Daily quotes

[Kat Kanning]

Actually, I don't desire a new car either.  I was making a joke.

[Lloyd Danforth]

I didn't think ya did. I assume that like most of us you are happy to have a paid for running car that you are not afraid of.

[Tom Sawyer]

Kat's on Prozac 


Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

[PattyLee loves dogs]

"No one of any feeling, born and educated in this once happy country, can consider the numerous distresses, the gross indignities, the barbarous ignorance, the haughty usurpations, that we have reason to fear are meditating for ourselves, our children, our neighbors, in? short, for all our countrymen and all their posterity, without the utmost agonies of heart and many tears." John Adams 1775

[shyfrog]

"Nonviolence is fine as long as it works."
~Malcolm X

[MTPorcupine3]

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. -George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952

[shyfrog]

"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." ~H.H. The Dalai Lama

[MTPorcupine3]

"All too many of the other great tragedies - Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the holocaust, to name but a few - were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations.  Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia required here.  If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wermacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.  'My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.  The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do.  But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late.  The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees.  However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once." Judge Alex Kozinski, 9th Circuit., in case Silveira vs Lockyer.

[VincentS]

In the Virginia Resolution of 1798, James Madison wrote of the principle of interposition:

    That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.

Here Madison asserts what is implied in nullification laws – that state governments not only have the right to resist unconstitutional federal acts, but that, in order to protect liberty, they are "duty bound to interpose" or stand between the federal government and the people of the state.

[VincentS]

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

[Pat McCotter]

"The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil." - Henry Louis Mencken

[KBCraig]

"Are you going to go for it, or are you going to give up?"
--Les Paul, at age 90

[shyfrog]

"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion,
Instead of Truth they use Equivocation,
And eke it out with mental Reservation,
Which is to good Men an Abomination."
~ Benjamin Franklin

Simply stated, it is sagacious to eschew obfuscation 

[Raineyrocks]

"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion,
Instead of Truth they use Equivocation,
And eke it out with mental Reservation,
Which is to good Men an Abomination."
~ Benjamin Franklin

Simply stated, it is sagacious to eschew obfuscation 

Whoa!  The day I understand that quote is the day I'll actually understand certain bible versuses or maybe spell the plural of versus correctly! 

[Raineyrocks]

Actually, I don't desire a new car either.  I was making a joke.

I'll laugh Kat!