Selected Favorite Quotations
Labor
"Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize."
Theodore Roosevelt
Politics
"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or, it is nowhere."
Shevek's speech to the workers, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
"When fascism comes to America, it’ll be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross."
Widely attributed Sinclair Lewis (And while he never actually said it, it remains true.)
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
H.L. Mencken
"If you love god, burn a church"
Jello Biafra
"How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-replicating means of production?"
Charles Stross, Singularity Sky
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
Oscar Wilde
Humor
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Douglas Adams
"I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally."
W. C. Fields
"A brahmin once asked The Blessed One:
"Are you a God?"
"No, brahmin" said The Blessed One.
"Are you a saint?"
"No, brahmin" said The Blessed One.
"Are you a magician?"
"No, brahmin" said The Blessed One.
"What are you then?"
"I am awake."
Beer
"It is disgusting to note the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects and the amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. Everybody is using coffee. If possible, this must be prevented. My people must drink beer."
Frederick the Great
Useful Maxims
"Cock-up before conspiracy."
Sir Bernard Ingham
"Sufficiently advanced cluelessness or incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. "
Grey's Law
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
Hanlon's Razor.
Never fire a laser at a mirror.
Larry Niven
"You often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons."
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Edward Abbey
"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
Abbey's Road
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Sir Pterry Pratchett
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
Jingo
"Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."
Men at Arms
"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home."
Good Omens
Many more quotes from Sir Pterry.
Ambrose Bierce
"Conservative - a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."
"What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country."