Monday, December 27, 2010

"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the Word is made flesh."

-- Leonard Cohen

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."

-Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Saturday, December 04, 2010

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

--John Kenneth Galbraith

Saturday, November 27, 2010

"Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

Thursday, November 25, 2010


"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."


-- Meister Eckhart

Friday, November 19, 2010

"I'm a part of Willie Nelson's world and I love it, but at the same time, I'm part of the Grateful Dead's world. One night I might be playing twin fiddles at the Broken Spoke and the next night I'll be down at Antone's playing blues. In that way Texas is a paradise, because all that music is here."

-- Doug Sahm, 1975

Thursday, November 18, 2010

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."

-- P. J. O'Rourke

Sunday, October 31, 2010

"Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret."

-- Laurence J. Peter
"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

--Horace Mann
, founder of Antioch College

Friday, October 29, 2010


"You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"


--Rod Serling

Friday, October 08, 2010

"Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

-- E.F. Schumacher

Monday, October 04, 2010

"I've been looking for that particular son of a bitch for seven years. I could have been a doctor, or an architect."

--Vivian Stanshall (Bad Blood)

Saturday, September 25, 2010

"The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity. As a fresh start, she should give away all her endowments to the poor and needy. The clergy should live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
,
Letters and Papers from Prison

Friday, September 24, 2010

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

-- George Orwell

Sunday, September 05, 2010

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."

-- Edith Sitwell

Friday, September 03, 2010

"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity."

-- Frank Leahy

Thursday, August 12, 2010

"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life — except death itself — was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."

--David E. Davis, Jr.
, advertising writer and magazine publisher, recounting a nearly fatal auto racing accident at age 25 that left him disfigured.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

"We have to repent of our blindness, our lukewarmness, and our disobedience, and turn back to the central truth of Christ as Lord and Saviour; an ethical system will not save us here, nor a timid sentimentalism, nor an excited emotional return, nor a dilettante mysticism.

We have to find that deep contrition which is the condition of His abiding.

Repentance is not a mere feeling of sorrow or contrition for an act of wrongdoing. The regret I feel when I act impatiently or speak crossly is not repentance... Repentance is contrition for what we are in our fundamental beings, that we are wrong in our deepest roots because our internal government is by Self and not by God.

And it is an activity of the whole person. Unless I will to be different, the mind will not follow.

True repentance brings an urge to be different, because of the sense of the incessant movement of what I am, forming, forming, forming what I shall be in the years to come."


-- Florence Allshorn (1887-1950)

Thursday, July 29, 2010

"An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness."

"Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive."

"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."

"If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate."

"Life is just one damned thing after another."

"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."

"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."

"To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing."


--Elbert Hubbard, (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915)

Friday, July 23, 2010

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

--John Adams

Thursday, July 22, 2010

‎"For some it was crazy, for others it was stupid, and others a day of courage and bravery. For me, it was a day to enjoy being on the bike."

--Carlos Sastre, on his ultimately futile attack on Stage 17 of the Tour de France

Sunday, July 11, 2010

"Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord preferred to live with whores & sinners, seeing I go in for that myself."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Venetian Epigrams, as translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Sunday, June 27, 2010

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

-- Barry Goldwater

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

"Whatever be our conception of the universe we must, it is obvious, start somehow; we must begin with something; and the something with which we begin, from the very fact that we do begin with it, must itself be without explanation, since, if something else were invoked to explain it, then the 'something else' must needs be logically prior to that which it is invoked to explain. Thus the 'something' being explained by a logically prior 'something else' could not have been ultimate."

-- C. E. M. Joad

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."

-- Andre Malraux
French author & resistance leader (1901 - 1976)

Friday, June 04, 2010

"When the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing of our own to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us fight—then we find out whether or not we live by faith."

-- Thomas Merton

Sunday, May 30, 2010

"That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans."

-- C. S. Lewis (Surprised By Joy, 1955)
"Why be a man when you can be a success?"

-- Bertolt Brecht

Friday, May 28, 2010

“Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

-- Hugh Latimer

Thursday, May 27, 2010

"Water is for washing your feet. Beer is for drinking."

-- Kosmo Spoetzl

Monday, May 24, 2010

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

- Douglas Adams

Thursday, May 06, 2010

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

-- Oliver Cromwell

Thursday, April 29, 2010

"The opening chords are from the last movement of Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. It goes from there to a Skip James motif. Following that it moves to a Gregorian chant, Dies Irae. It's the most scary one in the Episcopal hymn books, it's all about the day of judgment. Then it returns to the Vaughan Williams chords, followed by a blues run of undetermined origin, then back to Skip James and so forth."

-- John Fahey, describing his piece, "Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania/Alabama Border" as found on the album Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'"

-- Charles M. Schulz

Sunday, April 11, 2010

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."

-- Stephen Jay Gould

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."

--H. L. Mencken

Friday, March 26, 2010

"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with."

--Tennessee Williams

Thursday, March 25, 2010

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

-- David T. Wolf

Monday, March 22, 2010

"Failures are very public, and successes are short lived. It's the pleasure of drawing funny pictures that makes up for it."

--Bill Watterson
US cartoonist (1958 - )

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

-- Tom Lehrer

Monday, March 08, 2010

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

-- G. K. Chesterton

Saturday, March 06, 2010



"Victory or death!"

-- Col. William Barret Travis

Friday, March 05, 2010

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."

-- Lord Acton

Thursday, March 04, 2010

"Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."

-- Harry S. Truman

Thursday, February 18, 2010

"Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable."

-- Samuel Johnson

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

“When I was young, I was told: 'You'll see, when you're fifty.' I am fifty and I haven't seen a thing.”

-- Erik Satie
"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised."

-- George F. Will

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."

-- Bertrand Russell

Sunday, February 07, 2010

"All morons hate it when you call them a moron."

-- J.D. Salinger

Monday, January 25, 2010

"Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God."

-- Arvo Pärt

Friday, January 01, 2010

"Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness."

-- Cullen Hightower