Your Quote of the Day

“Mort Sahl, while attending a preview of Otto Preminger's film Exodus, stood up and called out, "Otto, let my people go!”

“If you wish to become a philosopher, the first thing to realise is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing: And Other Essays

“To be a songwriter-singer means the songs come from deep within, and you treat them as an artist, with that much respect. I couldn’t cheat myself.” – Roy Orbison
“Without the word dream, or the concept dream, and without the word blue and the emotions, I would have been really limited in the things I’ve written and performed.” – Roy Orbison

"Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes." -Jim Carrey

As Arthur (born Adolph) Marx never spoke in his films, I figured I'd just post some quotes by him...
"I am the most fortunate self-taught harpist and non-speaking actor who has ever lived."
"The man who first inspired me was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theater. He rolled cigars in the window of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue. When he got going good he was completely lost in work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves. Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I've thrown in a Gookie at least once."
Talking about working in vaudeville: "If an audience didn't like us, we had no trouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching - until (the Marx Brothers' mother and manager) Minnie gave us the high-sign that we'd collected our share of the receipts. Then we started throwing stuff back at the audience and run like hell for the railroad station the second the curtain came down."
"Cheap hotels in the South and Southwest were apparently set up as bug sanctuaries by some Audubon Society for Insects. Fleas, ticks, bedbugs, cockroaches, beetles, scorpions and ants, having no enemies, attacked with fearless abandon. They had the run of the house and they knew it. After a while you just let them bite. Fighting back was useless. For every bug you squashed, a whole fresh, bloodthirsty platoon would march out of the woodwork. In one hotel hotel the ants were so bad that each bed was set on four pots of oxalic acid."
"When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost. You mourn for yourself."
"If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it."

“If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too.”
--Tom Waits

...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (Sherlock Holmes)

“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

For me, "Catch 22" stands equally alongside "1984" and "Brave New World"

“It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'”
— Aldous Huxley

Mark Twain, from a much longer passage about Indian crows, excerpted from Following the Equator:
"If I sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would gather on the railing at the other end and talk about me; and edge closer, little by little, till I could almost reach them; and they would sit there, in the most unabashed way, and talk about my clothes, and my hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and politics ... until I could not longer endure the embarrassment of it; then I would shoo them away, and they would circle around in the air a little while, laughing and deriding and mocking, and presently settle on the rail and do it all over again.
With a little encouragement they would come in and light on the table and help me eat my breakfast; and once when I was in the other room and they found themselves alone they carried off everything they could lift; and they were particular to choose things which they could make no use of after they got them. In India their number is beyond estimate, and their noise is in proportion. I suppose they cost the country more than the government does; yet that is not a light matter. It would sadden the land to take their cheerful voice out of it."

"We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the common denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul."
~Willie Nelson

"I don't believe it's possible to be neutral.
The world is already moving in certain directions. And to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that is to collaborate with whatever is going on.
And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world."
~Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train

At the end of the day the day gotta end
Glorilla

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road - the one less traveled by - offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
~Rachel Carson, from “Silent Spring”

“What can I say that I have not said before?
So I'll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, and the leaf is singing still.”
~Mary Oliver

"I am a poor lost woof from the kennel of Fate looking for a dog to belong to."
--Saul Bellow

“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.“
Friedrich Nietzsche

my grandmother had a serious gas
problem.
we only saw her on Sunday.
she'd sit down to dinner
and she'd have gas.
she was very heavy,
80 years old.
wore this large glass brooch,
that's what you noticed most
in addition to the gas.
she'd let it go just as food was being served.
she'd let it go in bursts
spaced about a minute apart.
she'd let it go
4 or 5 times
as we reached for the potatoes
poured the gravy
cut into the meat.
nobody ever said anything,
especially me.
I was 6 years old.
only my grandmother spoke.
after 4 or 5 blasts
she would say in an offhand way,
"I'll bury you all!"
I didn't much like that:
first farting
then saying that.
it happened every Sunday.
she was my father's mother.
every Sunday it was death and gas
and mashed potatoes and gravy
and that big glass brooch.
those Sunday dinners would
always end with apple pie and
ice cream
and a big argument
about something or other,
my grandmother finally running out the door
and taking the red train back to
Pasadena
the place stinking for an hour
and my father walking about
fanning a newspaper in the air and
saying, "it's all that damned sauerkraut
she eats!"
~ Charles Bukowski, “Gas”

Al Joad: Ain't you gonna look back, Ma? Give the ol' place a last look?
Ma Joad: We're going' to California, ain't we? All right then let's go to California.
Al Joad: That don't sound like you, Ma. You never was like that before.
Ma Joad: I never had my house pushed over before. Never had my family stuck out on the road. Never had to lose everything I had in life.
"The Grapes of Wrath" was released on January 24, 1940.
John Steinbeck was particularly enamored with the performance of Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in the 1940 film version of his novel "The Grapes of Wrath," feeling that he perfectly encapsulated everything he wanted to convey with this character, and added that Fonda as Joad made him "believe my own words." The two became good friends. Indeed Fonda did a reading at Steinbeck's funeral.
According to Fonda, director John Ford preferred only one take and little or no rehearsal to catch the most spontaneous moment. For the key climactic final scene between Tom and Ma, Ford didn't even watch the rehearsal. When the time came to shoot, Ford led Fonda and Jane Darwell through the silent action of the scene, preventing them from starting their lines until the two actors were completely in the moment. It was done in a single take and Fonda said on screen it was "brilliant."
"I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too."
Prior to filming, producer Darryl F. Zanuck sent undercover investigators out to the migrant camps to see if John Steinbeck had exaggerated about the squalor and unfair treatment meted out there. He was horrified to discover that Steinbeck had actually downplayed what went on in the camps.
Henry Fonda kept the hat he wore in the movie for the rest of his life. Before he passed away in 1982, he gave it to his old friend Jane Withers. Apparently he and Withers, when she was an 8 year old girl and he a young man, did a play together before Fonda made movies. Fonda was so nervous to go onstage that little Jane took his hand, said a little prayer to ease his nerves, and the two of them became good friends for life.