“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”
― Immanuel Kant
“So, you're the man who can't spell '****.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead.”
― Dorothy Parker
“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays
“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”
― Napoléon Bonaparte
"Everyon's an atheist until they clog a toilet at someone else's house..."
~ unknown
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
― Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Poems
@edgarblythe,
I read that at vollege, it's in the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Can't remember which volume though.
@izzythepush,
I like several of Crane's poems. He directly attacks his chosen subject.
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
― George Orwell
“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.”
― Rodney Dangerfield
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
― George Orwell
Damn, that is just so appropriate for our time.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
"The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange."
---Joseph Campbell
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]”
― Harry S. Truman
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22
