“You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals
“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf
“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov
“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”
― Confucius
“Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“Try not to have a good time...this is supposed to be educational.”
― Charles M. Schulz
As for the line that “Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them,” Plato actually does say something like that in The Republic, Book IV, although it’s never that simple. Here’s the Jowett translation:
This is the point to which, above all, the attention of our rulers should be directed, –that music and gymnastic be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost to maintain them intact. And when any one says that mankind most regard, “The newest song which the singers have,” they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him; he says that when modes of music change, of the State always change with them.
Yes, said Adeimantus; and you may add my suffrage to Damon’s and your own.
Then, I said, our guardians must lay the foundations of their fortress in music?
Yes, he said; the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in.
Yes, I replied, in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears harmless.
Why, yes, he said, and there is no harm; were it not that little by little this spirit of licence, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates into manners and customs; whence, issuing with greater force, it invades contracts between man and man, and from contracts goes on to laws and constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last, Socrates, by an overthrow of all rights, private as well as public.
This is clearly a lot more than just one simple quote can represent. Music was, as Plato (and through him Socrates and others) notes in many of his works, music played an important ceremonial and bureaucratic role in Greek society; it was an essential part of formal education, and its forms were strictly controlled because they represented the condition of the state. It’s quite complex and very political.
“A bird is safe in its nest - but that is not what its wings are made for.”
― Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird
“One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.”
― Kahlil Gibran
@edgarblythe,
"Trumps first wife is from Czechoslovakia. His current wife is from Slovenia, So, if you think crawling under a wall is the most disgusting way to become an American, somewhere there is a Panamanian woman hiding in a truck full of chickens with ten pounds of heroin-filled condoms in her stomach who’s thinking, ‘Well, at least I didn’t have to blow Donald Trump." ~Bill Maher
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Of joys departed, not to return, how painful the remembrance.
Robert Blair
@edgarblythe,
Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
Jonathan Swift
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Jonathan Swift
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
Ayn Rand
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.”
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
@edgarblythe,
“My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.”
― Charles Dickens
