The following are some basic thoughts about politics, life, society, and other junk I deem to be relevant. Some of it relates to my political orientation, some of it involves interesting observations or comments about politics and life by people who are astute, learned, out-to-lunch, stupid, or should just know better. Use these at your own risk to intelligence and mental-stability.¨¨“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to William S. Smith, November 13, 1787
“You can’t come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say ‘Oh it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good.’ Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution? It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game.”
– Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the use of torture, February 2008.
“…(W)e lose when by official policy or by official negligence we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget . . . that which is our greatest strength: that we are different and better than our enemies.”
– Senator John McCain, on the use of torture, October 5, 2005.
“The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
– Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe¨
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
– Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, December 23, 1791.¨“Freedom’s the right to distinguish oneself upon the public listeners.”
– John Adams
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
– Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee“
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.”
– Wendell Phillips
¨
“I’ve wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor, and I’m happy to say I’ve finally won out over it.”
– Elwood P. Dowd
“A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just; and its justice constitutes its greatness and beauty.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
“Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, either flippant mistaking of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fate, 1860
“A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes…will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”
– John Stuart Mill
“Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret.”
– Benito Mussolini, Fasc Bili
“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”
– Frank Zappa
“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” – Groucho Marx¨“Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
– George Bernard Shaw
¨“Democracy seems suitable only to a very little country.”
– Voltaire
¨”The more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty.
– James Madison
“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”
-James Madison, letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1798|
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“Years ago my mother use to say to me: ‘In this world Elwood,’ – she always called me Elwood, – ‘you must be oh-so smart, or oh-so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
-Elwood P. Dowd
And on scholarship and knowledge: “It’s all a compost heap. You just put down a layer of humus that helps other stuff grow. Your work will all be forgotten, but it will help stuff grow.”
– Murray Edelman, U. of Wisconsin political scientist
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
– Frank Zappa
“Too often our leaders cannot work for the greater good because they acknowledge no good greater than politics. But if that’s truly our prime directive and highest imperative, God help us all.”
– syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, “The Miami Herald”, 1-7-10
“The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.”
– Samuel Pisar, author, lawyer, and Holocaust survivor, “The New York Times”, 1-28-10
“You can have all the muskets you want! You can even have assault muskets!… Their (the NRA’s) paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present. We can’t even begin to address 30,000 gun deaths that are actually, in reality, happening in this country every year because a few of us must remain vigilant against the rise of an imaginary Hitler.”
– Jon Stewart on the Gun lobby and NRA’s efforts to prevent new gun laws, 1-7-13
