I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet.”
-- Eduardo Galeano - “My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?”
-- Snoopy (Charles Schultz) - “[Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous, and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”
-- John Maynard Keynes - “Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled.”
-- Mohammed - “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Furhrer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"”
-- Dorothy Thompson - “[...] one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language,and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists, is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
-- George Orwell (Politics and the English Language) - “All men having power ought to be mistrusted. If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
-- James Madison - “We must use the modern techniques of motivational thinking and social science to make people constructively discontented.... If you are relatively happy with your life, if you enjoy spending time with your children, playing with them and talking with them; if you like nature...if you just like talking to people...if you enjoy living simply, if you sense no need to compete with your friends or neighbors--what good are you economically?”
-- Ernest Dichter - “There comes a time when the operation of the machine is so odious that you cannot even tacitly participate, You've got to place your bodies on the gears, the wheels, all the mechanism. And you've got to indicate to those who own it and those who run it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
-- Utah Phillips (Unless You Are Free) - “Facts are the enemy of truth.”
-- Miguel de Cervantes - “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
-- Aldous Huxley - “People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.”
-- Eric Hoffer - “In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
-- George Orwell - “If humanity still has hope of survival, of being better, that hope is in the pockets formed by the excluded ones, the left-overs, the ones who are disposable.”
-- Subcommandante Marcos - “There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.”
-- William S. Burroughs - “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”
-- Peter Drucker - “If every person has the right to defend - even by force - his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right - its reason for existing, its lawfulness - is based on individual right.
(People) wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man - in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.
It is evident, then, that the proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency to plunder instead of to work. All the measures of the law should protect property and punish plunder.”
-- Frederic Bastiat (1802-1850) (The Law (1850)) - “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
-- Carl Sagan - “The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything." ”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - “You can say what you want about this country. I love this country. I love the freedoms that we used to think we had.”
-- MOBYTHOR - “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”
-- John Lennon - “A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
-- John Updike - “Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,
we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music.”
-- Marcus Brigstocke (Live At The Apollo) - “When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
-- C. P. Snow - “I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.”
-- John Maynard Keynes