Mr.Piffka's Quotes

" It is heartbreaking that those with the most insight will suffer the greatest loss.
-Panzade

I might have posted this before, but it will always ring true.

"Truly war-torn countries can't afford space programs, nor to give mankind the stars, nor any other good thing. Creating the future is a rich culture's game; poverty can only re-create the past. Yet by the relentless logic of competition, all countries are driven to aspire to war readiness equal to that of their least-enlightened neighbor; the bar is set by the worst of us, alas, not by the best of us."
* Lois McMaster Bujold

"The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea."
- Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)

lovely quote-Glad to have you posting again.
When my faves leave in the summer I get antsy.

I had a link for this, but must have lost it from my StickyNotes. It is from somewhere in cyberspace from the early part of this last bad week -

"As night fell, the sirens of house alarms finally fell silent, and the air filled with a different, deafening and unfamiliar sound: the extraordinary din of thousands of croaking frogs."




edit - here, about halfway down the page...
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006673.html

welcome back Piff!

and by the way, hello, jjorge.

"Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another."

- Decimus Junius "Juvenal" Juvenalis (c60-130)



Hello and Hugs to Panzade -- yep, it's been quite a summer. Are you holding out from all these durn hurricanes?


Jjorge, my friend!! Thanks for the greetings. How're ya doin? Are you living in Virginia now?


Hi Osso! Good quote and interesting weblog. I plucked this quote from it:

EEEEK! Piffka's back in town!

Great to see you posting again Piff. I was getting worried...........

Eeeek.... Lord E!
How are you? Not posting much, just some quotes while trying to get back into the a2k routine.


"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people."

- Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

Piff, what ever you do, check out a thread Lord E has about a recent holiday trip - some of the best writing ever...
I'll be back with a link when I nab it.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58093&highlight=

"God made him, therefore let him pass for a man."

- Portia (William Shakespeare, 1564-1616),
Merchant of Venice


Thanks, Osso... I'm not surprised that a Lord E thread is great. I'll be sure to check out the link.

"Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing."

Thomas L. Friedman (1953- )



(Ed. note: Bummer in Big Easy - In emergency preparedness, Katrina has been a perfect model for the same policy we have, on a larger scale, regarding global warming: we know it's coming, but we refuse to publicly plan our response. A warmer world is a more energetic world, and there will probably be more Katrinas, more tsunamis, and other, bigger things. Ice core and other evidence says that you can have a long period of rapid warming and still be in the middle of an ice age - and vice versa. The point is, rapid climatic change has been a reality on this planet many times already. People who actually are planning for global warming know that prevention is not an option. Therefore protective action is called for, and Step One is admitting that climate change is taking place. No one knows if we can avoid sharing the same fate as the 98 percent of all species that have become extinct because of alterations in the environment; but if we can, it will be by means of planning, tools and equipment

It is very foolish for us to be in such denial over something we can perceive and anticipate so well, but this is exactly what we have done about one bad storm in New Orleans, and it is exactly what we continue to do on a global scale regarding climatic change. But denial is very easy for the people in charge right now, who instinctively address problems by simply defining them out of existence - it works perfectly in a political campaign. Denial is also very easy for the faithful, because they have already embraced the great big lie that the human race, alone among all life forms on Earth, is created in God's image. Wielding the arrogance bestowed upon them by that belief, there is no reality that they cannot successfully deny, if they so wish.

Oxymoronically, in doing so we become simultaneously arrogant and sycophantic, disrespecting every non-human resource (and pretending human life is "sacred") in overcompensation for our poor self esteem, which is classically consistent with our military bravado. I predict the current Republican dominance of the American political scene will continue until an issue arises upon which the two wings of the Republican coalition disagree. The old Chamber-of-Commerce, Rotarian wing is glad to have the voter support of the Southern, evangelical wing (just like the Democrats were for a hundred years before the Civil Rights Act) for now, but perhaps when they start getting the real bills for the impractical and unrewarding military efforts undertaken by presidents who find they can't "create their own reality" among the hillbillies of Islam quite as readily as they can among the hillbillies of red-state America, that coalition will unravel.

And then, I suppose, we'll be back to looking for vision and leadership among the Democrats, which can be a difficult mission. What a relief it would be, however, to hear some voice of authority say, "We've made some mistakes. We don't know why this is happening, but we we have to have a big port at the mouth of the Mississippi, so we think we should start planning for higher winds and water. This is going to be expensive, and so the era of cheap gas is over.")

"Honey, lately your low self-esteem is just good common sense."

James L. Brooks (1940- ), Spanglish

Brooks has a nice tart mind..

"In America, the demand for the power to compel is a confession of incompetence to lead."

Eugene E. Wilson

---

Yep, Osso! Brooks has an amazingly large body of work -- I love that he helped create the Mary Tyler Moore Show. To me, the film, Spanglish, was much better than the critics allowed.

"The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition, and incompetence."

Elbert Hubbard (1859-1915)

(in case you are wondering, this is not L.Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame. Elbert Hubbard was a famous lecturer and businessman. He was the the founder of the famous Roycroft Printing Shop and later the Roycroft Campus, well-known crafters of what are now highly-collectible items.

"The winds that blow our billions away return burdened with themes of scorn and dispraise."

Garet Garrett (1878-1954)

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)