"I think that Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it is true lightness." – Alicia Silverstone
“I don't know about you, but I don't trust a government that doesn't want me to be euphoric." – Woody Harrelson
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." – Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
“History is made up of juggernauts, revolting to human feeling in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity.” – Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution
“An armed society is a polite society" – Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon
“One of the great things about the U.S. Constitution is that it outlines a republic limited in scope and able to operate in spite of damnable officials and a chowderhead electorate – as 222 years of American history prove.” – P.J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich
“You can break a man’s skull. You can arrest him. You can throw him into a dungeon but how do you control what's up here? How do you fight an idea?” – Sextus, Ben-Hur
“Any age that does not exalt courage will be confounded by the Alamo, and baffled by the men who stayed in it. Any age that fears war more than servitude, or death more than honor, must denigrate the Alamo. Ages that do not honor the concept of liberty or death will fight no Alamos. Ages that do not cling to the great values of love, honor, courage, sacrifice, the soldier values, will not only fail to remember the Alamo, they may not long endure.” – T. R. Fehrenbach, Texas historian.
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another." - G. K. Chesterton
“Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines -- not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.” – Robertson Davies (b.1913), Tempest-Tost, 1951
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
“This novel is not to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” – Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) In a book review, Quoted in The Algonquin Wits, 1968, Edited by Robert E. Drennan
“...it is not through sin that he opposes God. The Devil's strategy for our times is to make trivial human existence and to isolate us from one another while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands, or economic anxieties.” – C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
“Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift; but it is of little worth in politics. Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.” – Woodrow Wilson
Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. – Vegetius
Oderint dum metuant – the Emperor Tiberius
“Damn me if with a heavier weapon I do not tickle your ass’s head…” – Lord Macdonald to James Boswell, 27 November, 1785
"It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." – C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
With regard to Pizza Hut's delivery to the ISS: "The pizza rode to the station with space tourist Dennis Tito, inspiring the editors of the NASA Watch website (www.nasawatch.com) to muse: "What a success story: a self-made American multimillionaire, born to a working class family, pays $20 million to fly on a Russian spacecraft and ends up as a pizza delivery boy."
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." -- Alexander Tyler
"To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society" ~~Teddy Roosevelt~~
"I will be leaving soon, for the Planet Mongo, in a rocket-ship, of my own design." -- DOCTOR ZARKHOV
"She had a face of such immovable stupidity that it amounted to a sort of strange beauty." -- Malcolm Muggeridge, on Rosa Luxemburg
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion" - Edmund Burke
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." - Edmund Burke, letter, April 3, 1777, to the Sheriffs of Bristol
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." - EDMUND BURKE
Q: "What has recording alone taught you?"
Paul McCartney: "That to make your own decisions about what you do is easy, and playing with yourself is very difficult but satisfying."
Inside a dog, it's too dark to read."
Groucho
Great quote from a great book: Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans