FAVORITE QUOTES
More will be added in my Copious Free Time...
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all.
--Montrose's Toast
With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men, I will plead; But to tyrants, I will give no quarter.
--William Lloyd Garrison
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation; No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not retreat a single inch, - AND I WILL BE HEARD.
--William Lloyd Garrison
...the truth is that I already know as much about my fate as I need to know. The day will come when I will die. So the only matter of consequence before me is what I will do with my allotted time. I can remain on shore, paralyzed with fear, or I can raise my sails and dip and soar in the breeze.
--Richard Bode, "First you have to row a little boat"
Life is property, property is life, both indistinguishable from liberty. The root of all evil - aside from forgetting that fact - lies in taking property against its rightful owners wishes.
--L. Neil Smith, "Henry Martyn"
...In the Carboniferous Epoch
We were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter
To pay for collective Paul;
But though we had plenty of money,
There was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said:
"If you don't work, you die."
--R. Kipling, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings"
I used to wait for a sign, she said, before I did anything. Then one night I had a dream & an angel in black tights came to me and said, You can start any time now & then I asked is this a sign? & the angel started laughing & I woke up.
Now, I think the whole world is filled with signs, but if there's no laughter, I know they're not for me.
--Brian Andreas, "Mostly True"
In the year Nineteen Hundred and Forty Nine, my friends and I happened on a curious footnote in "Nature", the Journal of the Academy of Sciences. It was written there in small letters that on the Kolyma river, during a dig, there was somehow discovered an underground ice stratum - a frozen ancient stream, and in it - samples of prehistoric (some tens of thousands of years old) fauna, also frozen. Whether fish or tritons, these were so perfectly preserved, witnessed the learned correspondent, that those present, having cracked the ice, immediately and WILLINGLY ate them.
The few readers of the Journal must have been not a little bemused by how long fish flesh may be preserved in ice. But few indeed would have been those who perceived the true heroic meaning of this incautious footnote. We - understood immediately. We saw the entire scene, brightly and in minute detail: how those present, in a cruel state of immediacy, smashed the ice; how, elbowing aside the high interests of ichthyology and each other, they hacked off chunks of thousands- year-old flesh, dragged it to the fire, defrosted it, and stuffed themselves.
We understood, because we were of THOSE PRESENT - of that, unique on earth, great tribe of zeki*, the only ones that could WILLINGLY eat a triton. And Kolyma was - the largest and most famous island, a pole of viciousness of the awful country of GULag, ripped by geography into an archipelago, but chained by psychology into a continent, - almost invisible, almost non-perceivable country, that was peopled by the tribe of zeki.
...My own eleven years, spent there, acquired not as shame, not even as an accursed nightmare, but having almost come to love that twisted world, and now, by a lucky circumstance, having become acquainted with many latter stories and letters, - might I yet be able to bring you something of the bones and the flesh? - and, incidentally, living flesh, and, incidentally, of a currently living triton.
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from the introduction to "GULag Archipelago" (translation mine)* Zeki - short for "Zaklyuchonniye" (prisoners), a term used to describe the inmates of GULag.
While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that, in my day at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first and Union afterwards"; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart -- Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!
--Daniel Webster, the Reply to Hayne, January 27, 1830
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason - Purpose - Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge - Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve - Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.
--Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more.
They are fools that think otherwise. No great effort was ever bought. No painting, no music, no poem, no cathedral in stone, no church, no state was ever raised into being for payment of any kind. No parthenon, no Thermopylae was ever built or fought for pay or glory; no Bukhara sacked, or China ground beneath Mongol heel, for loot or power alone. The payment for doing these things was itself the doing of them.
To wield onself -- to use oneself as a tool in one's own hand -- and so to make or break that which no one else can build or ruin -- THAT is the greatest pleasure known to man! To one who has felt the chisel in his hand and set free the angel prisoned in the marble block, or to one who has felt sword in hand and set homeless the soul that a moment before lived in the body of his mortal enemy -- to those both come alike the taste of that rare food spread only for demons or for gods.
-- Gordon R. Dickson, "Soldier Ask Not"
There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out.
The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully.
-- Ellen Goodman
"Who has known heights and depths shall not again
Know peace -- not as the calm heart knows
Low ivied walls, a garden close,
The old enchantment of a rose,
And though he tread the humble ways of men
He shall not speak the common tongue again."
-- Wilfred Noyce, "Springs of Adventure"
There is a limit to the practical application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.
-- Leon Trotsky
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
-- Henry Kissinger
Main Page Personal Stuff The Remembrance Day Page Linux Stuff E-mail me
Graphics created using
© 1999 by
Benjamin OkopnikThe Choice of the GNU Generation!
