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Jim Hightower

James "Jim" Allen Hightower (born January 11, 1943) is an American syndicated columnist, progressive political activist, and author. From 1983 to 1991 he served as elected commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture.

Quotes

 * There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.
 * There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos (1998)

 * The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government.
 * ,  (2002), p. 141

 * If you do not speak up when it matters, when would it matter that you speak? The opposite of courage is conformity.  Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

 * Populism is at its essence [...] just determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government. [...] One big difference between real populism and what the Tea Party thing is, is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, let's get rid of government. You need to be saying let's take over government.
 * Interview by Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010 (transcript, video

 * Here come the Democrats, again, you know, just weaker than Canadian hot sauce. You know? Offering a little reform. I saw one of the Senators, Democrats, saying, we're going to have a robust disclosure program. Oh, good. They're going to tell us they're stealing from us. But at least we're going to know.
 * Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010

 * The water won't clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek.
 * Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010

 * The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.
 * Americans who tell the truth, portrait.

 * Responding to withering public criticism of the state's chaotic and disastrous response to a killer winter storm, Abbott fumed, "What happened this week to our fellow Texans is absolutely unacceptable."... Abbott pointed his outrage at ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency charged with maintaining a reliable flow of electricity... But wait... ERCOT merely administers policies set by the Public Utility Commission... And who appointed the three members of that commission? Why, Greg, it was you! In fact, the chairwoman and one of the two other members of PUC are former top staffers of the governor... Abbott has been governor for six years, and not once has he proposed legislation to require that the corporate owners of electric utilities protect the grid from freezes... he also claims that the 2021 winter vortex was unprecedented and therefore couldn't have been anticipated. Oops ... wait again. A notorious rolling grid failure in a 2011 snowstorm left millions of Texans in deadly darkness.
 * Jim Hightower, What the Texas Deep Freeze Revealed About Corporate-Run Government, Common Dreams (24 February 2021)

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title: Jim Hightower


text:
P. J. O'Rourke

Patrick Jake O'Rourke (14 November 1947 – 14 February 2022) was an American political satirist, most often known as P. J. O'Rourke.

Quotes

 * Iran and Iraq have been at war for five years now. The traditional present for a fifth anniversary is wood. Here's a gift suggestion: a big stick to beat some goddamned sense into their heads.
 * "Year in Review" in Rolling Stone (19 December 1985)

 * Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.
 * "Year in Review" in Rolling Stone (15 December 1988)

 * Marijuana is […] self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?
 * Rolling Stone (November 1989), as cited in The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred Shapiro, Yale University Press (2006), p. 567

 * One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
 * Rolling Stone (30 November 1989)
 * Marxism has tremendous appeal in the Third World for exactly the same reason it had tremendous appeal to me in college. It gives you something to believe in when what surrounds you seems unbelievable. It gives you someone to blame besides yourself. It's theoretically tidy. And, best of all, it's fully imaginary so it can never be disproved.
 * "The Awful Power of Make-Believe". Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back At The Sixties. Collier, Peter; Horowitz, David, eds. (1989). Lanham, MD: Madison Books. ISBN 978-0819171474.

 * No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.
 * Roast of Robert Novak at the Conservative Political Action Committee (11 February 1994)

 * Why can't everybody just get along? No reasonably detached person goes to Israel without being reduced in philosophical discourse to the level of Rodney King—or, for that matter, to the level of George Santayana. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," Santayana said, in one of those moments of fatuousness that come to even the most detached of philosophers. It goes double for those who can't remember anything else. And they do get along, after their fashion. Muslims and Christians and Jews have lived together in the Holy Land for centuries—hating one another's guts, cutting one another's throats, and touching off wars of various magnitudes. The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
 * "Zion's Vital Signs" in The Atlantic (November 2001)

 * Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
 * As quoted in Busted : Stone Cowboys, Narco-lords, and Washington's War on Drugs (2002) edited by Mike Gray

 * I am a little to the right of ... Why is the Attila comparison used? Fifth-century Hunnish depredations on the Roman Empire were the work of an overpowerful executive pursuing a policy of economic redistribution in an atmosphere of permissive social mores. I am a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh. I'm so conservative that I approve of San Francisco City Hall marriages, adoption by same-sex couples, and New Hampshire's recently ordained Episcopal bishop. Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.
 * "I Agree With Me" (July/August 2004)

 * Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?, contains ten chapters of fulminations convincing the convinced. However, Moore does include one chapter on how to argue with a conservative. As if. Approached by someone like Michael Moore, a conservative would drop a quarter in Moore's Starbucks cup and hurriedly walk away.
 * "I Agree With Me" (July/August 2004)

 * There are two organizations pushing for change in November — al Qaeda and the Democratic party. And they both have the same message: 'We're going to fix you, America.' On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.
 * "Putting Words in the President's Mouth" (12 October 2004)

 * No, it turns out Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And how crazy does that make Saddam? All he had to do was tell Hans Blix, 'Look anywhere you want. Look under the bed. Look beneath the couch. Look behind the toilet tank in the third presidential palace on the left, but keep your mitts off my copies of Maxim.' And Saddam could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld gets elected head of the World Council of Churches. But no . ..
 * "Putting Words in the President's Mouth" (12 October 2004)

 * Saddam Hussein was reduced to the Unabomber — Ted Kaczynski — a nutcase hiding in the sticks. Sure, the terrorism by his supporters is frightening. Hence, its name, 'terrorism.' Killing innocent people by surprise is not called 'a thousand points of light.' But, as frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. The minute somebody sets off a suicide bomb, you can be sure that person doesn't have 'career prospects.' And no matter how horrendous a terrorist attack is, it's still conducted by losers. Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an Air Force.
 * "Putting Words in the President's Mouth" (12 October 2004)

The first nine Commandments concern theological principles and social law. But then, right at the end, is 'Don't envy your buddy's cow.' How did that make the top ten? What's it doing there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose as one of those things jealousy about the starter mansion with in-ground pool next door? Yet think how important the Tenth Commandment is to a community, to a nation, indeed to a presidential election. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't be a jerk and whine about what the people across the street have — go get your own. The Tenth Commandment sends a message to all the jerks who want redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, more government programs, more government regulation, more government, less free enterprise, and less freedom. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell.
 * And then there is the Tenth Commandment. 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.' The Ten Commandments are God's basic rules about how we should live — a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts.
 * "An Alternative Inaugural Speech" (18 January 2005)

 * Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!
 * "What's That Smell?" (23 October 2006)

 * The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay. In foreign policy, Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don't know when. Democrats are making the 'high school sex promise': I'll pull out in time, honest!
 * "Letter to Our European Friends" (4 February 2008)

 * The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is 'America's ex-wife.'
 * "Letter to Our European Friends" (4 February 2008)

 * Incidentally, there's a balanced position that all of America's presidential candidates could take on the controversial abortion issue. If they want votes they shouldn't campaign to make abortion illegal or legal. They should campaign to make it retroactive. If a kid reaches 25 and he or she is still jobless, feckless, and sitting around Starbucks acting like a — no offense — European, then whack.
 * "Letter to Our European Friends" (4 February 2008)

 * She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.
 * Endorsing Hillary Clinton for President over Donald Trump, May 7, 2016 on NPR

Modern Manners (1983)

 * Modern Manners : An Etiquette Book for Rude People

 * A charity ball is like a dance except it's tax deductible.

 * A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.

 * Weird clothing is de rigeur for teenagers, but today's generation of teens is finding it difficult to be sufficiently weird. This is because the previous generation of teens, who went through adolescence in the sixties and seventies, used up practically all the available weirdness.

 * A woman should dress to attract attention. To attract the most attention, a woman should either be nude or wearing something as expensive as getting her nude is going to be.

 * Nothing makes an awful secret like a secret Negro... Up North, confess your bloodline freely. There's nothing a Northerner likes better than a black person who is completely white. Do not, however, try this trick with real blacks. They could give a shit... (If you travel in very sophisticated circles, you may want to turn Marcus Aurelius into Moses Schmeckle. Racism is very lower-class. Upper-class people are never racists; they're anti-Semites.)

 * Foreigners may pretend otherwise, but if English is spoken loudly enough, anyone can understand it, the British included. Actually, there’s no such thing as a foreign language. The world is just filled with people who grunt and squeak instead of speaking sensibly. French may be an exception. But since it’s impossible to figure out what French people are saying, we’ll never know for sure.

The Bachelor Home Companion (1986)

 * Full title: The Bachelor Home Companion. A practical guide to keeping house like a pig.

 * A good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.

 * A steady job is at least as deleterious to the spirit of bachelorhood as a steady date. Some jobs are worse than actual wives.

 * Bachelors know all about parties. In fact, a good bachelor is a living, breathing party all by himself. At least that is what my girlfriend said when she found the gin bottles under the couch. I believe her exact words were, "You're a disgusting, drunken mess." And that's a good description of a party, if it's done right.

 * Cleaning, like seduction, should be done from the top down — starting with the ceiling, which is ridiculous. Gravity takes care of that.

 * Despite the fact that meat is made from dead animals, it shouldn't smell that way. Try this test for meat freshness: close your eyes and see if you can tell the pork chops from a gym locker.

 * Even newlyweds don't spend much time together, now that few marriages outlast the appliance warranties.

 * For some mysterious Darwinian reason, women feel compelled to straighten up bedrooms before and after sex. Try to make love in every other room of the house.

 * Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.

 * Never serve oysters during a month that has no paycheck in it.

 * Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks.

 * The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.

 * The real truth about children is they don't speak the language very well. They're physically uncoordinated. And they are ignorant of our elaborate ideas about right and wrong.

 * There's only one secret to bachelor cooking — not caring how it tastes.

 * You can keep the dining room clean by eating in the kitchen.

Republican Party Reptile (1987)

 * Pain is the body's way of showing us we're bone-heads. A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one — not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so.

 * Every generation finds the drug it needs.

 * Fishing ... is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.

 * Freddie Aguilar, who's billed as "the Bob Dylan of the Philippines." This is unfair, since he's good-looking, plays the guitar well, can carry a tune, and writes songs that make sense.

 * I mean, so what if some fifty-eight-year-old butt-head gets a load on and starts playing Death Race 2000 in the rush-hour traffic jam? What kind of chance is he taking? He's just waiting around to see what kind of cancer he gets anyway. But if young, talented you, with all of life's possibilities at your fingertips, you and the future Cheryl Tiegs there, so fresh, so beautiful — if the two of you stake your handsome heads on a single roll of the dice in life's game of stop-the-semi — now that's taking chances! Which is why old people rarely risk their lives. It's not because they're chicken — they just have too much dignity to play for small stakes.

 * Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.

 * I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.

 * In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.

 * Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.

 * Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.

 * Industrialization came to England but has since left.

 * Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

 * Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom," a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions—North and South, black and white, labor and management—but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.

 * The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy— a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting "Sieg Health" and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties. The Safety Nazis advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind.

 * The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies is supposed to have subscribed to the Village Voice for six years in an attempt to find out about life in America's rural areas.

 * The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts— squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.

 * The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.

 * These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

 * To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

Holidays in Hell (1989)

 * Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

 * Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport— two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.

 * Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.

 * Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.

 * Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.

 * I am no stranger to loud noise. I've been to a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids.

 * I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners— two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.

 * I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.

 * I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.

 * If Christ came back tomorrow, He'd have to change planes in Frankfurt. Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.

 * In Western Australia they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailing-boat equipment, the gin and tonic.

 * Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.

 * It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin's new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that's a human-rights violation.

 * Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.

 * Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.

 * One nice thing about the Third World, you don't have to fasten your seat belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is forty-five minutes.

 * Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

 * The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Grand Prix track to watch the charter buses race.

 * The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.

 * The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know.

 * The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.

 * The Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.

 * The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.

 * The most extraordinary change in Moscow was Arbat Street, the USSR's first pedestrian mall. Of course, there's something a little sad about a pedestrian mall in a nation where few people own cars— the whole damn country's a pedestrian mall.

 * There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.

 * There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts— the country has shortages of practically everything.

 * They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, "the Irish of Asia".

 * To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.

 * War will exist as long as there's a food chain.

 * What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.

Parliament of Whores (1991)

 * There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.

 * The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
 * p. 14

 * The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

 * Marilyn Quayle was there, too, looking – it was indeed a strange week in Washington – great. She had her hair done up in something my wife said was a chignon, and whatever it was, it made Marilyn look considerably less like a Cape buffalo than usual. Though actually I admired the Cape buffalo look. I have an idea that – like a Cape buffalo – if Marilyn Quayle gets furious and charges, you've got only one shot at the skull. You wouldn't want to just wound her.

 * Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.

 * The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

 * Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country. So maybe he owes all of us an apology...

 * The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge piñata — a papier-mâché donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budget and other goodies. The American voter is blindfolded and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.

 * Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
 * pp. xviii-xix.

 * Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And — since women are a majority of the population — we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.

 * Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadows about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

 * There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
 * p. 194

 * The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.
 * p. 198

Give War a Chance (1992)

 * The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors— psychology, sociology, women's studies— to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

 * At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

 * I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don't let it bother me. I don't let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.

 * The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

 * You can't get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.

 * You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.

 * The Third World attitude toward the United States is also easy to understand if you think of it in terms of adolescence. The citizens of the Third World are in a teenage muddle about us--full of envy, imitation, anger and blind puppy love. I have been held at gunpoint by a Shi'ite youth in West Beirut who told me in one breath that America was "pig Satan devil" and that he planned to go to dental school in Dearborn as soon as he got his green card. In Ulundi, in Zululand, I talked to a young man who, as usual, blamed apartheid on the United States. However, he had just visited the U.S. with a church group and also told me, "Everything is so wonderful there. The race relations are so good. And everyone is rich." Just what part of America had he visited, I asked. "The South Side of Chicago," he said.

The Liberty Manifesto (1993)

 * Speech delivered May 6, 1993 for the opening of the Cato Institute's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

 * Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

 * There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

 * There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself. Keep your hands to yourself, Bill. Hillary, mind your own business.

 * Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting Hillary in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money — hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

 * And the Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?

 * You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal.

 * Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

 * Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

 * All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty.

 * Things are better now than things have been since men began keeping track of things. Things are better than they were only a few years ago. Things are better, in fact, than they were at 9:30 this morning, thanks to Tylenol and two Bloody Marys. But that's personal and history is general. It's always possible to come down with the mumps on V-J Day or to have, right in the middle of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a piece of it fall on your foot. In general, life is better than it ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: 'dentistry.'

 * A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.

 * A pleasant natural environment is a good— a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.

 * A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty — their power and privilege — to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians

 * Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind, goddamnit!

 * Any person who has spent time outdoors actually doing something, such as hunting and fishing as opposed to standing there with a doobie in his mouth, knows nature is not intrinsically healthy.

 * Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.

 * Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.

 * Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.

 * Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.

 * Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say "I've got cancer" and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy?

 * Biotechnology is a worry. What if they take genetic material from wet noodles and blowfish and splice it into politician chromosomes and create a Clinton administration?

 * Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet: to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.

 * Crowded as the country is, is overcrowding even its main problem? Hong Kong and Singapore both have greater population densities (14.315 and 12.347 per square mile, respectively) than Bangladesh, and they're called success stories. The same goes for Monaco. In fact, the whole Riviera is packed in August, and neither Malthus nor Ehrlich have complained about the topless beaches of St. Tropez.

 * Ecology is the science of everything. Nobody knows everything. Nobody even knows everything about any one thing. And most of us don't know much. Say it's ten-thirty on a Saturday night. Where are your teenage children? I didn't ask where they said they were going. Where are they really? What are they doing? Who are they with? Have you met the other kids' families? And what is tonight's pot smoking, wine-cooler drinking, and sex in the backseats of cars going to mean in a hundred years? Now extend these questions to the entire solar system.

 * Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner's Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.

 * Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

 * Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free— indeed, sanctimonious— way for "progressives" to be racists.

 * Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

 * Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.

 * Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.

 * I guess the argument of contextuality is that anything is okay as long as it's done by people who are sufficiently unlike you.

 * I suspect the Haitian Ministry of Health's principal contribution to health in Haiti is providing nice, healthy jobs to those Haitians with the connection to get them.

 * I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.

 * Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.

 * If the politics of disease are to be understood, particularly in the dreadful countries where this understanding is most needed, then the politics of total collapse have to be understood first.

 * If we're going to improve the environment, the first thing we should do is duck the government. The second thing we should do is quit being moral. Screw the rights of nature. Nature will have rights as soon as it get duties. The minute we see birds, trees, bugs, and squirrels picking up litter, giving money to charity, and keeping an eye on our kids at the park, we'll let them vote.

 * Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.

 * In a society where commonweal does not exist, there are no duties, only exactations to be avoided, and no freedoms, only privileges to be grabbed. There can be no such thing as "public services" because nothing in the country is truly public. Everything is somebody's fief. And every fief must be exploited if the exploiter cares to survive.

 * In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.

 * It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.

 * It's hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.

 * "Malthus,", says Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, "was right in predicting that the population would grow geometrically." Al, as the father of four children, should know.

 * Man has been breeding livestock for ten thousand years and has yet to come up with a monstrous sheep that can trample buildings and graze a whole golf course for breakfast.

 * Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.

 * Most of the research about species extinction has been conducted on islands because islands are controlled environments and scientists can get drinks with little umbrellas in them there... Island logic also tells us that an increase in habitat size means an increase in number of species. But it doesn't necessarily. You can build your bed as large as you like and still get very few people to sleep with you.

 * Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.

 * On Friday, June 12, 1992, 110 heads of state gathered at Riocentro. They were indistinguishable in dress and deportment. Where was biodiversity when we needed it?

 * One thing that's certain about going outdoors: When you come back inside, you'll be scratching.

 * People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.

 * People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is so their mission will look more important.

 * Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet.

 * Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty— their power and privilege— to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.

 * Remember, FDA employees are serious about fear. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it. FDA employees are first-class agonizers, world champions at losing sleep. When Meryl Streep got hysterical about Alar, they actually checked the apples instead of Meryl's head.

 * Saigon is like all the other great modern cities of the world. It's the mess left from people getting rich.

 * Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.

 * Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.

 * The morning meal was served in traditional socialist fashion— very slowly, with the courses out of order so that the jelly arrived half an hour after the toast and the coffee didn't come until we'd called for the check. However, it was hard to be angry at a place that had ice cream, beer, and cigarettes on its breakfast menu.

 * The observers had a logbook recording the assaults, bombings, and artillery attacks on the area. Each page was ruled in vertical columns: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, DAMAGE, CASUALTIES. The columns headed ACTION TAKEN BY THE UN were completely empty.

 * The people who believe that, as a result of industrial development, life is about to become a hell, or may be one already, are guilty, at least, of sloppy pronouncements. On page 8 of Earth in the Balance, Al Gore claims that his study of the arms race gave him "a deeper appreciation for the most horrifying fact in all our lives: civilization is now capable of destroying itself." In the first place, the most horrifying fact in many of our lives is that our ex-spouse has gotten ahold of our ATM card. And civilization has always been able to destroy itself. The Greeks of ancient Athens, who had a civilization remarkable for lack of technological progress during its period of greatest knowledge and power, managed to destroy them fine.

 * The typical old-fashioned diet was so bad it almost resembled modern dieting.

 * There is a fine line in the Third World between half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe and half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe so they can throw you in jail.

 * Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.

 * Two key rules of Third World travel: 1. Never run out of whiskey. 2. Never run out of whiskey.

 * Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.

 * War is a great asshole magnet.

 * We tried to find the mayor. His secretary said he was at home. His wife said he was at the office. In Italy or France this would mean His Honor was having an affair. In Chabarovice it probably meant he'd run off to be a busboy in Stuttgart.

 * When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.

 * When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.

 * When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

 * Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer. We can just step off the sidewalk. And sometimes we can get impressionable members of the opposite sex to perform sacramental rites with us. "Every drop of water wasted is a drop less of a wild and scenic river, Jennifer. We'd better double up in the shower."

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

 * Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.

 * We’re told cars are dangerous. It’s safer to drive through South Central Los Angeles than to walk there. We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

Why I Am a Conservative (1996)

 * There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head.
 * How to Explain Conservatism to Your Squishy Liberal Friends: Individualism 'R' Us

A Message to Redistributionists (1997)

 * Speech delivered May 1, 1997 for the twentieth anniversary of the Cato Institute.

 * I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.

Eat the Rich (1999)

 * Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

 * When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism (2004)

 * The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.

 * Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (2005)

 * There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.

On The Wealth of Nations (2007)

 * When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.
 * Chapter 2: "Why Is The Wealth of Nations So Damn Long?", p. 22

How The Hell Did This Happen? (2017)

 * How The Hell Did This Happen? : The Election of 2016 (2017)

 * Author's Note
 * I knew that the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election would be interesting times. I had no idea they would rise to the level of an ancient Chinese curse.
 * I was prepared for some surprises during the 2016 campaign, which leaves me with no excuse for how surprised I was by what the surprises were... Most of the chapters of this book were written while the events described were taking place. Reading the manuscript, I notice there's a lack of continuity between the chapters. One thing doesn't lead to another.  This is because, in the 2016 presidential campaign, as far as I can tell, one thing didn't lead to another.... if my book lacks a coherent narrative it's because I couldn't find one.

 * Preamble
 * We the people of the United States, in order to dissolve what unity we have, establish injustice, insure domestic idiocy, provide for the common offence, promote the general despair, and secure enmity toward ourselves by our posterity, do ordain and establish this obnoxious political spectacle, the election of 2016.

 * Chapter One: The Campaign Begins: Ready, Set, Go to Hell
 * Show me one candidate who, like Millard Fillmore in 1856, has the honest decency to come right out and admit being a "Know-Nothing." At least the members of the Know-Nothing Party knew they knew nothing.
 * The opinion was universally held, by the sort of people who universally hold opinions, that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush would be the inevitable winners of their parties' nominations. And I trembled for my country.

 * Chapter Two: The Abominable Showman: June 16, 2015
 * But then — from the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, dross, and dregs — came Donald Trump.
 * Trump claims to be worth billions, seven of them as of 2012. In 2004 Forbes Magazine estimated Trump's net worth to be $2.6 billion. New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien looked into the numbers and came up with a net worth figure between $150 million and $250 million. Trump sued O'Brien. Trump lost.
 * [Adam] Davidson notes that Trump is no longer even a minor player in the luxury resort and gambling business. He owns no casinos. Nor is he the principal owner of his own reality TV production company. Trump's Manhattan real-estate operation does not even rate as a mention in industry's "major rankings of developers, owners or property managers." "When you try to weigh Trump's record as a businessman" Davidson says, "you quickly find there is nothing of substance... His true calling seems to be acting like a successful businessman."
 * Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt between 1991 and 1994. "Restructured" being the Trump way of saying he didn’t pay it. We Americans know a leader when we see one. We can assume that Trump will further America's economic growth the same way he's furthered his own — with bad debt, bad debt, bad debt, and more debt.

 * Chapter Three: The Horror! The Horror!
 * The best case that can be made for Donald Trump is that American politics has turned into an unmapped and pestilent watershed in the heart of darkness, so let's send Mr. Kurtz upriver. To understand how the heretofore more or less respectable Republican Party wound up with such a repellent nominee it's useful to look at the other prospective nominees. And be repelled.

 * Chapter Four: A Huck So Unlike Finn: July 26, 2015
 * It would be completely unfair — and thus entirely in the spirit of this campaign — to single out one Republican candidate as an example of Republican candidates being so intellectually soiled that they lost the nomination to crap itself. As an example Mike Huckabee will do.

 * Chapter 27: I Endorse Hillary Clinton
 * America is experiencing the most severe outbreak of mass psychosis since the Salem witch trials of 1692. So why not put Hillary on the dunking stool?
 * Variant: The 2016 presidential campaign is the most severe case of mass psychosis since the Salem witch trials of 1692. (paraphrase stated in various write-ups of the book)

title: P. J. O'Rourke


text:
Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who pioneered humanistic psychology and developed ideas related to a hierarchy of needs.

1940s-1960s

 * It is too often not realized that culture itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the physiological emergencies come less and less often.
 * A Theory of Human Motivation (1943)

 * Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be... In fact it can be said that the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short.
 * Maslow (1954), as cited in: Hiram E. Fitzgerald, Michael G. Walraven (1987). Psychology. p. 119; Also in: Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being. Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 5.
 * Variant quote: Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be... It is as if Freud supplied us with the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.'

 * I am deliberately rejecting our present easy distinction between sickness and health, at least as far as surface symptoms are concerned. Does sickness mean having symptoms? I maintain now that sickness might consist of not having symptoms when you should. Does health mean being symptom-free? I deny it. Which of the Nazis at Auschwitz or Dachau were healthy? Those with a stricken conscience or those with a nice, clear, happy conscience? Was it possible for a profoundly human person not to feel conflict, suffering, depression, rage, etc.? In a word if you tell me you have a personality problem, I am not certain until I know you better whether to say "Good" or "I'm sorry". It depends on the reasons. And these, it seems, may be bad reasons, or they may be good reasons. An example is the changing attitude of psychologists toward popularity, toward adjustment, even toward delinquency. Popular with whom? Perhaps it is better for a youngster to be unpopular with the neighboring snobs or with the local country club set. Adjusted to what? To a bad culture? To a dominating parent? What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave? A well-adjusted prisoner? Even the behavior problem boy is being looked upon with new tolerance. Why is he delinquent? Most often it is for sick reasons. But occasionally it is for good reasons and the boy is simply resisting exploitation, domination, neglect, contempt, and trampling upon. Clearly what will be called personality problems depends on who is doing the calling. The slave owner? The dictator? The patriarchal father? The husband who wants his wife to remain a child? It seems quite clear that personality problems may sometimes be loud protests against the crushing of one's psychological bones, of one's true inner nature.
 * "Personality Problems and Personality Growth", an essay in, The Self : Explorations in Personal Growth (1956) by Clark E. Moustakas, p. 237, later published in Notes Toward A Psychology of Being (1962).

 * The higher people get, the more evolved and psychologically healthy people get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.
 * Summer notes on social psychology of industry and management at Non-Linear Systems, inc., Del Mar, California, Non-Linear Systems, Inc, 1962, p. 81.

 * The best product should be bought, the best man should be rewarded more. Interfering factors which befuddle this triumph of virtue, justice, truth, and efficiency, etc., should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.
 * Eupsychian Management : A Journal (1965), p. 212.

 * If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays. I can now add a slight variation on this; you cannot have a good society unless virtue pays. But here we get very close to the whole subject of metaneeds, and also of the ideal conditions where dichotomies are resolved and transcended.
 * Eupsychian Management : A Journal (1965), p. 213.

 * I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
 * The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966), Ch. 2, p. 15; although some similar statements to describe fundamental errors in human perception have been attributed to others, his expression, or slight paraphrases of it, is one of the earliest yet found to be documented in published writings, and remains among the most popular.

Motivation and Personality (1954)

 * For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that, if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself tends to be defined in terms of eating. Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may all be waved aside as fripperies that are useless since they fail to fill the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone. It cannot possibly be denied that such things are true, but their generality can be denied. Emergency conditions are, almost by definition, rare in the normally functioning peaceful society.
 * p. 17.

 * Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.
 * p. 23.

 * The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.
 * p. 31.

 * A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
 * p. 93.

 * Love, safety, belongingness and respect from other people are almost panaceas for the situational disturbances and even for some of the mild character disturbances.
 * p. 103.

 * Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.
 * p. 123.

 * The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy. The study of self-actualizing people must be the basis for a more universal science of psychology
 * p. 234.

 * One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.
 * p. 255.

1970s and later

 * Education is learning to grow, learning what to grow toward, learning what is good and bad, learning what is desirable and undesirable, learning what to choose and what not to choose.
 * The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971).

 * What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
 * As quoted in Life In the Open Sea (1972) by William M. Stephens, p. 21.

 * And I may add that it taught me something about the limitations of the small . . . orthodox scientist who won't recognize as knowledge, or as reality, any information that doesn't fit into the already existent science.
 * As quoted in New Pathways In Psychology (1972) by Colin Wilson

 * The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
 * As quoted in Road Signs for Success (1993) by Jim Whitt, p. 61.

 * Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.
 * As quoted in Relax — You May Have Only a Few Minutes Left : Using the Power of Humor to Overcome Stress in Your Life and Work (1998) by Loretta LaRoche, p. xvii.

 * If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
 * As quoted in Perfecting Private Practice (2004) by Joan Neehall-Davidson, p. 95.

 * The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within — and make the point: This can be done.
 * As quoted in The Meaning of Life : According to the Great and the Good (2007) edited by Richard T. Kinnier.

 * You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.
 * As quoted in How the Best Leaders Lead : Proven Secrets to Getting the Most Out of Yourself and Others (2010) by Brian Tracy, p. 35.

Quotes attributed to Abraham Maslow

 * Since my mother is the type that's called schizophrenogenic in the literature—she's the one who makes crazy people, crazy children—I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.
 * As quoted in Colin Wilson New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972, 2001), 155-56.

 * [Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church.
 * Letter to a colleague (Nov 1960). In Colin Wilson, New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972, 2001), 154.

 * We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
 * Attributed to Maslow by Toni Galardi in The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (Not Just Survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval (2009). Also to be found in other self-help books and on many quotes sites, but always without citation.

Quotes about Abraham Maslow

 * Psychologist Abraham Maslow described an innate human drive beyond basic survival and emotional needs — a hunger for meaning and transcendence. This concept of "self-actualization" rapidly gained adherents. "It is increasingly clear," Maslow wrote, "that a philosophical revolution is under way. A comprehensive system is swiftly developing, like a tree beginning to bear fruit on every branch at the same time." He described a group he thought of as Transcenders, "advance scouts for the race," individuals who far exceeded the traditional criteria for psychological health. He compiled a list of around three hundred creative, intelligent individuals and groups of individuals whose lives were marked by frequent "peak experiences" (a term he coined). This was his Eupsychean Network — literally, "of good soul." Transcenders were irresistibly drawn to each other, he said; two or three such people would find each other in a roomful of a hundred, and they were as likely to be businessmen, engineers, and politicians as poets and priests.
 * Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980)

 * Dr. Abraham Maslow opened the way to a new look at mental health. He studied several persons whom he saw as self-actualizing and fully human. What he reported about their "peak experiences" rang uncannily like the reports of the mystics. Here at last was someone trying to establish a model of the healthy psyche, and included in it, almost like a stamp of authenticity, was the mystical experience!
 * Nina Graboi One Foot in the Future: A Woman's Spiritual Journey (2000), Chapter Twenty-three

 * Lachman says, people miss seeing that he [Maslow) was responsible for a major shift of focus within the discipline. "He really was ground-breaking in his thinking," Lachman says. "He was saying that you weren't acting on the basis of these uncontrollable, unconscious desires. Your behaviour was not just influenced by external rewards and reinforcement, but there were these internal needs and motivations." Unlike the psychoanalysts and behaviourists who preceded him, Maslow was not that interested in mental illness - instead of finding out what went wrong with people, he wanted to find out what could go right with them. This opened the door for later movements such as humanistic psychology and positive psychology, and the "happiness agenda" that preoccupies the current UK government.
 * Abraham Maslow and the pyramid that beguiled business, William Kremer and Claudia Hammond, BBC World Service (September 2013)

 * Some years ago, an American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, felt the same kind of instinctive revolt against the 'atmosphere' of Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on sickness and neurosis, and decided that he might obtain some equally interesting results if he studied extremely healthy people. He therefore looked around for the most cheerful and well-adjusted people he could find, and asked for their co-operation in his studies. he soon discovered and interesting fact: that most extremely healthy people frequently experience of intense affirmation and certainty; Maslow called these 'peak experiences.' No one had made this discovery before because it had never struck anyone that a science calling itself 'psychology' and professing to be a science of the human mind (not merely the sick mind), ought to form its estimate of human beings by taking into account healthy minds as well as sick ones. A sick man talks obsessively about his illness; a healthy man never talks about his health; for as Pirandello points out, we take happiness for granted, and only begin to question life when we are unhappy. Hence no psychologist ever made this simple and obvious discovery about peak experiences.
 * Colin Wilson in Introduction to the New Existentialism, p. 15. (1966)

 * Maslow's psychology, firmly based upon Freud and Watson, simply points out that the optimistic side of the picture has been overlooked; the deterministic laws of our 'lower nature' hold sway in their won field; but there are other laws. Man's freedom is a reality -- a reality that makes a difference to his physical, as well as his mental health. When Frank's prisoners ceased to believe in the possibility of freedom, they grew sick and died. On the other hand, when they saw that Dachau had no chimney, standing out all night in the rain seemed no great hardship; they laughed and joked. The conclusion needs to be stated in letters ten feet high. In order to realise his possibilities, man must believe in an open future; he must have a vision of something worth doing. And this will not be possible until all the determinism and pessimism that we have inherited from the 19th century -- and which has infected every department of our culture, from poetry to atomic physics -- has been dismissed as fallacious and illogical. Twentieth century science, philosophy, politics, literature -- even music -- has been constructed upon a weltanschauung that leaves half of human nature out of account.
 * Colin Wilson in New Pathways In Psychology, p 219-220 (1972)

title: Abraham Maslow


text:
Frank Hague

Frank Hague (17 January 1876 – 1 January 1956) was an American Democratic Party politician who served as the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey from 1917 to 1947, Democratic National Committeeman from New Jersey from 1922 until 1949, and Vice-Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1924 until 1949.

Quotes

 * Listen, here is the law! I am the law! These boys go to work!
 * Speech on city government to the Emory Methodist Episcopal Church in Jersey City (10 November 1937), quoted in New York Times. (11 November 1937), p. 1, responding to the director of the Board of Education's special service bureau, upon being told that the law required two young delinquents to go to school rather than work, as they would have preferred.

 * As long as I am mayor of this city the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist." You never hear a real American talk like that.
 * Speech to the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce (12 January 1938), as quoted in The Last Three Miles : Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway (2007) by Steven Hart, p. 137.

title: Frank Hague


text:
John Lehman

John Lehman (born 1942) was the United States Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987 and a member of the 9-11 Commission.

Quotes

 * "We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941. We are currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism. In fact, that has been a great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better. This would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, 'We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg.' Like them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us. And part of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared."
 * At the 130th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Naval Institute and Annapolis Naval History Symposium on 31 March 2004., (PFD)

 * "We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam, it must have been Saddam. We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. .... This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism."
 * Ibid.

 * "I’d like to say we have fixed these problems, but we haven’t. We have very real vulnerabilities. We have not diminished in any way the fervor and ideology of our enemy. .... Today, probably 50 or more states have schools that are teaching jihad, preaching, recruiting, and training. We have absolutely no successful programs even begun to remediate against those efforts. .... Nobody paid attention. Presidents in four administrations put their arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi jihadism, and said these are our eternal friends."
 * Ibid.

 * "Many will recall with pain what we went through in the Reagan administration in 1983, when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut—241 Marines and Navy corpsmen were killed. We immediately got an intercept from NSA [National Security Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign ministry of Iran, ordering the murder of our Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate. Instead, we did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do, which was to withdraw. Osama bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments."
 * Ibid.

Misattributed

 * "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."
 * This quote is often misattributed to John Lehman, but it apparently was actually said by Donald Regan, President Reagan's chief of staff, to a 1987 Gridiron Dinner audience.

title: John Lehman


text:
Harry Warner

Harold "Harry" Morris Warner (12 December 1881, Krasnosielc, Mazovia, Poland – 25 July 1958), born Hirsch Eichelbaum, was one of the founders of Warner Bros.

Quotes

 * Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
 * Full comment: "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music — that's the big plus about this."
 * Harry Warner, Warner Bros., as movies with sound made their debut in 1927 ("Tech titans wish we wouldn't quote them on this baloney")

title: Harry Warner


text:
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Harry Emerson Fosdick (24 May 1878 – 5 October 1969) was an American Baptist and Presbyterian minister.

Quotes

 * Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the Fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. I speak of them the more freely because there are no two denominations more affected by them than the Baptist and the Presbyterian. We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.
 * "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" in Christian Work #102 (10 June 1922), p. 716–722

 * The present world situation smells to heaven! And now, in the presence of colossal problems, which must be solved in Christ's name and for Christ's sake, the Fundamentalists propose to drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly! Well, they are not going to do it; certainly not in this vicinity. I do not even know in this congregation whether anybody has been tempted to be a Fundamentalist. Never in this church have I caught one accent of intolerance. God keep us always so and ever increasing areas of the Christian fellowship; intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant, not with the tolerance of indifference, as though we did not care about the faith, but because always our major emphasis is upon the weightier matters of the law.
 * "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" in Christian Work #102 (10 June 1922), p. 716–722

 * Some Christians carry their religion on their backs. It is a packet of beliefs and practices which they must bear. At times it grows heavy and they would willingly lay it down, but that would mean a break with old traditions, so they shoulder it again. But real Christians do not carry their religion, their religion carries them. It is not weight, it is wings. It lifts them up, it sees them over hard places. It makes the universe seem friendly, life purposeful, hope real, sacrifice worthwhile. It sets them free from fear, futility, discouragement, and sin — the great enslaver of men's souls. You can know a real Christian when you see him, by his buoyancy.
 * Twelve Tests of Character (1923); part of this has sometimes been paraphrased: Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.

 * The Church offers comradeship with Jesus in all the affairs of life. It gives men a clearer understanding of the mind of Christ. It is through Christ that they come to know God. The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.
 * Statement co-authored with Joseph Fort Newton and Charles E. Jefferson, edited by Charles Steltzle, as quoted in The American Scrap Book (1928), p. 15; also in Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches (1930), p. 85

 * I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.
 * Armistice sermon The Unknown Soldier (preached Sunday 12 November 1933, immediately following Armistice Day), published in The Secret of Victorious Living (1934); also in I Renounce War : The Story of the Peace Pledge Union (1962) by Sybil Morrison. The sermon inspired Canon Dick Sheppard to write a letter to the press in 1934, leading to the founding of the Peace Pledge Union.

 * Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
 * Statement made in 1935 or earlier, as quoted in The Home Book of Quotations, Classical and Modern (1937) by Burton Egbert Stevenson

 * Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
 * As quoted in The Home Book of Quotations, Classical and Modern (1937) edited by Burton Egbert Stevenson

 * Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind's eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as defeated and that alone will make victory impossible. Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Do not picture yourself as anything and you will drift like a derelict.
 * Statement made in 1937 or earlier, as quoted in Personality and Life : A Practical Guide to Personality Improvement (1941) by Jay N. Holliday

 * Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world — making the most of one's best.
 * Statement of 1937 or earlier, as quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) edited by Herbert Victor Prochnow

 * Peace is an awareness of reserves from beyond ourselves, so that our power is not so much in us as through us. Peace is the gift, not of volitional struggle, but of spiritual hospitality.
 * On Being Fit to Live With : Sermons on Post-War Christianity (1946)

 * Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
 * As quoted in Wisdom for Our Time (1961) by James Nelson

 * The process has now run full circle: Preaching originates in personal counseling; preaching is personal counseling on a group basis; personal counseling originates in preaching. Personal counseling imparts to the preacher a practical familiarity with human nature which he would not otherwise obtain.
 * As quoted in Preaching as Counseling : The Unique Method of Harry Emerson Fosdick (1966) by Edmund Holt Linn

 * He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.
 * As quoted in The Christian Herald (1969), Vol. 92, p. 72

 * Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
 * As quoted in He Came from Galilee (1974) by Parker B. Brown

 * To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.
 * As quoted in Don't Try to Live Your Life in One Day! (2008) by Johnny Ong, p. 171

God of Grace and God of Glory (1930)

 * God of grace and God of glory, On Thy people pour Thy power. Crown Thine ancient church's story, Bring her bud to glorious flower. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, For the facing of this hour, For the facing of this hour.

 * Lo! the hosts of evil 'round us, Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways. From the fears that long have bound us, Free our hearts to faith and praise. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, For the living of these days, For the living of these days.

 * Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, Lest we miss Thy kingdom's goal, Lest we miss Thy kingdom's goal.

As I See Religion (1932)

 * God is not a cosmic bell-boy for whom we can press a button to get things done.

 * Hating people is like burning down your own home to get rid of a rat.
 * Variant: Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.

 * The men of faith might claim for their positions ancient tradition, practical usefulness, and spiritual desirability, but one query could prick all such bubbles: Is it scientific? That question has searched religion for contraband goods, stripped it of old superstitions, forced it to change its categories of thought and methods of work, and in general has so cowed and scared religion that many modern-minded believers... instinctively throw up their hands at the mere whisper of it... When a prominent scientist comes out strongly for religion, all the churches thank Heaven and take courage, as though it were the highest possible compliment to God to have Eddington believe in Him. Science has become the arbiter of this generation's thought, until to call even a prophet and a seer "scientific" is to cap the climax of praise.

Living Under Tension (1941)

 * Living Under Tension : Sermons on Christianity Today (1941)

 * He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.
 * p. 111

 * No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined. One of the widest gaps in human experience is the gap between what we say we want to be and our willingness to discipline ourselves to get there.
 * Also quoted in The Heart of Goodness : A Radiant Path to a Richer, Fuller Life (1999) by Jo Ann Larsen

On Being a Real Person (1943)

 * Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

 * Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man is his endowment with personal capacities. The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distances.

 * At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.
 * A very similar statement has become attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but apparently only in recent decades: "A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle." This seems to have been first attributed to Franklin in The New Age Magazine Vol. 66 (1958), and the earliest appearance of it yet located is in Coronet magazine, Vol. 34 (1953), p. 27, where it was attributed to a Louise Stein.

The Living of These Days (1956)

 * The Living of These Days : An Autobiography (1956)

 * The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.

 * A good sermon is an engineering operation by which a chasm is bridged so that the spiritual goods on one side — the "unsearchable riches of Christ" — are actually transported into personal lives upon the other. Here lies the difference between a sermon and a lecture.

Riverside Sermons (1958)

 * I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
 * p. 22

 * Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes.
 * p. 100

 * He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.

Misattributed

 * It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
 * Anatole France, as quoted in The Ironic Temper : Anatole France and His Time (1932)

 * The half is greater than the whole.
 * Hesiod, in Works and Days

 * The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
 * Elbert Hubbard, as quoted in The Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951) by Evan Esar, p. 103

title: Harry Emerson Fosdick


text:
Fran Lebowitz

Frances Ann Lebowitz (born October 27, 1950) is an American author, public speaker, and occasional actor. She is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life as filtered through her New York City sensibilities and her association with many prominent figures of the 1970s and 1980s New York art scene.

Quotes

 * I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?
 * "Words Are Easy, Books Are Not," interview with Bob Morris, The New York Times (1994-08-10), Late Edition, Section C, page 1, column 1.

 * There's no such thing as advice to the lovelorn. If they took advice, they wouldn't be lovelorn. You see, advice and lovelorn don't go together. Because advice makes love sound like some sort of cognitive activity, but we know that it isn't. We all know that it's some sort of horrible chemical reaction over which we have absolutely no control. And that's why advice doesn't work.
 * Index Magazine interview with David Savage (1997).

 * Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It’s my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they’re apparently also not good enough to be shorter.
 * Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

 * I doubt there’s ever been a true thing said on Fox. Maybe the weather report, maybe not.
 * Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

 * Most of my news, I get from the radio news stations. One of the stations' advertising lines is "Give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world." In 22 minutes, they just have time for the headlines, so they can only really tell you what happened — which, by the way, is the news. They tell you how many people were killed in Iraq today, but they don’t then bring on some Republican senator to explain to you how that’s good. Or, on the contrary, they don’t bring in a bunch of Democrats to tell you why it’s bad. They just tell you what happened. That’s the news. I am capable of analyzing my own news. What makes these people qualified to analyze my news for me? No matter what side they’re on, I never agree with them.
 * Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

 * Take away a man’s actual sense of manhood — which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children — and you’ve got to give them something else. And they did. This hideous religion that’s all over the country — these huge church-malls — that’s what substitutes for these lost towns. But that’s not a town. That’s a cult. A town is diverse, in a real way, not in this fake way we have now. A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A "community" is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That’s just self-righteousness — incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic. People have become so rigid; their opinions seem to them like themselves. When that happens (and it has happened) people can’t change their minds. If you are identified by your opinions — if that is the very basis of yourself — how can you change your mind?
 * Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

 * The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.
 * Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

Metropolitan Life (1978)
E.P. Dutton, 1978, ISBN 0-525-15562-7

 * All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive — you are leaking.
 * "Manners" (p. 6).

 * Rome is a very loony city in every respect. One needs but spend an hour or two there to realize that Fellini makes documentaries.
 * "A World View" (p. 64).

 * Any child who cannot do long division by himself does not deserve to smoke.
 * "Digital Clocks and Pocket Calculators: Spoilers of Youth" (p. 84).

 * I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.
 * "Why I Love Sleep" (p. 91).

 * Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
 * "Mars: Living in a Small Way" (p. 101).

 * Bread that must be sliced with an ax is bread that is too nourishing.
 * "Food for Thought and Vice Versa" (p. 109).

 * Women who insist on having the same options as men would do well to consider the option of being the strong, silent type.
 * "Letters" (p. 143).

 * Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
 * "Letters" (p. 143).

 * If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.
 * "Letters" (p. 143).

 * Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is simply a good excuse not to play football.
 * "Letters" (p. 144).

 * Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast the disc jockey is not allowed to talk.
 * "No News is Preferable" (p. 221)
 * Originally published in "The Lebowitz Report" column in Mademoiselle (1975)

Social Studies (1981)

 * Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
 * "People".

 * The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.
 * "People".

 * The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
 * "People".

 * Do not elicit your child's political opinions. He doesn't know any more than you do.
 * "Parental Guidance".

 * Children do not really need money. After all, they don't have to pay rent or send mailgrams.
 * "Parental Guidance".

 * Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
 * "Parental Guidance".

 * Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable expectations and eventual disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around the room with royal-blue chickens.
 * "Parental Guidance".

 * Do not allow children to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too much vermouth.
 * "Parental Guidance"

 * No animal should ever jump up on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
 * "Pointers for Pets".

 * Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.
 * "Tips for Teens".

 * Should you be a teenager blessed with uncommon good looks, document this state of affairs by the taking of photographs. It is the only way anyone will ever believe you in years to come.
 * "Tips for Teens".

 * Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.
 * "Tips for Teens".

 * Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn't make up yourself - a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.
 * "Tips for Teens".

 * I understand, of course, that many people find smoking objectionable. That is their right. I would, I assure you, be the very last to criticize the annoyed. I myself find many-- even most-- things objectionable. Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one's home. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs. In private I avoid such people; in public they have the run of the place. I stay at home as much as possible, and so should they. When it is necessary, however, to go out of the house, they must be prepared, as I am, to deal with the unpleasant personal habits of others. That is what "public" means.
 * "When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes...Shut Them".

Other

 * "How do you know if your child is a writer? Your obstetrician holds his stethoscope to your abdomen and only hears excuses."
 * Reported in Ginai Bellafante, "Opinions You Won’t Find on Twitter: Fran Lebowitz Talks, The New York Times (November 21, 2010).

title: Fran Lebowitz