
 * As quoted in Kendrick Frazier, A Mind at Play: An Interview with Martin Gardner, Skeptical Inquirer (Mar/Apr 1998), 22, No. 2, 37.

Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience (2001)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback edition published by W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-32238-6

 * We know from polls how ignorant the general public is about science. Almost half of all adults in the United States now believe in astrology and in angels and demons, and that we are being observed by aliens and UFOs who frequently abduct humans. More than half believe that evolution is an unverified a theory. Science education in our nation, especially in lower grades, is getting worse, not better. Several states are constantly doing their best to force public schools to teach creationism. Greedy publishers, interested only in profit, turn out book after book on astrology, ufology, the occult, dangerous programs to lose weight without exercising or cutting calories, and every known variety of dubious medicine. The electronic media are equal offenders. Every year I hope the tide is about to turn, and that contributors to television, radio, and the Internet will become so appalled by the flood of fake science they keep flinging at the public that they will at least try to tone it down. Alas, every year the flood gets worse.
 * Introduction (pp. 2-3)

 * Suppose, however, there is not enough time for measures to be taken to prevent a collision, and earth is shattered by a giant NEO that will hurt us all into oblivion. What are the philosophical implications of such an event? This obviously is not a problem for atheists, agnostics, or pantheists because they are resigned to the fact that nature does not care a rap about preserving a species. What about theists? I’m inclined to think that even to them a certain extinction of humanity would be acceptable. The Biblical Jehovah, remember, is said to have drowned every man, woman, baby, and their pets, except for Noah and his family. If God can allow an earthquake to kill thousands, or the Black Death to wipe out half of Europe, surely she would have no scruples about allowing an asteroid to bring human history to a flaming end.
 * Chapter 3 “Near-Earth Objects: Monsters of Doom?” (p. 36)

 * Let the Bible be the Bible! It’s not about science. It’s not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.
 * Chapter 4 “The Star of Bethlehem” (p. 45)

 * The King James Bible is a literary masterpiece best left unaltered. It is a classic to put on a shelf alongside the great fantasies of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and yes, even the Koran.
 * Chapter 4 “The Star of Bethlehem” (p. 45)

 * For reasons that reflect popular ignorance of science, combined with a love of miracles, the notion that fresh eggs balance more easily on the first day of spring caught fire in the United States.
 * Chapter 5 “The Great Egg-Balancing Mystery” (p. 53)

 * Public infatuation with alternative medicines of all varieties shows no sign of abating. Acupuncture, homeopathy, aromatherapy, herbal remedies, chelation, iridology, therapeutic touch, magnet therapy, psychic healing, and so on are gaining new converts every day. The tragedies occur, of course, when gullible sufferers rely solely on such remedies and avoid seeking mainstream help. It would be good if we had some statistical evidence about the frequency of deaths following reliance on pseudomedicines.
 * Chapter 8 “Reflexology: To Stop a Toothache, Squeeze a Toe!” (p. 83)

 * My attack on Freud brought a raft of angry letters from dedicated Freudians. One reader assured me that Freudianism is “alive and well.” True, but alive and well only among a dwindling remnant of Freud acolytes, not among the majority of today’s psychiatrists or intellectuals.
 * Chapter 10 “Freud’s Flawed Theory of Dreams” (p. 112)

 * This confusion of the certainty of mathematics within a formal system and the uncertainty of its applications to the world is a common mistake often made by ignorant sociologists.
 * Chapter 14 “Alan Sokal’s Hilarious Hoax” (p. 146)

 * The deeper question that lies behind the above banalities is whether the rules of baseball are similar to or radically different from the rules of science. Clearly they are radically different. Like the rules of chess and bridge, the rules of baseball or made by humans. But the rules of science are not. They are discovered by observation, reasoning, and experiment. Newton didn’t invent his laws of gravity except in the obvious sense that he thought of them and wrote them down. Biologists didn’t “construct” the DNA helix; they observed it. The orbit of Mars is not a social construction. Einstein did not make up E=mc2 the way game rules are made up. To see rules of science as similar to baseball rules, traffic rules, or fashions in dress is to make a false analogy that leads nowhere.
 * Chapter 14 “Alan Sokal’s Hilarious Hoax” (pp. 147-148)

 * But that science moves inexorably closer to finding objective truth can only be denied by peculiar philosophers, naive literary critics, and misguided social scientists. The fantastic success of science in explaining and predicting, above all in making incredible advances in technology, is proof that scientists are steadily learning more and more about how the universe behaves.
 * Chapter 14 “Alan Sokal’s Hilarious Hoax” (p. 148)

 * The curious notion that “truth” does not mean “correspondence with reality,” but nothing more than the successful passing of tests for truth, was dealt a death blow by Alfred Tarski’s famous semantic definition of truth: “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. The definition goes back to Aristotle. Most philosophers of the past, all scientists, and all ordinary people accept this definition of what they mean when they say some thing is true. It is denied only by a small minority of pragmatists who still buy John Dewey’s obsolete epistemology.
 * Chapter 14 “Alan Sokal’s Hilarious Hoax” (p. 148)

 * Carlos Castaneda died in Westwood, California, in 1998. “His only real sorcery,” writes Kathryn Lindskoog in her entertaining book Fakes, Frauds, and Other Malarkey (1993), “was turning the University of California into an ass.” The next time you come close to a crow, try calling out “Hello Carlos!” If you are high enough on peyote, you might hear the bird answer.
 * Chapter 16 “Carlos Castaneda and New Age Anthropology” (p. 169)

 * Although Jacobs has had no training in psychology, psychiatry, or hypnotherapy, he uses hypnotism to induce his patients (now more than seven hundred) to develop strong memories of horrendous abductions even though many patients had no such memories until hypnotized. Jacobs is convinced that five million Americans have been kidnapped at least once by aliens. One female patient, who worked in retail sales, had, according to Jacobs, one hundred abductions in one year, an average of one every three days!
 * Chapter 21 “What's Going On at Temple University?” (p. 226)

 * To support his conviction that the Old Testament is accurate history, Newton worked out an elaborate chronology of earth’s history, drawing on astronomical data such as eclipses and star motions and legends such as that of Jason and the Argonauts, which he took to be genuine events. With incredible ingenuity he tried to harmonize biblical history with secular histories of the ancient world. It is sad to envision the discoveries in mathematics and physics Newton might have made if his great intellect had not been diverted by such bizarre speculations.
 * Chapter 22 “Isaac Newton, Alchemist and Fundamentalist” (p. 242)

Quotes about Gardner

 * His "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American is one of the few bridges over C. P. Snow's famous "gulf of mutual incomprehension" that lies between technical and literary cultures.
 * Dana Richards, "Martin Gardner: A 'Documentary' ", in The Mathematician and the Pied Puzzler: A collection in tribute to Martin Gardner (1999), ed. Elwyn Berlekamp and Tom Rodgers, p. 9

 * He writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer  once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling.
 * Colin Wilson, in The Quest For Wilhelm Reich (1981), p. 2

 * Gardner is the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us.
 * Stephen Jay Gould in Martin Gardner, Puzzler and Polymath, Dies at 95 The New York Times, May 23, 2010

 * He was not a mathematician—he never even took a maths class after high school—yet Martin Gardner, who has died aged 95, was arguably the most influential and inspirational figure in mathematics in the second half of the last century.
 * Alex Bellos in Martin Gardner obituary The Guardian, May 27, 2010

title: Martin Gardner


text:
Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker (born 9 February 1944) is an American author whose novel, The Color Purple, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.

Quotes

 * The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.
 * Foreword to The Dreaded Comparison: Animal Slavery and Human Slavery (1996) by Marjorie Spiegel, p. 14.

 * He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain.
 * Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992).

 * I felt in Georgia and on the east coast generally very squeezed. People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box or they need to label you and fix you in time and location. I feel a greater fluidity here. People are much more willing to accept that nothing is permanent, everything is changeable so there is freedom and I do need to live where I can be free.
 * On living in California, as quoted in "A long walk to freedom" in The Guardian (25 February 2001).

 * The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
 * As quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why the Left is Right (2004) by William P. Martin, p. 173.

 * Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.
 * From the film poster for Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.

 * I want a grown-up attitude to Cuba, for instance, a country and people I love. I want an end to the war immediately, and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and drive themselves out of Iraq. I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the US to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on. But most of all I want someone with the confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend", and this Obama has shown he can do.
 * "Obama is the change that America has tried to hide" in The Guardian (1 April 2008)

 * The harm that you do to others is the harm that you do to yourself and you cannot think then that you can cause wars in other parts of the world and destroy people and drone them without this having a terrible impact on your own soul and your own consciousness.
 * Poet, Author Alice Walker Meets the Inner Journey with Global Activism in "The Cushion in the Road" (May 28, 2013).

 * I think unless the people are given information about what is happening to them, they will die in ignorance. And i think that's the big sin. I mean if there is such a thing as a sin, that's it, to destroy people and not have them have a clue about how this is happening.
 * Poet, Author Alice Walker Meets the Inner Journey with Global Activism in "The Cushion in the Road" (May 28, 2013).

The Color Purple (1982)

 * Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk?

 * They calls me yellow like yellow be my name. They calls me yellow like yellow be my name. But if yellow is a name Why aint black the same. Well, if I say Hey black girl Lord, she try to ruin my game.

 * I don’t know nothing, I think. And glad of it.

 * The little I knew about my own self wouldn’t have filled a thimble!

 * Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.

 * We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?

 * The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.

 * I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

 * I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

 * I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)

 * But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

Quotes about Alice Walker

 * Today, great writers from minority groups in the U.S. are finding their voice in the wonderful, rich imagery of magic realism. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Amy Tan all have a unique, rich way of writing that can be described as magic realism. These women are among those who have broken away from the style of writing that defines most of the fiction coming from industrialized countries: that pragmatic, minimalist style and way of facing reality in which the only things one dares talk about are those things one can control. What cannot be controlled is denied.
 * 1991 interview in Conversations with Isabel Allende (1999)

 * There are some young Black women, however, that I particularly want to talk about, younger than I in any case, young Black women who are writing, who are inspirational to me...I'm impressed certainly with Alice Walker.
 * 1988 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

 * I loved The Color Purple. The movie disappointed me because so many people I do love were bowled over by it. I felt it was a romantic treatment that perhaps could have been dealt with more honestly.
 * 1986 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

 * This ninny [referring to one particularly hostile black author] implied that The Color Purple would absolutely destroy black Americans. But it's interesting that we've survived rapes, slavery, ridicule, abuse, discrimination and you tell us we are so weak that a book is going to destroy us. Please!
 * 1987 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

 * I loathe the misogynist assumption that a woman’s faults must be the direct result of a man’s actions, but I find myself incapable of separating Walker’s fraught marriage from her hatred of Judaism. She doesn’t separate the two either. In her 2014 book, The Cushion in the Road, Walker writes about meeting an elderly Palestinian woman in the Occupied Territories. The woman accepted a gift from Walker, and then bestowed a blessing upon her, “May God protect you from the Jews,” to which Walker responded, “It’s too late, I already married one”...I wonder how Walker could put the burden of her trauma onto us — black Jewish women. What is her responsibility to her daughter, and what is my responsibility to Alice Walker? Many of my black and Jewish friends refuse to even judge her. Perhaps it is I who know nothing, nothing at all. I know that I will not cancel Alice Walker. I can’t erase the incredible work she created. I will continue to read The Color Purple and her other works. But I will never be able to rid myself of the ghost of this poem. It would be irresponsible and self-hating of me to do so. I will read and teach Walker’s work with love, but this poem will always be there, fluttering in the wind like a torn-out page of the Talmud.
 * Nylah Burton Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me" (2018)

 * Perhaps, just as Alice Walker writes of her own forebears in her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," my blood ancestors-unlike my literary ancestors-were so weather-beaten, terror-stricken, and maimed that they were stifled. As a result, those who somehow managed to create became, in my view, martyrs and saints. "Instead of being perceived as whole persons," wrote Walker, "their bodies became shrines: what was thought to be their minds became temples suitable for worship. These crazy 'Saints' stared out at the world, wildly, like lunatics-or quietly, like suicides; and the 'God' that was in their gaze was as mute as a great stone."
 * Edwidge Danticat chapter 1, "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work"

 * To me, the great writers who come from ethnic minorities writing in English come from America. I think the deep, the real deep thinkers now writing in the English language are the black women, such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, etc. (F.J.: Where they are using black English in a certain kind of way to signify their difference?) Emecheta: Exactly.
 * Buchi Emecheta In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock (1992)

 * My ambition has long been sharpened by Alice Walker, willing to tell the stories of black women without apology, willing to write politically without apology—Possessing the Secret of Joy, a haunting, gorgeous novel about female genital mutilation that keeps me transfixed and heartbroken and helpless each time I read it, because sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to tell a story.
 * Roxane Gay interview quoted here

 * one of the things that guided how I was thinking about the ending was this Alice Walker quote, where she’s talking about writing The Color Purple and about what a radical act it is to give certain characters a happier, peaceful ending.
 * Kaitlyn Greenidge Interview

 * writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America.
 * Linda Hogan (writer) "Hearing Voices" in The Writer on Her Work, Volume 2 (1991)

 * Throughout the 1970s, feminist journals like Women: A Journal of Liberation and Ms. ran regular features on forgotten women who have since become mainstays of our culture. In a 1975 article in Ms., Alice Walker reintroduced Zora Neale Hurston to eager readers like me, who sought out second-hand copies of Her Eyes Were Watching God.
 * Alix Kates Shulman https://bookmarks.reviews/five-books-that-made-me-a-feminist/ “Five Books that Made me a Feminist”] (2019)

 * (Q:The Woman Warrior opens with your mother saying "You must not tell anyone what I'm about to tell you," and then you proceed to do just that. Why do you begin with this particular scene?") Kingston: There has to be a way into the story. And there are obstacles in the way, including orders from one's own mother not to tell. So I thought if I began the book stating what that order was, I could confront it directly and disobey the order. And in that way I could free myself and my voice to be able to tell the story. Since writing that I've seen that there are other people who use this same technique. Alice Walker begins The Color Purple: "You better not never tell nobody but God." Toni Morrison begins The Bluest Eye: "Quiet as it's kept"-then proceeds to tell the community's secrets.
 * 1996 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * there are plenty of black men and Asian men who love Alice Walker's work. And they love my work. And there isn't even a battle going on. It's Ishmael Reed all by himself. It's Frank Chin all by himself. But the press plays it up as if it's all these Asian men against me.
 * 1991 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * Over and over again, we find women directed toward the loom, the shuttle, the distaff, the embroidery frame rather than the pen. Many of them heeded these calls: the artful textiles, the glorious quilts, the richly varied embroideries, the fancywork that decorated churches and homes, all testify to the flourishing creativity of women. And, as Alice Walker reminded us, the creation of gardens was, for many women, a form of art.
 * Gerda Lerner The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993)

 * I connected with Alice Walker in Tougaloo. She wrote me in '68. There was like an underground of Black poets that existed during the '60s, which we all knew.
 * 1984 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)

 * Look at how many Black Lesbian writers there are whose names are not known. Why isn't Gloria Hull a household name because of the research she's done on women of the Harlem Renaissance? What about Pat Parker? She's a really powerful poet. Norton is probably one of the finest poetry publishers in this country but I'm only one Black dyke and I'm greedy. I want more of us read and seen. Alice Walker is not a Lesbian. She has made very positive and sympathetic statements of "solidarity" with Lesbian sisters but she has made it perfectly clear that she is not a Lesbian and I think that's a real factor in her acceptability.
 * interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)

 * How do you think I feel when I hear Alice Walker say "Black feminism sounds like some kind of spray!"? I feel really sad. It hurts me, but it hurts me for Alice too, because I hear her testifying against herself in a way that is painful, and because she does it in a way that also testifies against me. All the time Black women are surrounded by forces that attempt to make us speak out against each other, and all of us have had the experience of opening our mouth and having a frog jump out, but we also have to realize that we are responsible for our own frogs. I know Alice would not attack other Black women in a white women's forum, so I would like to presume that it was not meant as an attack. But the fact remains it was heard as an attack upon Black feminism by many, and it was a very demoralizing statement.
 * 1988 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)

 * Many of us recently discovered that the famous black American novelist Alice Walker is anti-Semitic. We also learned that a lot of people have known this for a long time. The writer and professor Roxane Gay tweeted on December 17 that Walker "has been anti-Semitic for years" and she brings it up at all of the events she discusses her admiration for Walker's novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. What Gay knew, and what became widely known this weekend due to a New York Times Review interview with Walker, is that she is a huge fan of a British "professional" conspiracy theorist named David Icke.
 * Charles Mudede "Maybe Steven Spielberg Is to Blame for Alice Walker's Anti-Semitism" ( Dec 18, 2018)

 * I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer – or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South — was Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which I read for the first time when I was in junior high. Because I saw something of – not myself – but the experience of the people around me reflected in that book, because it’s set in the rural South and these people are poor, and just seeing that she could do that made me think, ‘Maybe I could do that.’ It just made me realize that it might be possible.
 * Jesmyn Ward attributed in article (2011)

 * White feminism is so distasteful that many women of color want nothing to do with the feminist label, period. Alice Walker devised the term womanism to define her love of Black womanhood and a commitment to improved lives for all people oppressed due to race or class.
 * Monnica Williams, Psychedelic Justice (2021)

 * I was teaching a course in Russian history, and I thought I would jazz it up a little. It was art, literature, it had students read Russian literature, and Alice didn't say anything in class. And then the first papers came in, and she wrote this paper on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and I read the paper-well, I showed it to a colleague of mine. This is sort of an inside thing about the academic world, I have a lot of inside things of the academic world, and this colleague of mine-as you can see, I'm not letting Alice say anything-I showed it to a colleague of mine, and with that professorial arrogance, he said, "She couldn't have written it."...He said, "Somebody else must have written this." I said, "No, you're wrong. There's nobody around that can write like this." That was our introduction.
 * Howard Zinn 1996 interview in The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker (2010)

title: Alice Walker


text:
Talk:Brothels

The following quotes were moved here from the page because the source has no apparent notability. If he is notable, please create a wp page, a wq page or add evidence of notability here. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 07:36, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

 * "Today, the Harvard-educated proprietor of a boutique brothel on the East Side would be photographed attending first nights and would discuss her next book on television chat shows with respectful psychoanalysts who would treat her, not without justification, as a professional colleague." ~ Joan O'Sullivan

Unsourced

 * I once invested in a whorehouse, I made a fortune on that place.
 * Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm

 * Brothels are a much sounder investment than ships, I've found. Whores seldome sink, and when they are boarded by pirates, why, the pirates pay good coin like everyone else.
 * littlefinger

title: Talk:Brothels


text:
User talk:66.187.227.200

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 08:45, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:66.187.227.200


text:
Talk:Cynicism

The following quotes were moved here from the page because the source has no apparent notability. If he is notable, please create a wp page, a wq page or add evidence of notability here. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 12:14, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

 * "Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows." -- David T. Wolf
 * "Cynicism is just a totally realist view from an idealist person. it's overly analytic front allows the cynic to find the flaws that men with clouded vision cannot find. it is not necessarily a bad thing just the perspective of finding a bad thing...to be rectified" -- Nicholas J.S. Mason

The following quotes is moved here for the same reason. ~ Ningauble 17:12, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

 * The skill of critical thinking is referred to as cynicism by individuals who have not attain said proficiency.
 * Horace Dumont

Most quotes are pathetic
Apparently you people have no clue what a cynic really is.

And apparently neither do you...

A rather cynical interpretation of cynicism (lolololol)
All these quotes seem very negative towards cynicism. I quite enjoy the company of cynical people. They find enjoyment in the worst of things, by complaining and moaning about them.

Stephen Colbert's quote

 * This quote was there alone:
 * Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because '''cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.
 * Stephen Colbert, Knox College Commencement Address (3 June 2006)

 * Put the following which included the above but with more context + a link to the address:
 * Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes"...
 * Stephen Colbert, Knox College Commencement Address (3 June 2006)

Om777om (talk) 03:58, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Am suggesting that the longer quote be kept and the shorter one deleted, or ?? It seems that the sentences that he spoke bother before & after the first quote posted "Cynicism masquerades..." would make it easier for people to understand Colbert's point. What do you think?

title: Talk:Cynicism


text:
The Mummy Returns

The Mummy Returns is a 2001 sequel to The Mummy film, in which the mummified body of Imhotep is shipped to a museum in London, where he wakes once again and resumes his quest for absolute power.
 * ''Directed by Stephen Sommers. Written by Stephen Sommers

Ardeth Bay

 * [narrating] Five thousand years ago, a fierce warrior known as the Scorpion King led a great army on a campaign to conquer the known world. After a vicious campaign that lasted seven long years, the Scorpion King and his army were defeated and driven deep into the sacred desert of Ahm Shere. One by one, they slowly perished under the scorching sun, until only the great warrior himself was left alive. Near death, the Scorpion King made a pact with the dark god Anubis, that if Anubis would spare his life and let him conquer his enemies, he would give him his soul. Anubis accepted his offer and spared his life. Anubis gave the Scorpion King command of his army, and like an evil flood, they washed away all that lay before them. When his task was done, Anubis forced the Scorpion King to serve him for all time. His army was returned to the sands from whence they came, where they wait, silently, to be awakened once again.

 * There's a fine line between coincidence and fate.

Baltus Hafez

 * The creature will suck them dry and then become whole again.
 * 51m55s

Rick O'Connell

 * Look, fellas. Knowing my brother-in-law, he probably did something to deserve this. But this is my house, and I have certain rules about snakes and dismemberment.

Dialogue

 * Rick: This is bad, Evy!
 * Evy: We've had bad before.
 * Rick: This is worse!

 * Jonathan: I told you! I told you!
 * Meela: And your point is?
 * Jonathan: My point is, I told you so you wouldn't kill me.
 * Meela: When did we make that arrangement?

 * Alex: Hey, the Book of the Dead!
 * Meela: What a bright little child. Your mother must be missing you terribly. If you wish to see her again, you better behave.
 * Alex: Lady, I don't behave for my parents, what makes you think I'm going to do it for you?
 * Lock-Nah: [threatening Alex] Silence!
 * Meela: Because your parents wouldn't slip poisonous snakes in your bed [kisses his cheek] while you're sleeping.

 * Imhotep: [in Egyptian] I know you can understand me, little one. So you must listen carefully because [in English] it is you who are the chosen one. You who will take me to Ahm-Shere.
 * Alex: What if I don't? What if I get a little lost?
 * Imhotep: [laughs] You are a strange little one. You are your father's son. But I know something you don't. This bracelet is a gift and a curse. The sands of time have already begun to pour against you.
 * Alex: Yeah, yeah. I already heard this part. From the minute I put the bracelet on, seven days do I have before the Scorpion King wakes up.
 * Imhotep: Did you also hear that if you do not enter the pyramid before the sun strikes it on that very morning that the bracelet will suck the life out of you?
 * Alex: [shocked] That part I missed. Hey, wait a minute, that means I only have five days left!
 * Imhotep: And I believe it would be nice trying not to get lost, don’t you?
 * Alex: My dad is going to kick your arse!
 * Imhotep: Hmm. [takes off his mask, smirking; Alex gasps and steps back] I do not think so.

 * Alex: Are we there yet?
 * Lock-Nah: No.
 * Alex: Are we there yet?
 * Lock-Nah: No.
 * Alex: Are we there yet?
 * Lock-Nah: No. No, no no no no NO!
 * (Lock-Nah sticks his knife into the table between Alex's fingers)
 * Alex: Whoa! That was amazing! Perfect aim!
 * Lock-Nah: What are you talking about? I missed.

 * Lock-Nah: When the time comes, I shall truly enjoy killing you.
 * Alex: But until that time, you better be a little nicer to me. Now, where's my water?
 * [Lock-Nah shoves the pitcher of water into Alex's hands]
 * Alex: No ice?

 * [Jonathan and an enemy soldier run into a clearing with stones while fleeing undead pygmies]
 * Jonathan: See that?! We're safe, we're safe! See those sacred stones, they'll never cross those!
 * Shafek: You are sure?
 * Jonathan: Yes, of course I'm sure!
 * [A pygmy notices them and attacks, spearing Shafek in the chest]
 * Jonathan: [upon letting out a shriek of shock] Sorry! My mistake!

 * Jonathan: Pull me up! Pull me up!
 * [He sees the huge diamond on top of the pyramid]
 * Jonathan: Wait, wait. Let me down. Let me down!
 * Rick: It's not worth your life, you idiot!
 * Jonathan: Yes, it is! Yes, it is!

About

 * "We worked with a guy called Dr. Stuart Smith from UCLA and he’s an Egyptologist. He put all this stuff on tape for us and it’s kind of the closest we can come to what we think the actual language sounded like. It’s like ancient Latin. When we speak Latin now we think it’s what it sounded like, but we’re not really sure. The problem with a lot of this Egyptian stuff is words like ‘look out’ become like 10 lines. Steve would go, ‘No, no, no. Lose the first four words. Say that word and then say the last word.’ So basically, I’d end up making the stuff up.
 * Arnold Vosloo (Moviestar November/December 2001)

Taglines

 * Adventure is reborn.
 * He will rise again.
 * The most powerful force on Earth is about to be unleashed by the two people who should know better.

Cast

 * Brendan Fraser - Richard "Rick" O'Connell
 * Rachel Weisz - Evelyn "Evy" Carnahan O'Connell/Princess Nefertiri
 * Freddie Boath - Alexander "Alex" O'Connell
 * John Hannah - Jonathan Carnahan
 * Oded Fehr - Ardeth Bey
 * Arnold Vosloo - High Priest Imhotep
 * Alun Armstrong - Baltus Hafez, the cult leader
 * Patricia Velasquez - Meela Nais / Anck-Su-Namun
 * Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje - Lock-Nah
 * Dwayne Johnson - The Scorpion King

title: The Mummy Returns


text:
Devil's advocate

The advocatus diaboli (Latin for Devil's advocate) is a former official position within the Catholic Church, the Promoter of the Faith: one who "argued against the canonization (sainthood) of a candidate in to uncover any character flaws or misrepresentation of the evidence favoring canonization".

In common language, the phrase "playing devil's advocate" describes a situation where someone, given a certain point of view, takes a position they do not necessarily agree with (or simply an alternative position from the accepted norm), for the sake of debate or to explore the thought further using valid reasoning that both disagrees with the subject at hand and proves their own point valid. Despite being medieval in origin, this idiomatic expression is one of the most popular present-day English idioms used to express the concept of arguing against something without actually being committed to the contrary view.

Quotes

 * ADVOCATUS DIABOLI, devil’s advocate, the name popularly given to the promoter of the Faith (promotor fidei), and officer of the Sacred Congregation of Rites at Rome, whose duty is to prepare all possible arguments against the admission of any one to the posthumous honours of beatification and canonization. This functionary is first formally mentioned under Leo X. (1513–1521) in the proceedings in connexion with the canonization of St Lorenzo Giustiniani. In 1631 Urban VIII. made his presence, either in person or by deputy, necessary for the validity of any act connected with the process of beatification or canonization (see Canonization). The phrase, “devil’s advocate,” has by an easy transference come to be used of any one who puts himself up, or is put up, for the sake of promoting debate, to argue a case in which he does not necessarily believe.
 * According to 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Advocatus Diaboli

 * Refusing to speak to the media, refusing to answer the tough question, but releasing canned speeches? What country is this? China? iTunes should be ashamed of distributing state-sponsored propaganda
 * According to Speeches of Canada's PM Stephen Harper rank as top-downloaded podcasts (July 4, 2006)

title: Devil's advocate