At Its Most Decadent

"Rome... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled."

~ Gore Vidal

Art Is Like Baby Shoes

"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."

~ John Updike

Creative Activity

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better."

~ John Updike

The Metaphor of the Human Couple

"If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time."

~ Octavio Paz

Poetry Lets Us

"Poetry lets us touch the impalpable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia."

~ Octavio Paz, The Double Flame (1993)

That's Relativity

"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."

~ Albert Einstein

Point of View

"Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view. "

~ Ernst Mach

Do Something

"I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man, who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something."

~ Richard Attenborough

So Certain of Themselves

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

~ Bertrand Russell

Listen to Yourself

"I confess that I listen to my own music for my own pleasure."

~ Herb Alpert

Be Known By Results

"If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results."

~ Emily Bronte

Never Fold Pages

"Never fold the corners of pages in books. For every page you bend bends a thought, unsettles a truth, and despoils perfection."

~ Thomas Fortenberry

Never Lend Books

"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me."

~ Anatole France

Easy to Lead Men to War

"It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace."

~ Andre Gide

Radiant With Light

"You know what I would do if I were in your place? I'd ask for all or nothing; I'd insist on immensity...I'd work up a magnificient hunger, an enormous thirst, and I'd race through the drunken spaces between the spheres, singing the fearsome drinking song of eternity, joyous, radiant, sublime, hands full of bunches of grapes made of stars and my face purple with suns! I wouldn't leave a star unturned, and at the end of the banquet I'd pass out beneath the table of the heaven's radiant with light!"

~ Victor Hugo

Called to Apathy

"I think our generation has been called to apathy just as our grandparents were called to defeat fascism and the baby boomers were called to get divorced and fuck around for most of their adult lives before bankrupting the entire goddamn country when they retire. But we have the chance to do something really special here. Imagine a world where people didn't care enough to go to war over anything. Where some guy gets up in the morning and says, 'I know God wants me to kill the infidels and keep gay people from marrying each other, but I just don't give a shit. I'm going back to bed.' It would be paradise on earth. This is our mission. I think we can make it happen, but I really don't care either way. And that's called hope."

~ Paul Neilan

Truth Going Off

"With some minds, truth is, in effect, not so cruel a thing after all, seeing that, like a loaded pistol found by poor devils of savages, it raises more wonder than terror—its peculiar virtue being unguessed, unless, indeed, by indiscreet handling, it should happen to go off of itself."

~ Herman Melville, from The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857)

Spirit

"Spirit costantly formulates questions. It must store up inquiries. The creative power of spirit lies in its ability to create questions. Thus the supreme objective of spirit is in the creation of the question itself -- in short, the creation of nature. But that is impossible. Yet the march toward impossibility is the method of spirit. Spirit is -- well, it is the drive to pile zero on zero endlessly in order to arrive at one."

~ Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors.

Stop Living in the Past

"Stop living in the past, old-timer."

~ Captain America. (Michael Jan Friedman, Tomorrow Men)

Retarded Grafting

"The emergence of literary and artistic forms capable of expressing the results of half a century of rapid social change was retarded -- and is still in many respects retarded -- by persistent attempts to salvage remnants of the old culture and graft them on to 'the new world of technological anonymity'."

~ Geoffrey Barraclough

Cast Not Thy Light

"Cast not thy light into hell, for thou shalt reveal the horrors of life."

~ Thomas Fortenberry

From Barbarism to Decadence

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

~ Oscar Wilde

See Them As We Are

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

~ Anais Nin

Lie Around the World

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

~ Winston Churchill

Barbarism

"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."

~ Robert E. Howard

Under My Skin

"Once people
get under
my skin,
They never find the exit."

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I Always Wanted to Be Somebody

"I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific."

~ Lily Tomlin

Tonight's Weather

"Weather forecast for tonight: dark."

~ George Carlin

Too Many Tyrannies

"This century has already seen too many tyrannies engage in the distortion and destruction of the finest creative impulses of humankind."

~ Sidney Altman

A Poem Without Words

"A picture is a poem without words."

~ Horace

Gibran's Death

"Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people."

~ Kahlil Gibran

Extended Empire

"Extended empire, like expanded gold
Exchanges solid strength for feeble splendor."

~ Samuel Johnson

The Father of Intolerance

"Fanaticism is the child of false zeal and of superstition, the father of intolerance and of persecution."

~ John William Fletcher

The Overcompensation of Fanaticism

"Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt."

~ Robertson Davies

Quoting Emerson

"We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dangerous Thought

"There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous."

~ Hannah Arendt

You Can Put Wings On a Pig

"You can put wings on a pig, but you don't make it an eagle."

~ Bill Clinton, US 42nd President (describing a modified piece of legislation, 1996).

You Can Only Milk a Cow So Long

"You can only milk a cow so long, then you're left holding the pail."

~ Hank Aaron

Magnificent Hypocrisy

"Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing."

~ Edmund Burke

The Hypocritical Archer

"A hypocrite is in himself both the archer and the mark, in all actions shooting at his own praise or profit."

~ Thomas Fuller, Holy and Profane States--The Hypocrite (maxim I, bk. V, ch. VIII)

Measure Freedom

“At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.”

~ Eric Idle

Aristotle's Humor

"Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit."

~ Aristotle

More Like Machines

"As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines."

~ Joseph Wood Krutch

Machines Are Worshipped

"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery."

~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Begin Saving the World

"You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."

~ Charles Bukowski

Small Beginnings

"The beginnings of all things are small."
[Lat., Omnium rerum principia parva sunt.]

~ Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (V, 21)

The Beginning Stands For the Whole

"Begin whatever you have to do: the beginning of a work stands for the whole."
[Lat., Incipe quidquid agas: pro toto est prima operis pars.]

~ Decimus Magnus Ausonius, Idyllia (II, Inconnexa, 5)