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William Jennings Bryan

William Jennings Bryan (19 March 1860 – 26 July 1925) was an American lawyer, statesman, and politician. He was a three-time Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States, and famously supported Tennessee's Butler Act against the teaching of evolution at the Scopes Trial of 1925.

Quotes

 * Success is brought by continued labor and continued watchfulness. We must struggle on, not for one moment hesitate, nor take one backward step.
 * Illinois College Valedictory (1881)

In this, our land, we are called upon to give but little in return for the advantages which we receive. Shall we give that little grudgingly? '''Our definition of patriotism is often too narrow. Shall the lover of his country measure his loyalty only by his service as a soldier?''' No! Patriotism calls for the faithful and conscientious performance of all of the duties of citizenship, in small matters as well as great, at home as well as upon the tented field. There is no more menacing feature in these modern times than the disinclination of what are called the better classes to assume the burdens of citizenship. If we desire to preserve to future generations the purity of our courts and the freedom of our people, we must lose no opportunity to impress upon our citizens the fact that above all pleasure, above all convenience, above all business, they must place their duty to their government; for a good government doubles every joy and a bad government multiplies every sorrow. Times change but principles endure. The jury has protected us from the abuse of power. While human government exists the tendency to abuse power will remain. This system, coming down from former generations crowned with the honors of age, is today and for the future our hope. Let us correct its defects with kindly hands, let us purge it of its imperfections and it will be, as in the past, the bulwark of our liberties.
 * No government can long endure unless its citizens are willing to make some sacrifice for its existence.
 * "The Jury System", delivered in response to a toast at a bar association banquet in Lincoln, Nebraska (February 1890)

 * A man who murders another shortens by a few brief years the life of a human being; but he who votes to increase the burden of debts upon the people of the United States assumes a graver responsibility.
 * First Speech Against Unconditional Repeal (9 February 1893)

 * The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.
 * Principal Speech Against Unconditional Repeal (16 August 1893)

 * Next to the ministry I know of no more noble profession than the law. The object aimed at is justice, equal and exact, and if it does not reach that end at once it is because the stream is diverted by selfishness or checked by ignorance. Its principles ennoble and its practice elevates.
 * "The Law and the Gospel" (1896)

 * You cannot judge a man's life by the success of a moment, by the victory of an hour, or even by the results of a year. You must view his life as a whole. You must stand where you can see the man as he treads the entire path that leads from the cradle to the grave — now crossing the plain, now climbing the steeps, now passing through pleasant fields, now wending his way with difficulty between rugged rocks — tempted, tried, tested, triumphant.
 * "The Law and the Gospel" (1896)

 * Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.
 * "America's Mission", speech delivered by the leader of the Democratic Party at the Washington Day banquet given by the Virginia Democratic Association at Washington, D.C., (22 February 1899), as published in The Book of Public Speaking (Vol. 2)

'''Plutocracy is abhorrent to a republic; it is more despotic than monarchy, more heartless than aristocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in the hour of its calamity.''' Conscienceless, compassionless and devoid of wisdom, it enervates its votaries while it impoverishes its victims. It is already sapping the strength of the nation, vulgarizing social life and making a mockery of morals. The time is ripe for the overthrow of this giant wrong. In the name of the counting-rooms which it has denied; in the name of business honor which it has polluted; in the name of the home which it has despoiled; in the name of religion which it has disgraced; in the name of the people whom it has opprest, let us make our appeal to the awakened conscience of the nation.
 * And who can suffer injury by just taxation, impartial laws and the application of the Jeffersonian doctrine of equal rights to all and special privileges to none? Only those whose accumulations are stained with dishonesty and whose immoral methods have given them a distorted view of business, society and government. Accumulating by conscious frauds more money than they can use upon themselves, wisely distribute or safely leave to their children, these denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw a light upon their crimes.
 * Address at Madison Square Garden, New York (30 August 1906), at a reception welcoming Bryan on his return from a year's trip around the world, published in Speeches of William Jennings Bryan, Funk & Wagnalls, (1909), p. 90

 * Dear me, think of it, niggers speaking French!
 * Bryan's response to learning about Haiti while serving as Secretary of State (1912), as quoted in The Little Nation That Tests Our Loyalty to Democracy : Haiti: America’s vision of the country is too heavily reliant on a Haitian military we trained. What about the rising Haitian middle class?, October 24 1993, The Los Angeles Times''

 * Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.
 * As quoted in "Osborn States the Case For Evolution", in The New York Times (12 Jul 1925), p. XX1; the tooth was misidentified as anthropoid by Osborn, who over-zealously proposed Nebraska Man in 1922; the tooth was shortly thereafter found to be that of a peccary (a Pliocene pig) when further bones were found. A retraction was made in 1927, correcting the scientific blunder.

Address at Illinois College (1881)

 * Illinois College Graduating Oration (1881)

 * Appearance too often takes the place of reality — the stamp of the coin is there, and the glitter of the gold, but, after all, it is but a worthless wash. Sham is carried into every department of life, and we are being corrupted by show and surface. We are too apt to judge people by what they have, rather than by what they are; we have too few Hamlets who are bold enough to proclaim, "I know not seem!"

 * If we delight in gossip, and are not content unless each neighbor is laid upon the dissecting table, we form a character unenviable indeed, and must be willing to bear the contempt of all the truly good, while we roll our bit of scandal as a sweet morsel under the tongue.

 * But if each day we gather some new truths, plant ourselves more firmly upon principles which are eternal, guard every thought and action, that it may be pure, and conform our lives more nearly to that Perfect Model, we shall form a character that will be a fit background on which to paint the noblest deeds and the grandest intellectual and moral achievements; a character that cannot be concealed, but which will bring success in this life and form the best preparation for that which is beyond.

 * Character is the entity, the individuality of the person, shining from every window of the soul, either as a beam of purity, or as a clouded ray that betrays the impurity within. The contest between light and darkness, right and wrong, goes on; day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, our characters are being formed, and this is the all-important question which comes to us in accents ever growing fainter as we journey from the cradle to the grave, "Shall those characters be good or bad?"

Cross of Gold Speech (1896)

 * Speech at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois (9 July 1896)

 * This is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.

 * We object to bringing this question down to the level of persons. The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal; and this has been a contest over a principle.

 * There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests up on them.

 * You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

 * If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

God and Evolution (1922)

 * "God and Evolution", in The New York Times (26 Feb 1922), p, 84; rebuttals by Henry Fairfield Osborn and Edwin Grant Conklin were printed a few days later.

 * The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a “hypothesis,” but the word “hypothesis,” though euphonioous, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word “guess.” If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word “hypothesis.” When it is understood that “hypothesis” means “guess,” people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it.

 * The only part of evolution in which any considerable interest is felt is evolution applied to man. A hypothesis in regard to the rocks and plant life does not affect the philosophy upon which one's life is built. Evolution applied to fish, birds and beasts would not materially affect man's view of his own responsibilities except as the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis as to these would be used to support a similar hypothesis as to man. The evolution that is harmful— distinctly so — is the evolution that destroys man’s family tree as taught by the Bible and makes him a descendant of the lower forms of life. This … is a very vital matter.

 * The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effort, for truth is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.

Scopes Trial (1925)

 * Statements of Bryan from the Scopes Trial (10 - 21 July 1925)

 * I have been so satisfied with the Christian religion that I have spent no time trying to find arguments against it. … I am not afraid now that you will show me any. I feel that I have enough information to live and die by.

 * If they believe it, they go back to scoff at the religion of their parents.
 * On evolution, in transcript of the fifth day's proceedings (16 Jul 1925) in The World's Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case: a Complete Stenographic Report of the Famous Court Test of the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act, at Dayton, July 10 to 21, 1925, Including Speeches and Arguments of Attorneys (1925), by John Thomas Scopes, p. 175

Day 7

 * Quotes of Bryan from Day 7 of the trial

 * I can make affirmation; I can say "So help me God, I will tell the truth."

 * I have studied the Bible for about 50 years, or sometime more than that, but, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was but a boy. … I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there: some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

 * When I read that a "big fish" swallowed Jonah — it does not say whale. That is my recollection of it. A big fish, and I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both what He pleases. … One miracle is just as easy to believe as another. … It is hard to believe for you, but easy for me. A miracle is a thing performed beyond what man can perform. When you get within the realm of miracles; and it is just as easy to believe the miracle of Jonah as any other miracle in the Bible.

 * These gentlemen have not had much chance — they did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it and they can ask me any question they please.

 * The reason I am answering is not for the benefit of the superior court. It is to keep these gentlemen from saying I was afraid to meet them and let them question me, and I want the Christian world to know that any atheist, agnostic, unbeliever, can question me anytime as to my belief in God, and I will answer him. … Your honor, they have not asked a question legally and the only reason they have asked any question is for the purpose, as the question about Jonah was asked, for a chance to give this agnostic an opportunity to criticize a believer in the world of God; and I answered the question in order to shut his mouth so that he cannot go out and tell his atheistic friends that I would not answer his questions. That is the only reason, no more reason in the world.

 * If you will take the second chapter — let me have the book. [Reaches for a Bible.] The fourth verse of the second chapter says: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens," the word day there in the very next chapter is used to describe a period. I do not see that there is any necessity for construing the words, "the evening and the morning," as meaning necessarily a 24-hour day, "in the day when the Lord made the heaven and the earth."… I think it would be just as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in 6 million years or in 600 million years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other. … My impression is they were periods, but I would not attempt to argue against anybody who wanted to believe in literal days.

 * Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world. I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it, and while it will require time, I am willing to take it.

Summations

 * Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.
 * Undelivered Trial Summation

 * In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane — the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times a bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.
 * Summation

Quotes about Bryan

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source

 * The nomination of Mr. Bryan by the Democrats and his endorsement by the majority of the Populists made a strong appeal to the labor vote. In that campaign the Democrats vigorously denounced "capitalism and the money power," and arrayed the masses against the classes. They proposed income taxes on the rich, free silver or an abundance of money in circulation, limitation of injunctions, and other measures which proved attractive to trade unionists in their struggle against powerful employers of labor, and especially against the great trusts with which they had found themselves unable to cope on equal terms.
 * Mary Ritter Beard A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920)

 * History had been unkind to William Jennings Bryan, characterizing him as a Bible-thumping buffoon. Bryan was anything but the bumpkin he is made out to be in common accounts of the Scopes trial. … William Jennings Bryan was a great American hero, someone in whom people on the Left can take a sympathetic interest. A century ago, he was a leading populist politician … He was a strong opponent of the runaway capitalism of his day and fought hard and effectively for progressive social change, including votes for women, progressive income tax, and for getting the United States off the gold standard, which was a terrible burden on the American working class.
 * James Robert Brown, in Who Rules in Science? (2004), p. 189

 * The impassioned plea of Bryan in 1896 that labor be not "crucified upon a cross of gold" could not be wholly ridiculed to silence. The Populist movement which swept over the West and South, I began now to believe, was a third party movement of deep significance and it was kept from political power on the one hand by the established election frauds of the South, of which I knew, and by the fabulous election fund which made McKinley President of the United States.
 * The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (1968)

 * The free-silver campaign was at its height. The proposition for the free coinage of silver at the ratio with gold of sixteen to one had become a national issue almost overnight. It gained in strength by the sudden ascendancy of William Jennings Bryan, who had stampeded the Democratic Convention by an eloquent speech and the catch phrase: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour the crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of gold." [...] I could not share the enthusiasm for Bryan, partly because I did not believe in the political machine as a means of bringing about fundamental changes, and also because there was something weak and superficial about Bryan. I had a feeling that his main aim was to get into the White House rather than "strike off the chains" from the people. I resolved to steer clear of him. I sensed his lack of sincerity and I did not trust him.
 * Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931)

 * Democrats, strong in the cotton region, generally agreed on a low-tariff policy but on little else. Hard-money ‘‘Bourbon’’ Democrats in the Grover Cleveland mold clashed with inflationists whose perennial champion was William Jennings Bryan, ‘‘Boy Orator of the Platte,’’ the ‘‘Great Commoner’’ whose affected rusticity symbolized the economic and cultural gulf that separated Main Street from Wall Street. Self-made men like James Michael Curley of Boston or Al Smith and Robert Wagner of New York, champions of labor who had scrambled up out of immigrant ghettoes like Roxbury or Hell’s Kitchen, sat uneasily in party councils with cotton-South barons like Mississippi’s Senator Pat Harrison or rural Texans like John Nance Garner, men who saw in cheap, nonunion labor their region’s major economic resource. Cerebral reformers like Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter barely coexisted in the same party with antic populist demagogues like Louisiana’s Huey Long. Cultural differences, too, cleaved the party along the lines that separated Catholics and Jews from old-stock Protestants, divided anti-Prohibition ‘‘wets’’ from fundamentalist ‘‘drys,’’ and distanced urban immigrants from rural Klansmen. These conflicting forces had locked in such irreconcilable conflict at the Democrats’ presidential nominating convention of 1924 in New York that only after 103 ballots did the weary and sweltering delegates settle on a compromise ticket. It had corporation lawyer John W. Davis at its head and Nebraska governor Charles W. Bryan, brother of the Great Commoner, in the vice-presidential slot. Davis’s crushing defeat by Calvin Coolidge seemed to confirm the suspicions of many pundits that the roiling, fractionated mob known as the Democratic Party could never be fashioned into a coherent instrument of governance. ‘‘I don’t belong to an organized political party,’’ quipped America’s favorite humorist, Will Rogers. ‘‘I’m a Democrat.’’
 * David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945 (1999), ISBN 0-19-503834-7, p. 31

 * Unfortunately for the Republicans, William Jennings Bryan was a great orator and took the early lead in the public's eye. Bryan, flashing steel-blue eyes and well-kept teeth, vowed to fight the money kings of Wall Street and wholly supported unlimited coinage of silver.
 * Peter Krass, in Carnegie (2011), Ch. 24: Illegal Rebates and a Fight with Rockefeller

 * As for William Jennings Bryan, of whom so much piffle, pro and con, has been written, the whole of his political philosophy may be reduced to two propositions, neither of which is true. The first is the proposition that the common people are wise and honest, and the second is the proposition that all persons who refuse to believe it are scoundrels. Take away the two, and all that would remain of Jennings would be a somewhat greasy bald-headed man with his mouth open.
 * H.L. Mencken, in Damn! : A Book of Calumny

 * Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. … Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
 * H. L. Mencken, in a memorial in the Baltimore Evening Sun (27 July 1925)

 * He leads a new crusade, his bald head glistening... One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities... But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among us...
 * H. L. Mencken, in H.L. Mencken on Religion (2002) edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 18

 * Called by his admirers the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan was a tireless defender of the poor against the rich and a prophet of reform and humanitarianism. Without a doubt he was the voice of the Democratic party at the turn of the century, and his style and dedication kept him at center stage for thirty-five years of turbulent American politics.
 * Steven O'Brien, Paula McGuire, James M. McPherson and Gary Gerstle in American Political Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present (1991), p. 49

The earth speaks not of a succession of distinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in which, as the millions of years roll by, increasing perfection of structure and beauty of form are found; out of the water-breathing fish arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the land-living amphibian arises the land-living, air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creeping things resembling each other closely. The earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent of the bird from one kind of reptile and of the mammal from another kind of reptile. This is not perhaps the way Bryan would have made the animals, but this is the way God made them!
 * The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as “the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life.” In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their remains in the rocks which compose the deeper layers of the earth, and when the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and storm we find wondrous lines of ascent invariably following the principles of creative evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly forms always precede the higher and more specialized forms.
 * Henry Fairfield Osborn, in The Earth Speaks to Bryan (1925), p. 5; written in response to the Scopes Monkey Trial, where Bryan spoke against the theory of evolution. They had previously been engaged in the controversy about the theory for several years. The title refers to a Biblical verse from the Book of Job (12:8), “Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee.”

 * Today the earth speaks with resonance and clearness and every ear in every civilized country of the world is attuned to its wonderful message of the creative evolution of man, except the ear of William Jennings Bryan; he alone remains stone-deaf, he alone by his own resounding voice drowns the eternal speech of nature.
 * Henry Fairfield Osborn, in The Earth Speaks to Bryan (1925), p. 8

 * Direct observation of the testimony of the earth ... is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history. If Mr. Bryan, with an open heart and mind, would drop all his books and all the disputations among the doctors and study first hand the simple archives of Nature, all his doubts would disappear; he would not lose his religion; he would become an evolutionist.
 * Henry Fairfield Osborn, in "Evolution and Religion", The New York Times (5 March 1922), p. 91; written in response to an article a few days earlier in which William Jennings Bryan challenged the theory of evolution as lacking proof.

 * The national Democratic Party, having absorbed the Populist Party and rebuffed its own northeastern conservative wing, became the bearer of agrearian demands in national politics. Thus it was that so much of the old populist program could be enacted years after the Populist Party and the Farmers' Alliance had faded away. The politically committed farmer and the extraordinary figure of William Jennings Bryan — at once a national party chief, agrarian social-movement leader, and the country's foremost progressive reformer — made this translation possible.
 * Elizabeth Sanders, in Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917, p. 413

title: William Jennings Bryan


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Abbie Hoffman

Abbott Howard "Abbie" Hoffman (30 November 1936 – 12 April 1989) was a social and political activist in the United States, co-founder of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"), and later, a fugitive from the law, who lived under an alias following a conviction for dealing cocaine.

Quotes

 * The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going.
 * Spoken to police immediately prior to his arrest at the Lincoln Hotel Restaurant in Chicago (August 1968), quoting himself in "Creating the Perfect Mess" (1 September 1968) in Revolution for the Hell of It (1968); also quoted in Abbie Hoffman : American Rebel (1992) by Marty Jezer.

 * All you kiddies remember to lay off the needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.
 * "God Bless America — Shoot Nixon", on the spoken word album Wake Up America! (1970).

 * In this state, dig it, you get twenty years for sale of dope to a minor. You only get five to ten for manslaughter. So like, the thing is, if you're selling to a kid and cops come, shoot the kid real quick!
 * "Chicago", on the spoken word album Wake Up America! (1970).

 * I feel like a famous Indian Chief of the Fagowee nations, who led his tribe for 40 years in the desert amidst starvation, hunger, famine, strife, plague — finally staggered up to the top of this mountain, drug crazed, looked out and pounded his chest and said, "Where the fuck are we? Where the fuck are we?"
 * Wake Up America! (1970).

 * I only regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.
 * Post-trial statement (modeled after a quote by American revolutionary Nathan Hale), after being declared guilty of flag desecration for wearing a shirt that resembled an American flag (1968), quoted in "The Trial of Abbie Hoffman's Shirt" in The Huffington Post (8 June 2005).

 * If this guy is God, then this is the God that the United States of America deserves.
 * Comment about Maharaji Ji - video (1973).

 * For six years, the only consistent thing about our national drug policy has been its inconsistency. Harsher penalties, urine testing, hysteria, budget cuts and the simplistic "Just Say No!' campaign (the equivalent of telling manic depressives to "just cheer up") have returned drug education and treatment to the Reefer Madness era.
 * "Reefer Madness" in The Nation (21 November 1987).

 * You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.
 * Tikkun (July-August 1989); also quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why the Left is Right (2004) by William P. Martin, p. 51.

 * I see Judaism as a way of life. Sticking up for the underdog. Being an outsider. A critic of society. The kid on the corner who says the emperor has no clothes on. The Prophet.
 * Tikkun (July-August 1989).

 * In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation — Jim Crow — ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. Now, it doesn't matter who sits in the Oval Office. But the big battles that were won in that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong … and we were right! I regret nothing!
 * Closing words from his last speech, Vanderbilt University (April 1989).

 * It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List.
 * On the success of his book, Steal This Book, as quoted in Steal This Book Too! (2004) by Sean Curtis.

 * Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.
 * The "Steal Yourself Rich" Book (1971), p. v.

 * Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.
 * Bye-Bye Sixties, Hollywood-Style, Square Dancing in the Ice Age (1982).

Revolution for the Hell of It (1968)

 * I can only related to Chicago as a personal anarchist, a revolutionary artist. If that sounds egotistical, tough shit. My concept of reality comes from what I see, touch, and feel, The rest, as far as I'm concerned, didn't happen. If it did, so what, then it happened. Great! I am my own leader I make my own rules. The revolution is whereever my boots hit the ground. If the Left considers this adventurism, fuck 'em, they are a total bureaucratic bore.
 * On To Chicago (August 25-30,1968)

 * STRUCTURE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN CONTENT IN THE TRANSMISSION OF INFORMATION. It is the same as saying "the medium is the message."
 * p. 109, quoting the famous statement of Marshall McLuhan.

 * THE KEY TO ORGANIZING AN ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY IS TO ORGANIZE PEOPLE AROUND WHAT THEY CAN DO AND MORE IMPORTANTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO DO.
 * p. 135.

 * You ask, "What about the innocent bystanders?" But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent.
 * p. 183.

 * TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
 * p. 184.

 * The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.
 * p. 184.

 * I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
 * p. 187.

 * The only way to support a revolution is to make your own.
 * p. 188.

Woodstock Nation (1969)

 * In Woodstock Nation there are no writers—only poet-warriors.
 * Landing a Man on the Earth Without the Help of Norman Mailer

 * I think this is a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison.

 * WOODSTOCK NATION is built on ELECTRICITY. It is our energy, music, politics, school, religion, play, battleground and our sensuality. I hesitate only in using the word Morality, for Morality means soul and ELECTRICITY lack soul but so too does the wood pen I scratch against the yellow pad. Morality rests in God's imagination and if we see ourselves as gods I guess we alone make those choices. Moral decisions never rest in our tools, be they electricity or pencils, flowers, or guns.

 * One tries not to be cynical; after all, they are jumping around on the fuckin moon and no matter what you think of PIG NATION, you have to admit that it dies have a good special effects department.
 * Moonshine

 * Some day we too will fly off in some communal capsule, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Hippies, liberated women, young workers on the line, and G.I.'s sitting in stockades because they don't want to go to Vietnam. There will be a whole mess of us laughing and getting stoned on our way to OUTERSPACE, and the first thing we're gonna do out there is to rip down that fuckin flag on the moon.
 * Moonshine

 * God, I'd like to fuck Janis Joplin!!
 * Down on Me and Janis Joplin

 * The Beatles may be more popular than Jesus but heavy cats like Chairman Mao, Uncle Ho, and beautiful long-haired Che Guevara are more popular than The Beatles.
 * Down on Me and Janis Joplin

 * LONG LIVE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION!
 * Down on Me and Janis Joplin

 * It's July fifteenth, 2 a.m. on a farm somewhere in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's a beautiful warm night, filled with a starry blue sky waiting for the astronauts to violate its silence. Lying on your back you can look up and repeat all the old hippy cliches to yourself about dropping out and heading for the country. Why not? After all, on a clear night in New York City up on my roof I can sometimes see two stars and Anita jokes about how they must be attached to a long electric wire that comes out of the Con Ed building across the street, for there are no clear nights in New York. There is an underground newspaper conference going on at the farm. It's a good place to start describing some of the changes that have gone down in the hop community over the past few years. For the underground press is the molder and chronicler of the amorphous body of long -haired freaks you see sticking their tongue out at you in the TV news at night or luring your daughter to a rock-and-roll dance in the park.
 * Death to the Pigs Who Invade Our Land

 * Your universities teach you to be eternal cynics, a cynicism that can be only drowned in alcohol and diet pills and psychoanalysts and golf. Forget your cynicism. There is not one who has more respect for life than a revolutionist.
 * Che's Last Letter

 * For a revolution, in order to be a true revolution, must be a world revolution. To achieve that world revolution, you the children of the Yankees must lend a hand. You must vomit forth your cynicism in the streets of your cities. You must mount an unrelenting attack on everything the bastards that rule your country hold dear. You must refuse to serve in their armies, you must reject the heroin offered in their universities, you must become clogs in their productive machines.
 * Che's Last Letter

 * Every group was broke cause the liberal bulge that used to support most radical causes was off on some other trip, playing around with anti-ABM campaigns and sending food to Biafra. Even though they wept and shed some blood in the streets of Chicago, they were gone for good - gone with their money. Our revolution was becoming too radical or crazy or violent or young. We were fuckin up their cocktail parties and it mattered not the blood we were shedding or the growing fascism in the country. New ways had to be found to get bread cause the days of the mailings and benefits were over. In fact, for the Yippies, they had never even begun.
 * The Great Rip Off

 * It's in those moments that you start to think about being white and male and over thirty and too smart for your own fuckin good. You start to get pretty down in the dumps sometimes. Besides, every group was into calling the other an imposter and fights were breaking out all over the place. The left was moving into Stalinism and the hippies were moving to the country (as usual). It was mighty lonely on the fence.
 * The Great Rip Off

Steal This Book (1971)

 * It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail.
 * Introduction.

 * It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond the-one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-buinsess, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgement to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals an how much. I always wanted to put together an outlaw handbook that would help raise consciousness on these points while doing something about evening the score. There was also the challenge of testing the limits of free speech.
 * Introduction

 * To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
 * Introduction, p. iv.

 * Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn't allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.
 * Introduction, p. v.

 * Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks.
 * "Free Education".

 * Those who say a demonstration should be concerned with education rather than theater don't understand either and will never organize a successful demonstration, or for that matter, a successful revolution.
 * "Demonstration"

 * Dealing, although dangerous, is a tax-free way of surviving even though it borders on work.
 * "Free Dope"

 * Amerika is just another Latin dictatorship. Those who have doubts should try the minimal experience of organizing a large rock festival in their state, sleeping on some beach in the summer or wearing a flag shirt. Ask the blacks what it's been like living under racism and you'll get a taste of the future we face. As the repression increases so will the underground - deadly groups of stoned revolutionaries sneaking around at night and balling all day.

 * It's ridiculous to talk about a revolution without a few words on guns. If you haven't been in the army or done some hunting, you probably have a built in fear against guns that can only be overcome by familiarizing yourself with them.

Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (1980)

 * My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce.
 * p. 64.

 * A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station, not the factory. It concentrates its energy on infiltrating and changing the image system.
 * p. 86
 * Free speech is the right to shout "Theater!" in a crowded fire.
 * p. 214.

 * There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning. I think I've learned that lesson twice now. The essence of successful revolution, be it for an individual, a community of individuals, or a nation, depends on accepting that challenge.
 * p. 297.

 * Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. When all today's isms have become yesterday's ancient philosophy, there will still be reactionaries and there will still be revolutionaries. No amount of rationalization can avoid the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on the planet. I still believe in the fundamental injustice of the profit system and do not accept the proposition there will be rich and poor for all eternity.
 * p. 297.

Misattributed

 * Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.
 * This has been attributed to Hoffman by referencing The New York Times (20 April 1989), but that article (Section A, Page 16) actually says "But the Rabbi also quoted one of Mr. Hoffman's favorite sayings: 'Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.'" This statement doesn't attribute the saying to Hoffman, but only says it was a favorite and presumably he used it repeatedly.
 * An earlier version is "Sacred cows make great hamburgers", recorded as an anonymous saying in Encyclopedia of Graffiti (1974) by Robert George Reisner and Lorraine Wechsler.
 * There are earlier instances of essentially this quote. In the form "Sacred cows make the best hamburger" it appeared in October 1965 in a student newspaper at Pennsylvania State University, The Daily Collegian, saying it was borrowed from Aardvark magazine, according to the Quote Investigator blog.

Quotes about

 * Abbie Hoffman was one of the first Americans to fully appreciate the possibilities and the importance of living in what was becoming a media age. He was the New Left’s clown, not because he was clownish, but because in a very calculated way he understood that the New Left was in need of a clown, that a clown could publicize their issues, that a clown was not ignored. Above all, Abbie Hoffman did not want to be ignored. And like all good clowns, he was very funny. He was a master of the put-on, and those who understood put-ons laughed while the others joined the television cameras waiting when he promised to spin and levitate the Pentagon, not understanding why he was not in the least bit embarrassed, or the slightest bit disappointed, when he failed to do so.
 * Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2004)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Abbie Hoffman


text:
John Gilmore

John Gilmore (born 1955) is an American computer science innovator, Libertarian, Internet activist, and one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project.

Quotes

 * The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
 * As quoted in TIME magazine (6 December 1993)
 * Unsourced variant:
 * The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.

 * How many of you have broken no laws this month?
 * As quoted in a speech to the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in 1991

 * If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody.
 * As quoted in Subject: [IP John Gilmore on government trustworthiness and spy gear]

 * When the X500 revolution comes, your name will be lined against the wall and shot.
 * As quoted in Peter Gutmann's X509 style guide

title: John Gilmore


text:
I. F. Stone

Isador Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989), better known as I. F. Stone, was a politically progressive American investigative journalist, writer, and author. He is best remembered for I. F. Stone's Weekly (1953–71), a newsletter ranked 16th among the top hundred works of journalism in the U.S., in the 20th century, by the New York University journalism department, in 1999; and second place among print journalism publications.

Quotes

 * We felt proud and exultant to arrive with the Jewish flag at our mast. The refugees looked for the first time upon the Holy Land with wondering and often tear-filled eyes. This was the sight for which they had longed with all their hearts, the sight for which they had risked their lives crossing one illegal border after another and on the high seas.
 * Underground to Palestine (1947)

 * There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.
 * I.F. Stone's Weekly (1954-03-15)

 * Professor Einstein would not have liked a stuffy tribute. My wife and I loved him. He was a charter subscriber to the Weekly, and often strained its primitive bookkeeping facilities by renewing when no renewal was due. We and our three children had the great pleasure on several occasions of having tea with him at his home. It was like going to tea with God, not the terrible old God of the Bible but the little child’s father-in-heaven, very kind, very wise and yet himself very much like a child, too…
 * Stone's obituary tribute to Einstein, April 1955, reprinted in The Best of I. F. Stone and quoted in

 * Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda.
 * I.F. Stone's Weekly (January 21, 1963)

 * I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called "the significant trifle" — the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.
 * The Haunted Fifties (1963)

 * The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.
 * The Haunted Fifties (1963)

 * A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.
 * I.F. Stone's Weekly (August 3, 1967)

 * All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.
 * In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967 (1967), p. 317

 * Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.
 * I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly (May 19, 1969)

 * I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.
 * I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly (December 14, 1971)

 * To be able to spit in their eye and do what you think is right and report the news and have enough readers to make some impact is such a pleasure that you forget, you forget what you are writing about. It becomes, you know, it like, you are like a journalistic Nero fiddling while Rome burns and having a hell of a good time or like a small boy covering a hell of a big fire. It's just wonderful and exciting. You are a cub reporter and God has given you big fire to cover. And you forget, you forget it is really burning.
 * Quoted by Bill Moyers in Bill Moyers talks with alternative media heavyweights Glenn Greenwald  and  Amy Goodman about what can and can't be addressed in big corporate media,  PBS.org  (April 3, 2009)

 * There’s a lot of things those journalists know, that I don’t know, but a lot of it is wrong.
 * Quoted in the Ottawa Citizen, As timely as Trump, a documentary about political deceit and feisty, independent journalism by Peter Hum (February 7, 2017)

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (September 5, 2006)
Transcript/full text online

 * The American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public.
 * What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished.
 * This is what is happening in Cyprus, where we have been begging Greeks and Turks to desist from the murderous escalation of reprisal and counter reprisal. Johnson practices in Southeast Asia what he deplores in the Mediterranean....
 * The first was the raid by U.S. Navy planes in June on Pathet Lao headquarters in Laos in retaliation for shooting down two reconnaissance planes. We would not hesitate to shoot down reconnaissance planes over our own territory; such overflights are a clear violation of international law. But the U.S. now seems to operate on the principle that invasion of other people's skies is our right, and efforts to interfere with it (at least by weaker powers) punishable by reprisal. This is pure "might is right" doctrine...
 * Even in wartime, reprisals are supposed to be kept within narrow limits. Hackworth's Digest, the State Department's huge Talmud of international law, quotes an old War Department manual, Rules of Land Warfare, as authoritative on the subject. This says reprisals are never to be taken "merely for revenge" but "only as an unavoidable last resort" to "enforce the recognized rules of civilized warfare." Even then reprisals "should not be excessive or exceed the degree of violence committed by the enemy." These were the principles we applied at the Nuremberg trials.
 * Our reprisal raids on North Vietnam hardly conformed to these standards. By our own account, in self-defense, we had already sunk three or four attacking torpedo boats in two incidents. In neither were our ships damaged nor any of our men hurt; indeed, one bullet imbedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the second of the attacks even took place. To fly sixty-four bombing sorties in reprisal over four North Vietnamese bases and an oil depot, destroying or damaging twenty-five North Vietnamese PT boats, a major part of that tiny navy, was hardly punishment to fit the crime....
 * Morse revealed that U.S. warships were on patrol in Tonkin Bay nearby during the shelling of two islands off the North Vietnamese coast on Friday, July 31, by South Vietnamese vessels. Morse said our warships were within three to eleven miles of North Vietnamese territory, at the time, although North Vietnam claims a twelve-mile limit. *Morse declared that the U.S. "knew that the bombing was going to take place." He noted that General Khanh had been demanding escalation of the war to the North and said that with this shelling of the islands it was escalated. Morse declared the attack was made "by South Vietnamese naval vessels -- not by junks but by armed vessels of the PT boat type" given to South Vietnam as part of U.S. military aid. Morse said it was not just another attempt to infiltrate agents but "a well thought-out military operation." Morse charged that the presence of our warships in the proximity "where they could have given protection, if it became necessary" was "bound to be looked upon by our enemies as an act of provocation."
 * The press, which dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the anti-war speeches of Morse and Gruening, ignored this one, too.

Quotes about Stone

 * One of the great reporters of the 20th century, I.F. Stone, told journalism students never to forget that "All governments lie." He could speak with authority, having spent seven decades exposing deception and official lies by digging deep into government documents and transcripts. He gained his greatest fame and impact publishing the newsletter called "I.F. Stone's Weekly," taking on McCarthyism, racism in the military, and the Vietnam War. "In this age of corporation men," he wrote in 1963, "I am an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise." This critically acclaimed documentary, produced in1973, offered an inside look at how Izzy Stone worked.
 * Bill Moyers in Bill Moyers talks with alternative media heavyweights Glenn Greenwald  and  Amy Goodman about what can and can't be addressed in big corporate media,  PBS.org  (April 3, 2009)

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/books/review/Berman.t.html?pagewanted=all
 * Stone was... a lover of freedom. A part of him always rebelled against the culture of mendacity he helped to foster in his own corner of the American left... "All governments lie," Stone’s maxim, ought to be plastered across every journalist’s desk. But the lesson Stone can offer us today is, I would say, mostly a reminder that we will have to rise to our own occasion, and not expect heroes from the past to guide our faltering steps.

 * I.F. "Izzy" Stone was a wonderfully intelligent, hard-working, and highly respected American journalist who wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power. He’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy witch hunts and couldn't get a job with a mainstream paper, so he started his own independent weekly. Stone was not invited to White House press conferences, but didn't mind. He famously said, "There's a lot of things those journalists know, that I don't know, but a lot of it is wrong." Stone read the voluminous Congressional Record cover to cover, finding news stories in unlikely places. Stone was highly respected and had good sources inside government.
 * Peter Hum "As timely as Trump, a documentary about political deceit and feisty, independent journalism", Ottawa Citizen (February 7, 2017)

 * A new [2017] documentary called All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone... considers decades of U.S. government controversies and the press that covered them... a film about the "children" of I.F. Stone — those contemporary independent, investigative journalists who work with his spirit, and perhaps were inspired or motivated by him, weaving Stone's story through the film... the unifying theme — which we used as the title of our film — is Izzy Stone's dictum that "all governments lie." The film tracks several of the lies we've been told by several presidents and others in government over the years. There are many more examples, of course. Little did we know, when we started this film, that by the time it was completed, we'd be living in the "post-truth" age of "alternate facts." When we started making the film three years ago, Donald Trump was not a candidate and few people would have predicted he would become president of the United States. The film now seems even more vital and prescient in this "post-truth" world of "alternative facts."
 * Peter Hum "As timely as Trump, a documentary about political deceit and feisty, independent journalism", Ottawa Citizen (February 7, 2017)

 * I. F. Stone may have thought that environmentalism was distracting the youth of the 1960s and early 1970s from more urgent battles, but by today's standards, the environmentalists of that era look like fire-breathing radicals.
 * Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

 * Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more important than the Big One-why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone wasting their time worrying about women's rights and poverty and wars when it's blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement's leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crisis made "Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other major problems one could name... relatively insignificant by comparison." Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth Day as "a gigantic snowjob" that was using "rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure." They were both wrong. The environmental crisis-if conceived sufficiently broadly-neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.
 * Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

 * In 1964 I. F. Stone was the first American journalist to challenge the account provided by President Lyndon B. Johnson of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Throughout the 1960s Stone exposed the futility of the Vietnam War. By the 1960s the I. F. Stone's Weekly had a circulation of 70,000. However, ill-health forced I. F. Stone to cease publication in 1971.
 * Spartacus-Educational, by John Simkin   (September 1997)

title: I. F. Stone


text:
Mae West

 Mary Jane West (August 17, 1893 – November 22, 1980) was an American actress and playwright, most commonly known as "Mae" West.

Quotes

 * Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.
 * Response to an exclamation, "Goodness! What beautiful diamonds!" in Night After Night (1932). She later used Goodness had nothing to do with it was the title of her (1953) autobiography.

 * Why don't you come up sometime and see me? … Come on up, I'll tell your fortune.
 * She Done Him Wrong (1933); this statement has widely said to be misquoted with the paraphrase: "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" In fact, Mae West did say: "come up and see me sometime.” in these two movies I'm No Angel and Sextette http://quotationize.com/come-up-see-me-sometime-not-misquote-mae-west/

 * Oh, Beulah, Peel me a grape.
 * I'm No Angel (1933)

 * I only like two kinds of men, domestic and foreign.
 * I'm No Angel (1933)

 * When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better.
 * I'm No Angel (1933)

 * It's not the men in your life that count, it's the life in your men.
 * I'm No Angel (1933)

 * When women go wrong, men go right after them.
 * She Done Him Wrong (1933)

 * A man in the house is worth two in the street.
 * Belle of the Nineties (1934)

 * When I'm caught between two evils, I generally like to take the one I never tried.
 * Klondike Annie (1936)

 * You take one thing and add it to another and you get two. Two and two is four; and five'll get you ten if you know how to work it!
 * My Little Chickadee (1940)

 * I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
 * Interview in Life magazine (April 18, 1969)

 * I'm the kinda girl who works for Paramount by day, and Fox all night
 * Sextette (1978)

 * To her British lover about to climb in bed with 80-something Mae: She said that she hoped soon to be able to say what Paul Revere said — 'The British are coming'. This was the last one-liner Mae ever uttered on film.
 * Sextette (1978)

 * Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
 * Sextette (1978)

 * When you got the personality, you don't need the nudity.
 * Quoted in "For Women, Monologues They Haven't Heard" by Susan Pomerance, Dramaline Publications (1985)

 * Marriage is a fine institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.
 * #149 in The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (2006) by Robert Byrne

 * Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.
 * #684 in The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (2006) by Robert Byrne

 * I've been in more laps than a napkin.
 * #685 in The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (2006) by Robert Byrne

 * She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
 * #832 in The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (2006) by Robert Byrne

 * I've always had a weakness for foreign affairs.
 * Person-to-Person interview (CBS) with Charles Collingwood, September 1959

 * You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

title: Mae West


text:
Zane Grey

Pearl Zane Grey (31 January 1872 – 23 October 1939), usually known as Zane Grey, was an American author most famous for his popular adventure novels and stories that were a basis for the Western genre in literature and the arts which idealized the American frontier.

Quotes

 * We'll use a signal I have tried and found far-reaching and easy to yell. Waa-hoo!
 * The Last of the Plainsmen (1908).

 * It was the elision of the weaker element — the survival of the fittest; and some, indeed very many, mothers must lose their sons that way.
 * The Desert of Wheat (1919).

 * he was a stranger in a strange land
 * The Desert of Wheat (1919).

 * "If I fished only to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago."
 * Tales of Southern Rivers (1924).

 * To bear up under loss — to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief — to be victor over anger — to smile when tears are close — to resist evil men and base instincts — to hate hate and to love love — to go on when it would seem good to die — to seek ever after the glory and the dream — to look up with unquenchable faith in something evermore about to be — that is what any man can do, and so be great.
 * As quoted in The North American Almanac (1931), p. 54, this sometimes published with a prefix "Recipe for greatness —" but this does not appear in the earliest versions of it yet located.

Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)

 * Numerous editions. Chapter numbers here are from the public domain text of the book at Project Gutenberg

 * Lassiter, the men of my creed are unnaturally cruel. To my everlasting sorrow I confess it. They have been driven, hated, scourged till their hearts have hardened. But we women hope and pray for the time when our men will soften.” “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am—that time will never come.” “Oh, it will!... Lassiter, do you think Mormon women wicked? Has your hand been against them, too?” “No. I believe Mormon women are the best and noblest, the most long-sufferin’, and the blindest, unhappiest women on earth.”
 * Chapter 2

 * I know Mormons. I’ve seen their women’s strange love en’ patience en’ sacrifice an’ silence en’ whet I call madness for their idea of God. An’ over against that I’ve seen the tricks of men. They work hand in hand, all together, an’ in the dark. No man can hold out against them, unless he takes to packin’ guns. For Mormons are slow to kill. That’s the only good I ever seen in their religion. Venters, take this from me, these Mormons ain’t just right in their minds. Else could a Mormon marry one woman when he already has a wife, an’ call it duty?
 * Chapter 3

 * You know, in every Mormon village there are women who seem mysterious to us, but about Milly there was more than the ordinary mystery. When she came to Cottonwoods she had a beautiful little girl whom she loved passionately. Milly was not known openly in Cottonwoods as a Mormon wife. That she really was a Mormon wife I have no doubt. Perhaps the Mormon’s other wife or wives would not acknowledge Milly. Such things happen in these villages. Mormon wives wear yokes, but they get jealous. Well, whatever had brought Milly to this country—love or madness of religion—she repented of it. She gave up teaching the village school. She quit the church. And she began to fight Mormon upbringing for her baby girl. Then the Mormons put on the screws—slowly, as is their way. At last the child disappeared. ‘Lost’ was the report. The child was stolen, I know that. So do you.
 * Chapter 3

 * Remembering Jane’s accusation of bitterness, he tried hard to put aside his rancor in judging Tull. But it was bitter knowledge that made him see the truth. He had felt the shadow of an unseen hand; he had watched till he saw its dim outline, and then he had traced it to a man’s hate, to the rivalry of a Mormon Elder, to the power of a Bishop, to the long, far-reaching arm of a terrible creed.
 * Chapter 4

 * For hand in glove with that power was an insatiate greed; they were one and the same.
 * Chapter 4

 * He called Tull a binder of women, a callous beast who hid behind a mock mantle of righteousness—an’ the last an’ lowest coward on the face of the earth. To prey on weak women through their religion—that was the last unspeakable crime!
 * Chapter 15

 * Don't look back!
 * Chapter 20

 * I’ll say that mercy an’ goodness, such as is in you, though they’re the grand things in human nature, can’t be lived up to on this Utah border. Life’s hell out here. You think—or you used to think—that your religion made this life heaven. Mebbe them scales on your eyes has dropped now. Jane, I wouldn’t have you no different, an’ that’s why I’m going to try to hide you somewhere in this Pass. I’d like to hide many more women, for I’ve come to see there are more like you among your people. An’ I’d like you to see jest how hard an’ cruel this border life is. It’s bloody. You’d think churches an’ churchmen would make it better. They make it worse. You give names to things—bishops, elders, ministers, Mormonism, duty, faith, glory. You dream—or you’re driven mad. I’m a man, an’ I know. I name fanatics, followers, blind women, oppressors, thieves, ranchers, rustlers, riders. An’ we have—what you’ve lived through these last months. It can’t be helped. But it can’t last always.
 * Chapter 23

title: Zane Grey


text:
Sacha Guitry

Alexandre-Pierre Georges (Sacha) Guitry (21 February 1885 – 24 July 1957) was a Russian-born French film actor, director, and screenwriter.

Book of Humorous Quotations, ed. Connie Robertson (1998), page 83

 * Honest women are inconsolable for the mistakes they haven't made.

 * You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.

 * The little I know, I owe to my ignorance.

 * When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy.
 * Usually erroneously attributed to Sir James Goldsmith, see The Daily Telegraph (London) in July 1997.
 * When a man steals your wife there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.

title: Sacha Guitry


text:
Talk:Finding Nemo

Leaving the EAC
Does someone know the quote where Squirt is telling Marlin how to exit the EAC, and Marlin says he doesn't understand a word that Squirt is saying? -- 69.10.70.66 12:28, 6 Aug 2004

Ok, here is what he says. Just turn on your subtitles during the movie.

Good afternoon! We're gonna have a great jump today. OK, crank a hard cutback as you hit the wall. There's a screaming bottom turn, so watch out! Remember - rip it, roll it, and punch it. Marlin - it's like he's trying to speak to me, I know it. listen, you're really cute but i dont know what you're saying.."

Nigel
Random

title: Talk:Finding Nemo


text:
Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler (5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-Jewish novelist, philosopher, and political activist who spent his later life in England.

Quotes

 * Oh, they had an explanation ready for every occasion, from the extension of capital punishment to the twelve-year-old to the abolition of the Soviet workers’ right to strike and to the one-party-election-system; they called it ‘revolutionary dialectics’ and reminded one of those conjurers on the stage who can produce an egg from every pocket of their frockcoats and even out of the harmless onlooker’s nose. They explained everything so well that, during a committee meeting, old Heinrich Mann, at one time a great ‘sympathiser,’ shouted to Dahlem, leader of the German Communists: ‘If you go on asking me to realise that this table here is a fishpond, then I am afraid my dialectical capacities are at an end.’
 * Scum of the Earth (1941)

 * Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit — it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.
 * A Challenge to 'Knights in Rusty Armor, The New York Times, (14 February 1943).

 * Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations.
 * From his essay in The God that Failed: Six Studies in Communism (ed. Richard Crossman, 1949), p. 68.

 * In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.
 * The Invisible Writing (1954).

 * I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
 * Return Trip to Nirvana from The Sunday Telegraph (1967).

 * Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
 * Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967 (1967).

 * If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction.
 * The Ghost in the Machine (1967).

 * The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
 * The Ghost in the Machine (1967).

 * God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
 * The Ghost in the Machine (1967).

 * The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
 * The Ghost in the Machine (1967, 1976).

 * Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.
 * The Act of Creation, London, (1970) p. 253.

 * Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.
 * The Act of Creation (1970).

 * The more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterwards.
 * The Act of Creation (1970).

 * Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.
 * Chapter 7, "The Snares of Language," The Act of Creation (1964).

 * [T]he evidence from anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe. From the anthropologist's point of view, two groups of facts militate against this belief: the wide diversity of Jews with regard to physical characteristics, and their similarity to the Gentile population amidst whom they live. Both are reflected in the statistics about bodily height, cranial index, blood-groups, hair and eye colour, etc. Whichever of these anthropological criteria is taken as an indicator, it shows a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries. ...The obvious biological explanation for both phenomena is miscegenation, which took different forms in different historical situations: intermarriage, large-scale proselytizing, rape as a constant (legalized or tolerated) accompaniment of war and pogrom.
 * The Thirteenth Tribe (1976).

 * Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out there is a pop group called The Police - I don't know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish them from the punks - and they've made an album of my essay The Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know anything about it until my clipping agency sent me a review of the record.
 * Writers at Work, ed. George Plimpton (1986).

 * "Rome was saved in A.D. 408 by the ransom the Senate paid to Alaric the Goth; ever since, when Europe found itself in an impasse or in a questing mood, it has turned yearningly to the land of culinary and spiritual spices. " "The greatest influence during the dark ages was Augustine, who was influenced by Plotinus, who was influenced by Indian mysticism. "Long before Aldous Huxley found Yoga a remedy for our Brave New World, Schopenhauer called the Upanishads the consolation of his life."
 * Attributed and quoted in Richer by Asia - By Edmond Taylor, p. 7.

 * The Mahatma was the greatest living anachronism of the twentieth century... [India would probably be] better off today and healthier in mind without the Gandhian heritage.
 * Arthur Koestler, quoted in Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, Michael Scammell

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

 * The sixth pre-Christian century—the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras—was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across the planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath of Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world. ...which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.

 * We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies — such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later.
 * as quoted by Michael Grossman in the The First Nonlinear System of Differential and Integral Calculus (1979).

 * If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality...
 * Epilogue

 * Today we know that on the sub-atomic level the fate of an electron or a whole atom is not determined by its past. But this discovery has not led to any basically new departure in the philosophy of nature, only to a state of bewildered embarrassment, a further retreat of physics into a language of even more abstract symbolism. Yet if causality has broken down and events are not rigidly governed by the pushes and pressures of the past, may they not be influenced in some manner by the "pull" of the future—which is a manner of saying that "purpose" may be a concrete physical factor in the evolution of the universe, both on the organic and unorganic levels. In the relativistic cosmos, gravitation is a result of the curvature and creases in space which continually tend to straighten themselves out—which, as Whittaker remarked, "is a statement so completely teleological that it certainly would have delighted the hearts of the schoolmen."
 * Epilogue [footnote referenced E.T. Whittaker's Space and Spirit (1946)]

 * If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.
 * Epilogue

 * The uomo universale of the Renaissance, who was artist and craftsman, philosopher and inventor, humanist and scientist, astronomer and monk, all in one, split up into his component parts. Art lost its mythical, science its mystical inspiration; man became again deaf to the harmony of the spheres. The Philosophy of Nature became ethically neutral, and "blind" became the favourite adjective for the working of natural law. The space-spirit hierarchy was replaced by the space-time continuum. ...man's destiny was no longer determined from "above" by a super-human wisdom and will, but from "below" by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.
 * Epilogue

Quotes about Koestler

 * When Judt wears the blinkers of his “pensée unique” he fails to make the subjects he discusses compelling and move them into interesting directions. In his essay on Arthur Koestler he criticizes Darkness at Noon for never mentioning the use of force whereby false confessions were extracted during the Moscow trials. Almost in a socialist realistic way, he chides Koestler for hiding the ugly truth of torture, stopping just short of implying that Koestler, despite his anti-Stalinism and anti-Communism, remained the prisoner of the ideas he once believed in. But Judt fails to see that this is precisely the strength of Koestler’s book. Extracting confession through torture is nothing new: it has been practiced through times immemorial. But convincing people that they should deliberately and falsely accuse themselves in order to further a cause is something truly important. It shows the quasi religious nature of Communism. Ignacio de Loyola and Glatkin (the interrogator in Darkness at Noon) would have perfectly understood each other, as indeed Dostoyevsky in his “Great Inquisitor” saw a century before. Compared to that, beating somebody to a pulp is banal.
 * Branko Milanović, "Tony Judt’s “Reappraisals”: The shipwrecks of the 20th century" (February 10, 2017)

 * I read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon with its poignant account of a communist show trial. Unlike Valtin's description of Gestapo brutality, Koestler's book allowed me for the first time to get inside, as it were, the mentality of the communist. Even more subtly, it showed that through the eyes of the communist himself the communist system makes no sense... Years later, when as Leader of the Opposition I met Koestler, I said how powerful I had found his book. I asked him how he had been able to imagine Rubashov and his tormentors. He told me no imagination was required. They were real.
 * Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (1995), pp. 57-58
 * We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.
 * Otto Katz, quoted in

title: Arthur Koestler


text: User:Rick MILLER~enwikiquote

title: User:Rick MILLER~enwikiquote


text:
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (or just Buckaroo Banzai) is a cult film released in 1984, starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Christopher Lloyd, and Jeff Goldblum.

From the film's dialogue

 * Hey, hey, hey — don't be mean. We don't have to be mean. 'Cause, remember: no matter where you go... there you are.

 * I've been ionized, but I'm okay now.

 * Evil! Pure and simple, from the 8th Dimension! Get 'em!

 * The missing circuit's in your head, Whorfin!

From the DVD's "Pinky Caruthers' Unknown Facts" feature

 * There are times when verbal ingenuity is not enough.

 * Nobody is nobody. Everyone has something to offer.

 * If all wishes were gratified, many dreams would be destroyed.

 * In my experience, nothing is ever what it seems to be, but everything is exactly what it is.

 * The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen all at once.

 * Treat us good, we'll treat you better. Treat us bad, We'll treat you worse.

 * I speak Spanish to God, French to women, English to men, and Japanese to my horse.

 * We have no special constitutional powers, unless you consider the extraordinary rights accorded every U.S. citizen by law, in which case we are amply empowered to go about our business.

 * Today's impossible is tomorrow's reality.

 * Mystery is the source of all true art and science.

 * Be cool, but care.

 * Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. (If you wish for peace, prepare for war).

 * The only way to know if a man is trustworthy is to trust him.

 * The Mind's a funny thing . . . in the Summer it longs for Winter. In the Winter it longs for Summer. In the Spring . . . it heads for the Bahamas.

 * Know that, as in life, there is much that many have looked upon but few have seen because, as my father told me and his father told him, you will come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth.

 * Those in a hurry show only that the thing they are about is too big for them.

 * Nothing real can defeat us. Nothing unreal exists.

 * Progress Over Protocol.

 * The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

 * Live like you're gonna die tomorrow and study like you're gonna live forever.

 * A battle won is a battle which we will not acknowledge to be lost.

 * Asking is a polite way of demanding.

 * A thousand pities cannot undo one thoughtless act.

 * A fool can throw a stone into the water which ten wise men cannot recover.

 * The Three Loves: love of others, the love of justice, and the love of freedom.

 * The Four Beauties: Mind, Language, Behavior, and Environment

Rawhide

 * I tell ya, if it ain't one thing, it's somethin' else.

 * {dying words} What are y'all lookin' at? You're on the clock. Let's saddle up, huh?

Lord John Whorfin / Dr. Emilio Lizardo

 * Laugh(a) while you can, monkeyboy!

 * Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife: "Doomed is your soul and damned is your life."

 * History is'a made at night. Character is what you are in the dark.
 * {The second half of the quote is attributed to American Evangelist Dwight L. Moody.}

 * Jesú Christo! (It) [M]ake the ganglia TWITCH!

 * Home. Home is where you wear your hat. "I feel so broke up...I want to go Home!"

 * May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I am sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly enshrined.

 * {moments before dying in a fiery explosion} Banzai! I'll see you in HELL!!!

John Bigbooté

 * {repeated line} BigbooTAY!

 * Let's go back up to my office and talk about this like two reasonable beings.

 * Put the snot on the track, John O'Connor.

 * It's not my goddamn planet. Understand, monkeyboy?

President Widmark

 * {reading from a printed form} "Declaration of War... The Short Form".

 * Buckaroo, I don't know what to say. Lectroids? Planet 10? Nuclear extortion? A girl named "John"?

 * What are you talking about, man? Some kind of race war in New Jersey?

John Parker

 * Excuse me, Mr. President. Time is short. In order to prevent John Whorfin's escape, my comrades are at this moment takin' up a geostationary position over New Jersey. De situation is explosive!

 * There is little time. You better come quickly if your planet is still important to you.

 * Hellooo, Mr. Secretary! {finger flex}

Other

 * Chase One Helicopter Pilot: This is Chase One. We got his tracks. They go right up to a wall of rock.  Holy shit!

 * Hospital PA System: Lithium is no longer available on credit.

 * Penny Priddy: I think I'm going crazy... Who's that girl, Buckaroo?  What's going on around here?  You drag me out of jail, you're... you're like Jerry Lewis, you give me hope to carry on, but... then you leave me in the lurch while you strap on your six-guns!  What do you want from me, Buckaroo?  Who am I?

 * Yoyodyne PA System: The only joy is the joy of duty. Work... work... work...

 * Red Lectroid Spaceship PA System: We are not in the Eighth dimension, we are over New Jersey. Hope is not lost.

 * Sign for Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems: The future begins tomorrow.

 * From the "Pinky Caruthers Unknown Facts" DVD feature: There is a term sometimes used at the Banzai Institute: The Three Bs, meaning the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is where the greatest discoveries are made in science. When one is at his most relaxed, the most receptive... that is when a foreign consciousness, a "stray bullet" as B. Banzai calls it, may pop into one's head.

 * Radio communication: Horizontal velocity is expanding, over.

Dialogue

 * Rawhide: Dr. Banzai is using a laser to vaporize the pineal tumor without damaging the quadrigeminal plate. Subcutaneous microphones are gonna allow the patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain.
 * Doctor: Like, "Raise my right arm"?
 * Rawhide: ...or, "Throw the harpoon." People are gonna come from all over. This boy's an Eskimo.

 * Buckaroo Banzai: You ever thought about joining me full-time?
 * New Jersey: Do you have an opening?
 * Buckaroo Banzai: Uh-huh. Can you sing?
 * New Jersey: A little. Yeah. I can dance...

 * Artie Duncan: I don't care if you walked through a mountain in Texas. This is New Jersey, and when you play my...{distracted by someone walking past him}... when you play my joint, you're just another act. I want some music out'a you characters!
 * Reno Nevada: You want it, Artie? You got it.

 * Penny Priddy: Uh, Dr. Banzai, you... you forgot your thruster.
 * Buckaroo Banzai: {smiles at her} Why don't you hold onto it for a while?
 * Penny Priddy: {suggestively} Anytime...

 * Scooter Lindley: Dad! Dad! Buckaroo's in trouble!
 * Casper Lindley: Say what?!

 * Perfect Tommy: Don't embarrass us.
 * Buckaroo Banzai: Have I ever?

 * Buckaroo Banzai: John Parker, take this wheel. Just... just hold on, that's good. It flies like a truck.
 * John Parker: Good. {pause} What is a truck?

 * Buckaroo Banzai: {as the thermopod is in free-fall} Can't you fly this thing?
 * John Parker: I'm a diplomat! I failed flight school!

 * General Catburd: Mr. President, I am a soldier. And I'm a damn good one. I've got enough decorations to snap a Christmas tree. All I'm trying to say is, and I hope I speak for everyone in this room, is that I am scared. I'm barely holding my... fudge, right now.
 * Senator Cunningham: {a woman} Stop acting like a goddamn schoolgirl, General, and pull yourself together!
 * President Widmark: I'm glad someone has the balls to face facts!

 * New Jersey: Where are we?
 * Buckaroo Banzai: I'd hate to tell you.

 * {As New Jersey and Reno are making their way through the lab, New Jersey notices a watermelon held in a pneumatic compression device}
 * New Jersey: Why is there a watermelon there?
 * Reno Nevada: {after a pause} I'll tell you later.

 * Scooter Lindley: Get away from that car, or I'll drink your blood!
 * Secretary of Defense: {noticing Scooter is holding an automatic rifle} Whatcha got there, son? That's not... real, is it?
 * Scooter Lindley: {fires a shot to the side} Get 'em up!

 * Lord John Whorfin: Full speed ahead. And may I remind you, to fasten your'a seat belts, and esstinguish all smoking material.
 * John Bigbooté: We haven't a chance. Your overthruster's for shit. We'll lose...
 * Lord John Whorfin: One more word out of you, Bigbooty...
 * John Bigbooté: BIG-BOO-TAY! TAY! TAY! {Whorfin shoots him}

 * First Mission Control Operator: Buckaroo, the White House wants to know is everything OK with the alien space craft from Planet 10 or should we just go ahead and destroy Russia?
 * Buckaroo Banzai: Tell him yes on one and no on two.
 * Second Mission Control Operator: Which one was yes, go ahead and destroy Russia... or number 2?

 * {New Jersey and Buckaroo are in an operating room, performing brain surgery}
 * New Jersey: See, this is the part where for me it started to look like a problem. You know, I wanted to sacrifice the Precentral vein to order to get some exposure, but because of this guy's normal variation I got excited and all of a sudden I didn't know whether if I was looking at the Precentral vein or one of the internal cerebral veins or the vein of Galen or the Basilar vein of Rosenthal. So on my own, me, at this point I was ready to say, "That's it. Let's get out."
 * Buckaroo Banzai: See, you can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when you get right down to it, this far inside the head, it all looks the same. {pause} No, no, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to.

Quotes about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

 * It just didn’t get the press or publicity it needed and the picture got lost in the shuffle.
 * Peter Weller, Interview #2, RoboCop Database

Taglines

 * Beings from Another Dimension have invaded your world.
 * You can't see them...but they can see you.
 * Your only hope is Buckaroo Banzai.
 * Expect the unexpected. He does.


text:
User:Jeffq/Experiments

For my various Wikiquote projects, I have created the following pages to allow me to experiment with ideas and share them with other interested parties:

 * User:Jeffq/Wikiquote:Exemption Doctrine Policy
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer: table of contents
 * Firefly: format page
 * Mystery Science Theater 3000: table of contents
 * Other table of contents experiments
 * QotD month-date pages: May (Kalki system) - June (Jeff system) - "NoRemember" (fancy system) - March (testing formatting)
 * Transwiki log: Transwiki automation
 * WQ:VFDA: link list - link list (kept/deleted) - balanced link list - transclusion list
 * Quote of the day: Main page mockup - Play-left - Play-right

I ask that the pages themselves not be modified except when specifically requested, although they typically have Talk pages in which comments and questions are most welcome. Thank you.

title: User:Jeffq/Experiments


text:
User:Jeffq/Experiments/BuffyTOC

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003) by Joss Whedon

See the discussion page for suggested formatting and inclusion guidelines.

title: User:Jeffq/Experiments/BuffyTOC


text:
User talk:Jeffq/Experiments/BuffyTOC

Please feel free to post your questions and/or comments about this experimental Buffy table of contents below.

title: User talk:Jeffq/Experiments/BuffyTOC


text:
Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander (October 4, 1936 – March 17, 2022) was an Austrian-born British architect. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology.

Quotes

 * In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low.
 * Foreword to Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software

 * ...the constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things [are] made out of, the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized.
 * Debate with Peter Eisenman at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, 17 November 1982.

The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
C. Alexander (1979) The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press,

 * ...we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a building or a town alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a "system" and with "methods" since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos.
 * p. 14
 * A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes.
 * p. 31
 * When we know those moments, when we smile, when we let go, when we are not on guard at all – these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it – for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed.
 * p. 52
 * Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.... These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they [patterns in the space] are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made.
 * Cited in: Peter Coad (1992) "Object-oriented patterns." Communications of the ACM 35.9. p. 152

 * On the geometric level, we see certain physical elements repeated endlessly, combined in an almost endless variety of combinations... It is puzzling to realize that the elements, which seem like elementary building blocks, keep varying, and are different every time that they occur .... If the elements are different every time that they occur, evidently then, it cannot be the elements themselves which are repeating in a building or town; these so-called elements cannot be the ultimate "atomic" constituents of space.
 * Cited in: Peter Coad (1992, p. 152)

 * Look more carefully...to find out what it really is that is repeating there .... Beyond its elements, each building [or town] is defined by certain patterns of relationships among the elements.... These relationships are not extra, but necessary to the elements... The elements themselves are patterns of relationships.
 * Cited in: Peter Coad (1992, p. 152) About To find patterns, what does one look for?

 * One begins to think with that new building block, rather than with littler pieces. And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.
 * Cited in: Peter Coad (1992, p. 152) About what happens when one finds a pattern?
 * ...a great architect's creative power, his capacity to make something beautiful, lies in his capacity to observe correctly, and deeply. A painter's talent lies in his capacity to see – he sees more acutely, more precisely, what it is that really matters in a thing, and where its qualities come from.
 * p. 218
 * Nothing which is not simple and direct can survive the slow transmision from person to person.
 * p. 230
 * ...every pattern we define must be formulated in the form of a rule which establishes a relationship between a context, a system of forces which arises in that context, and a configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves in that context.
 * p. 253

title: Christopher Alexander


text:
User:Jan Philipp Fiedler~enwikiquote

For information about me see my user page in the German Wikipedia.

title: User:Jan Philipp Fiedler~enwikiquote


text:
ChalkZone

ChalkZone is an American animated television series created by Bill Burnett and Larry Huber for Nickelodeon. The series follows Rudy Tabootie, an elementary school student whose magic chalk allows him into the ChalkZone, an alternate dimension where everything drawn on a blackboard and erased becomes real. The show concentrates on the adventures of Rudy, his sidekick Snap, and classmate, Penny Sanchez, within the zone.

The Skrawl

 * [To Chalk Dad] Hey hey hey, I was an original Tabootie before YOU were a sketch. - Snap

The Big Blow Up

 * I don't wanna hear the end of that sentence! - Snap
 * I forgot to draw the arrow. - Rudy

Future Zone

 * You can fill a lot of cereal in this bowl! - Rudy

Purple Haze

 * I hope this water softener will help. - Biclops
 * [After Rudy was bouncing his head & butt with a BULB HORN HONK] "Thank goodness you're okay Rudy. - Biclops

title: ChalkZone