Blaise Pascal has some thoughts (see Penseés (Thoughts), 1660) - 

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Others?

Evil is obvious only in retrospect. - Gloria Steinem Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983)

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. - Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911)

Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter. - Oliver Goldsmith

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. - Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life" (1900)

Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. - William Hazlitt

A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case. - Finley Peter Dunne

Fanaticism is . . . overcompensation for doubt. - Robertson Davies

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion. - Denis Diderot

In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal. - Thomas Jefferson

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad. - Alexander Pope

Being unable to reason is not a positive character trait outside religion. - Dewey Henize

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off. - Jonathan Swift

The more you reason the less you create. - Raymond Chandler

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell. - Edgar Allan Poe

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. - Horace Walpole

Humor is the most engaging cowardice. - Robert Frost

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman. - Oscar Wilde

Well, the telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful. - Kurt Vonnegut  

Kids like my act because I'm wearing nose glasses. Adults like my act because there's a guy who thinks putting on nose glasses is funny. - Steve Martin   

In the end, everything is a gag. - Charlie Chaplin  

Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of everyone else. - William Rotsler

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. - George Bernard Shaw

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor. - Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (act I)

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny. - Thomas Carlyle

A rich man's joke is always funny. - Thomas Edward Brown

He who laughs last has not yet heard the bad news. - Anthony Burgess

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis. - Jack Handey

_______________

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, two men are called a Law Firm, and three or more are called a Congress. - John Adams

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis D. Brandeis, from his dissent in the case Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928)

I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people. - Edmund Burke, Speech on the Conciliation of America

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. - Frank Zappa

The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man. - Learned Hand

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process. - Felix Frankfurter

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power. - Gerry Spence

I told him it was law logic - an artificial system of human reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else. - John Quincy Adams to John Marshall

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. - Martin Luther King Jr.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. - Joseph Addison

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. - Raymond Chandler

Law is born from despair of human nature. - Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins. - John Locke

If you think that you can think about a thing, inextricably attached to something else, without thinking of the thing it is attached to, then you have a legal mind. - Henry C. Blinn 

A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful. - Primo Levi

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little. – Samuel Johnson, Letter to Dr. Taylor

You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets. -

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it. - Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. - Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveler

______________________________

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. - John Adams (1735-1826), 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts. - John Gunther

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts. - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Facts are stupid things. - Ronald Reagan

It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year. - Truman Capote

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true. -  Gore Vidal

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by things that seem than by those that are. - Nicolo Machiavelli   

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you get. - Bertrand Russell

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. - H.H. Munro 

If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity. - Umberto Eco, Foucalt's Pendulum

Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resemble what actually happens. - Ian Stewart

Faith: not wanting to know what is true. - Friedrich Nietzsche

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying’. And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did." - Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? - Will Rogers

__

Bonus - 

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better. - A. J. Liebling

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage. - Albert Camus

He who uses trickery should at least make use of his judgment to learn that he can scarcely hide treacherous conduct for very long among clever men who are determined to find him out, although they may pretend to be deceived in order to disguise their knowledge of his deceitfulness. -  Magdeleine Sable

It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. - Noel Coward

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us. - Samuel Johnson

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth. - Adrienne Rich 

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. - Gloria Steinem

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

We have art in order not to die of the truth. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis. - Brad Holland

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. - William Blake, from "Notes on Reynolds's Discourses" (1908)

It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth. - Arthur James Balfour 

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. - Andre Gide

The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception. -  Edward Verrall Lucas

I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it really didn't matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. 'Do you want my life to be meaningless?' he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn't have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, 'I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?' I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I'm not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. 'You see, you see!' he said. 'You do believe, don't you, and you're going to place your trust in Him, aren't you?' Obviously, I again said no. He fell back in his chair.  - Albert Camus, The Stranger

_____________________________

I confess, I do not believe in time. - Vladimir Nabokov

Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked. - Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit

So little time and so little to do. - Oscar Levant

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive. - John Sladek

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. - William Gibson

A wise God shrouds the future in obscure darkness. [Prudens futuri temporis exitum Caliginosa nocte premit deus.] - Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Carmina (III, 29, 29)

The future is like heaven. Everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now. -James Baldwin

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. - J. G. Ballard

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. - Ray Bradbury

Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard. - Fritz R. S. Dressler

It is the business of the future to be dangerous. - Alfred Whitehead

FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured. - Ambrose Bierce

When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit. - Alan Moore

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like. - Alfred Hitchcock

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has. - Anita Brookner 

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them. - Charles Lamb

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time. - George Bernard Shaw

Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time. - George Patton

It takes a lot of time to be a genius; you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. -Gertrude Stein 

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. - Groucho Marx

___________________________

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  - Charles Dickens

Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you're home.  - Carol Nelson

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time. - Art Buchwald

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. - Erma Bombeck

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. - William Ralph Inge

It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back. - Bill Vaughn

Nostalgia's the most commercial commodity there is today; I believe it's true all over the world. - Stan Kenton

I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest. - Robert Wyatt

If you go flying back through time, and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it's probably best to avoid eye contact. - Jack Handey

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. - Louis Hector Berlioz

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. - Henry Kissinger

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. -  Tennessee Williams

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. - Oscar Wilde

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. - Umberto Eco

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important. - Eugene McCarthy (died December 10, 2005 at the age of 89)

My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. - Harry S. Truman

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. - John Quinton

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be. - Marshall McLuhan

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician. - Charlie Chaplin

In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people. - Groucho Marx

Politicians have the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn't happen. - Winston Churchill

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one. - Henry Miller

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. - George Orwell

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth. - W. H. Auden

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were. - John F. Kennedy

It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man. - David Harris

What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary? - Marion Barry

Beguiled by George W. Bush's easy smile and casual indifference to the details, we are on the brink of electing him to office. This isn't choosing a president, it's casting the lead in a sitcom about the presidency. - Roger Ebert

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. - T. S. Eliot

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny. - James Fenimore Cooper

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. - Georges Bernanos

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur. - Doug Larson

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to? - Clarence Darrow

I am the King of Rome, and above grammar.  [Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam.] – Sigismund at the 1414 Council of Constance to a prelate who objected to his grammar (not George Bush)

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world. - Heinrich Heine

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. - Benjamin Lee Whorf

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought. - Elizabeth Bowen

English - Who needs that? I'm never going to England! - Homer Simpson

If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. - Texan Governor "Ma" Ferguson

That woman speaks 19 languages and can't say "no" in any of them. - Dorothy Parker

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. - Robert Benchley

It's strange because I can't speak English well, but I am stirred by hearing it - Jack Benny, George Bums, Lucille Ball. - Alain Resnais

Morals and manners will rise or decline with our attention to grammar. … To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German. - Jason Chamberlain, inaugural address at University of Vermont, 1811 

You taught me language, and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! – Shakespeare, The Tempest (Caliban at I, ii)

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib. - Robert Burchfield

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. - Aldous Huxley

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say? - E. M. Forster

Look wise; say nothing and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought. - William Osler

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

_________________________________

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action. - Frank Herbert

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement. - Alfred Adler:

Trust everybody, but cut the cards. - Finley Peter Dunne

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved. - George MacDonald

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. - John F. Kennedy

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. – Thomas Jefferson

"Love all, trust a few / Do wrong to none … " - William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

I have great faith in fools - my friends call it self-confidence. - Edgar Allan Poe quotes

You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink. -  Terry Pratchett

Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance and without any visible reason. - Lord Chesterfield quotes

I don't really trust a sane person. - Lyle Alzado

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else.  - Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence.  Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. - William E. Gladstone

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.  - Charles Krauthammer

They are borne along by the violence of their rage, and think it is a waste of time to ask who are guilty. [Trahit ipse furoris Impetus, et visum est lenti quaesisse nocentum.]  - Lucanus (Marcus Annaeus Lucan), Pharsalia (II, 109)

Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; Those best can fear reproof who merit praise.  - Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (l. 582)

Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of a certain income can indulge. - George William Curtis

When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. So we were often angry at each other. - Charles De Gaulle.

Anger at lies lasts forever.  Anger at truth can't last. - Greg Evans

Keep cool; anger is not an argument. - Daniel Webster

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. - Jonathan Swift

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. - Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Kurt Vonnegut:  

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us. - "Cold Turkey", In These Times, May 10, 2004

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.  - H. L. Mencken

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. - Garrison Keillor

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood. - Fred Thompson, speech before the Commonwealth Club of California

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. - G. H. Hardy

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. - William Gibson

I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there. - Herb Caen

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. - Ursula K. LeGuin

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. - Bertrand Russell

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. - H. L. Mencken

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. - George Bernard Shaw

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity. - Herbert Butterfield

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. - Mark Twain

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality. - Salvador Dali

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. - Bill Watterson (the cartoonist, "Calvin and Hobbes")

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning. - A. E. Housman

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them! - Friedrich Nietzsche

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge. - Daniel J Boorstin

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. - H. L. Mencken

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? - Pablo Casals

"A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public" - Mark Twain

"The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed." - William Blum

"The popularity of conspiracy theories is explained by people's desire to believe that there is - some group of folks who know what they're doing" - Damon Knight 

"More things in politics happen by accident or exhaustion than happen by conspiracy." - Jeff Greenfield

"The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason." – Anthony Lewis

"The biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. Nobody's out to get you. Nobody gives a shit whether you live or die. There, you feel better now?"  - Dennis Miller

"A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood." - William Shenstone

"It is hard to tell if a man is telling the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place." - H. L. Mencken

"The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff." - Ambrose Bierce

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."  - Winston Churchill

"Truth is mighty and will prevail.  There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so." - Mark Twain

"Reality is bad enough.  Why should I tell the truth?" - Patrick Sky

"It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar." - Jerome K. Jerome

"If you tell a lie, always rehearse it. If it don't sound good to you, it won't sound good to anybody." - Leroy ''Satchel'' Paige

"When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty." - Norm Crosby

On journalists: "They consume a considerable quantity of our paper manufacture, employ our artisans in printing, and find business for great numbers of indigent persons." - Joseph Addison, the "Spectator," no. 367

"Ask how to live? Write, write, write, anything; the world's a fine believing world, write news." - Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Wit Without Money (Act II)

"Journalists should not be so distant that all they can hear are shouts, nor so close that they become more conspirators than critics." - Walter Lippman

"A free press is one that prints a dictator's speech but doesn't have to." - Laurence J. Peter

"Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification." - James Gordon Bennett

"Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians." - Karl Otto von Schonhausen Bismarck

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." - Oscar Wilde

"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock." - Ben Hecht

"If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people." - Daniel Moynihan

"The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that's about tenth or eleventh on their list." - Abbie Hoffman

"On behalf of the newspaper industry I wish to announce some changes we're making to serve you better.  When I say 'serve you better,'' I mean 'increase our profits.'  We newspapers are very big on profits these days.  We're a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors." - Dave Barry

"Journalism - an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space." - Rebecca West

"The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible."  -Van Wyck Brooks

"Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer." - Ben Bagdikian

"The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it." - Alexander Cockburn

And where is our Edward R, Murrow these days?  "It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper." - Rod Serling

______________________________________

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most. - Bob Dylan

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is. - Steve Martin

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. - George Santayana

Chaos and Order are not enemies, only opposites. - Richard Garriott

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos. - Kerry Thornley

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. - Henry Miller

I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos - especially activity that seems to have no meaning.  It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.  Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical. - Jim Morrison

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively. - Voltaire

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness. - Jean Cocteau

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. - Andre Gide

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.  - Naomi Wolf

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad. - Salvador Dali

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. - Mark Twain

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me. - Charles Baudelaire

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us! - George Bernard Shaw

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction. - Blaise Pascal

I have often depended on the blindness of strangers. - Adrienne E. Gusoff

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown. - Woody Allen

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up. - Wilson Mizner

Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense. - Steve Landesberg

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty. - Richard J. Needham

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.  - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake. - H. L. Mencken

Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people. - F. M. Hubbard

In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof. - John Kenneth Galbraith

"To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt." – Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

______________________________________

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. - David Brin

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. - Frederick Douglass

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. - Stephen Vincent Benét

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be. - Thomas Jefferson

You see what power is - holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them! - Amy Tan

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. ­- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Melish, January 13, 1813

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. - George Orwell quotes

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. - Eric Hoffer quotes

All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power. - Ashleigh Brilliant

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. - Margaret Thatcher

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. - George Bernard Shaw

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. - George Orwell

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power. - Bertrand Russell

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. - Bertrand Russell

__________________________________________

These came across the Just Above Sunset transom late in the week -

With Epcot Center the Disney Corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life. - PJ O'Rourke

I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence. - Gary Trudeau

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it. - Samuel Goldwyn

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies. - PG Wodehouse

A few more from Samuel Goldwyn:

• I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.
• I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
• I never put on a pair of shoes until I've worn them at least five years.
• I read part of it all the way through.
• If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.
• Let's have some new clichés.
• Spare no expense to save money on this one.
• Television has raised writing to a new low.
• When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.
• You've got to take the bitter with the sour.

A few more from P. G. Wodehouse: 

• If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
• The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
• It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
• A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

Lyndon B. Johnson: The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.

Thomas Aquinas: I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it.

Thomas Jefferson: The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

John Gardner: The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

Adlai Stevenson: It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.

Peter F. Drucker: Leaders shouldn't attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can't compromise.

Rabindranath Tagore: Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Groucho Marx: I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.

___________________

A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse. - Diane Arbus

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, "This is real, too."  -  Wynn Bullock

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. - Dorthea Lange

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. - Ansel Adams

No place is boring if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. - Robert Adams, Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques, May 1995

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.  - Dorothea Lange

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. - William Albert Allard, "The Photographic Essay"

I hate cameras.  They are so much more sure than I am about everything.  - John Steinbeck

All photographs are accurate.  None of them is the truth. - Richard Avedon

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.   - Henri Cartier-Bresson

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.  - Lewis Hine

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. -  Diane Arbus

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum. - Tallulah Bankhead

Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography.  Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next.  Hunters, after all, aren't cooks. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

_______________________

Florynce Kennedy: You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun.

Harry S Truman: Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

J. William Fulbright: In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

William O. Douglas: Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

Charles Evans Hughes: Dissents are appeals to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of another day.

Will Durant: Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is scarified in the turbulence of change.

Learned Hand: In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

John Lindsay: There are men - now in power in this country - who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis: The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.

James Russell Lowell: Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion.  

H. L. Mencken: I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.  

H. L. Mencken: The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.  

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

___________________________________

"The most beautiful dream that has haunted the heart of man since Icarus is today reality." - Louis Bleriot

"You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky." - Amelia Earhart

"More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination." - Wilbur Wright

"Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death." - Alexander Chase, 'Perspectives,' 1966

"I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things…" - Antoine de St-Exupéry

"What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?" - William Law, 'A Serious Call to a Devout and Holly Life XI,' 1728

"The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth." - Antoine de St-Exupéry, 'Wind, Sand, and Stars,' 1939

"Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle." - Igor Sikorsky

"Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the air to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 'North to the Orient,' 1935

"The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Douglas Adams

Søren Kierkegaard: Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

Mark Twain: Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.

Bill Cosby: A word to the wise ain't necessary, it's the stupid ones who need the advice.

Edward Abbey: There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Salvador Dali: I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

John Cage: I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

__ 

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

-  Isaac Asimov

First we kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, the undecided.

-  General Iberico Saint Jean

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

-  Salvador Dali

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

-  Fran Lebowitz

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

-  Dean Inge

What a good thing Adam had - when he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

-  Mark Twain

What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.

-  George Bernard Shaw

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.

-  Friedrich Nietzsche

Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.

-  Mark Twain

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

-  H. G. Wells

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

-  Douglas Adams

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

-  Herm Albright

The future is much like the present, only longer.

-  Don Quisenberry

The future will be better tomorrow.

"A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad." 

"Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty."

- Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death

"La liberté de la presse ne s'use que quand on ne s'en sert pas." (The freedom of the press is never used up or worn out - except when you don't use it.)

The motto of Le Canard Enchainé   http://www.lecanardenchaine.fr/

"Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant'."  Robert Anson Heinlein, A Rabble in Arms

"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves." - Claude Adrien Helvétius

"It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper." - Jerry Seinfeld

"In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates."  - Alexis de Tocqueville

"Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is."  - Mahatma Gandhi

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies."  - Groucho Marx

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." - Bertrand de Jouvenel

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."  - C. S. Lewis

"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."  - Plato

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you" - Pericles

_______________________________________

"For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else." - Sir Winston Churchill, speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet, London, November 9, 1954

"Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." - Sir Winston Churchill, Speech, 1941, Harrow School

Voltaire on the British – "They are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent."

"You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." - Samuel Johnson

"The marvelous maturity of London! I would rather be dead in this town than preening my feathers in heaven." - Nicholas Monsarrat

"I'm leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it's not raining." - Groucho Marx

"When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London." - Bette Midler

"This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air." - William Butler Yeats

"Ten minutes later we were both in a cab, and rattling through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station. The first faint winter's dawn was beginning to appear, and we could dimly see the occasional figure of an early workman as he passed us…"  - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventure of Abbey Grange

"If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces." - George Bernard Shaw, You Never Can Tell

"It is difficult to speak adequately, or justly, of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent." - Henry James

"There is one thing about Englishmen, they won't fix anything till it's just about totally ruined. You couldn't get the English to fix anything at the start. No! They like to sit and watch it grow worse. Then, when it just looks like the whole thing has gone up Salt Creek, why, the English jump in and rescue it." - Will Rogers

"The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm." - Alexander Woolcott

"We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic." - Cullen Hightower

"For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong."  - H. L. Mencken

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken

"The only thing I can really trust is my own self-indulgence." - Justin Bond

"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it." - Abbie Hoffman

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Cousin Woodman

"Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper." - Quentin Crisp

"There's a fine line between genius and insanity.  I have erased this line." - Oscar Levant

"I loathe people who keep dogs.  They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves." - August Strindberg

"If you think this is weird, just look at yourselves." - Charles Mingus

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." - John F. Kennedy

"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." - Carl Sagan

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

"Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt. Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves." - Robert Anton Wilson

"It's hard to argue against cynics - they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side." - Molly Ivins

Yeats – from Bob Patterson

"A statesman is an easy man

He tells his lies by rote;

A journalist makes up his lies

And takes you by the throat

So stay and home and drink your beer

And let the neighbors vote."

"I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots."

"It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is."

"You know what the Englishman’s idea of compromise is?  He says, Some people say there is a God.  Some people say there is no God.  The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements."

"Accursed who brings to light of day

The writings I have cast away."

"Much did I rage when young

Being by the world oppressed

But now with flattering tongue

It speeds the parting guest."

"Irish poets, learn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made."

"If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility."

Yeats - from the editor -

"An intellectual hatred is the worst."

"Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle?  A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself."

"I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead."

"Life is a long preparation for something that never happens."

And on the general topic -

"The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness." - Christopher Morley

"A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." - Salman Rushdie

_______________________________

On the subject of summer starting -

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity. – Charles Lamb

A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken. - James Dent

The summer night is like a perfection of thought. - Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

In summer, the song sings itself. - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday. - Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court 

On the D-Day anniversary this week -

You will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.  Your task will not be an easy one.  Your enemy is well trained, well equipped, and battle-hardened.  He will fight savagely....  The free men of the world are marching together to victory.  I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle.  We will accept nothing less than full victory.  Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking. - General Dwight D. Eisenhower giving the D-Day order on June 6, 1944

There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again.  You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON'T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.  No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton! - General George S. Patton, Jr  (from the speech delivered to his troops on June 5, 1944)  [Compare to this from Henry V of course.]

In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it. - Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel (15 November 1891 - 14 October 1944) German Field Marshal and commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps in World War II.

From Bob Patterson -

"In War there is no second prize for the runner up." - Omar N. Bradley

"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite." – Winston Churchill

"This landing is part of the concerted United Nations plan for the liberation of Europe, made in conjunction with our great Russian allies…." - Dwight David Eisenhower

"Le France ne peut étre la France sans la grandeur."  (France can not be France without greatness.) - Charles de Gaulle

"I’m convinced that the infantry is the group in the army which gives more and gets less than anybody else.  I draw pictures for and about the dogfaces because I know what their life is like and I understand their gripes.  They don’t get fancy pay, they know their food is the worst in the army because you can’t whip up lemon pies or even hot soup at the front, and they know how much of the burden they bear." -  Bill Maulden (Up Front, Page5)

These all point back to an item this week – April 24, 2005 - The End of Outrage?

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them. - Georges Bataille

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends? - George Eliot

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him. - Louis L'Amour

Depression is rage spread thin.  - George Santayana

In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. - Douglas Adams

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. - Aldous Huxley

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. - Lucanus (Marcus Annaeus Lucan), Pharsalia (II, 109)

I have always been on the side of the heretics against those who burned them because the heretics so often turned out to be right...  Dead, but right. - Edward R. Murrow

Whenever people say "we mustn't be sentimental," you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, "we must be realistic," they mean they are going to make money out of it. -  Brigit Brophy.

Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury. - James H. Cone

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. – Oscar Wilde

______________________________________________

From Bon Patterson - 

"The taxpayer – that’s someone who works for the Federal government but doesn’t have to take a civil-service examination."  - Ronald Reagan

"We don’t pay taxes.  Only the little people pay taxes."  - Leona Helmsley

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy."  - John Marshall

"We’re a trillion dollars in debt.  Who do we owe this money to, someone named Vinnie?"  - Robin Williams

"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."  - Voltaire 

From the editor - 

Income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.  - Will Rogers

The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax. - Albert Einstein

I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged. - Roger Jones

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss. - Robert A. Heinlein

I wouldn't mind paying taxes - if I knew they were going to a friendly country. - Dick Gregory

The expenses of government, having for their object the interest of all, should be borne by everyone, and the more a man enjoys the advantages of society, the more he ought to hold himself honored in contributing to those expenses.  - Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.  - Benjamin Franklin, from Letter to Jean Baptiste Leroy, 13 Novmber 1789

Death and taxes may be inevitable, but they shouldn't be related.  - J.C. Watts, Jr.

I like to pay taxes.  With them I buy civilization. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. - Mark Twain

Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

From Bob Patterson –

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."  - Neville Chamberlain

"A government needs one hundred soldiers for every guerrilla it faces." - Fulgencio Batista

"I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."  - Franklin Delano Roosevelt,  October 30, 1940

"The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war."  - General Douglas MacArthur

"We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." - Lyndon Baines Johnson

From the editor –

Nuclear war would really set back cable.  –  Ted Turner

The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized. - Friedrich von Bernhardi - Source: Germany and the next War (ch. I)

Where is it written in the Constitution that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?  - Daniel Webster

If war should sweep our commerce from the seas, another generation will restore it. If war exhausts our treasury, future industry will replenish it. If war desiccate and lay waste our fields, under new cultivation they will grow green again and ripen to future harvest. If the walls of yonder Capitol should fall and its decorations be covered by the dust of battle, all these can be rebuilt. But who shall reconstruct the fabric of a demolished government; who shall dwell in the well-proportioned columns of constitutional liberty; who shall frame together the skillful architecture which unites sovereignty with state's rights, individual security with prosperity? - Daniel Webster

The final war will be between Pavlov's dog and Schrödinger’s Cat. -  Robert Anton Wilson

We have women in the military, but they don't put us in the front lines. They don't know if we can fight or if we can kill. I think we can. All the general has to do is walk over to the women and say, "You see the enemy over there? They say you look fat in those uniforms." - Elayne Boosler

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war.  -  Abbie Hoffman

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. - David Friedman

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness. - Charles Baudelaire

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given. - John Updike

Our columnist Bob Patterson considers these -

"Now cracks a noble heart.  Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet - V, ii, 373

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth." – Voltaire

"The world is the mirror of myself dying." - Henry Miller

"Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient." - Henry Louis Mencken

"Then, last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane." - From Citizen Kane

"When my little boy, Dimitri, died, everybody was crying.  Me?  I got up, and I danced.  They said ‘Zorba is mad.’  But it was the dancing –only the dancing – that stopped the pain." - Anthony Quinn playing Zorba

Your editor considers these -

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. - Isaac Asimov

Nothing is certain but death and taxes. Of the two, taxes happen annually. - Joel Fox

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. - Clarence Darrow

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. - Mark Twain

The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you. – Woody Allen

Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.  - Groucho Marx

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened. - Sir Winston Churchill

The idea is to die young as late as possible. - Ashley Montagu

I'm not afraid of death.  It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life. - Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon, 1929

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.  - W. Somerset Maugham

Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away!  Death really hates that! - Matt Frewer, as Dr. Mike Stratford in "Doctor, Doctor"

______________________________________

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is. - Geoffrey Cottrell

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely. - Josephine Baker

To err is human. To loaf is Parisian. - Victor Hugo

Quarrels in France strengthen a love affair, in America they end it. - The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem

The Frenchman, by nature, is sensuous and sensitive. He has intelligence, which makes him tired of life sooner than other kinds of men. He is not athletic: he sees the futility of the pursuit of fame; the climate at times depresses him. - Anais Nin

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language. - Mark Twain

The French are true romantics. They feel the only difference between a man of forty and one of seventy is thirty years of experience. - Maurice Chevalier

In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise. - Virgil Thomson

And from Just Above Sunset columnist Bob Patterson -

"Is Paris burning?"  - Adolph Hitler

"In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator." - Jean Cocteau

"There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even – the French air clears up the brain and does good – a world of good."