Food For Thought

Government is actually the worst failure of
civilized man. There has never been a really
good one, and even those that are most tolerable
are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
             ~ H. L. Mencken






Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make
a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
             ~ Michel de Montaigne





Democracy is four wolves and a lamb
voting on what to have for lunch.
             ~ Ambrose Bierce





If you can conceive of morality without god,
why can you not conceive of society without
government?
             ~ Peter Saint-André





All great truths begin as blasphemies.
             ~ George Bernard Shaw







The philosopher has never killed any priests,
whereas the priest has killed a great many
philosophers.
             ~ Denis Diderot






Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.
             ~ J. Krishnamurthi







All Bibles are man-made.
             ~ Thomas Edison








The trouble with the world is that the stupid are
cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
             ~ Bertrand Russell







It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are
punished unless they kill in large numbers and to
the sound of trumpets.
             ~ Voltaire





What difference does it make to the dead,
the orphans, and the homeless, whether the
mad destruction is wrought under the name
of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty
and democracy?
             ~ Mohandas Gandhi






The injury we do and the one we suffer are not
weighed in the same scale.
             ~ Aesop





The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster,
an artificial person run amok, responsible only to
its own soulless self.
             ~ William Dugger




It is a government of the people by the people
for the people no longer; it is a government of
corporations by corporations for corporations.
             ~ Rutherford B. Hayes





He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than
he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
             ~ Thomas Jefferson



I have seldom met an intelligent person whose
views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
             ~ James Buchanan





In order to learn, one must change one's mind.
             ~ Orson Scott Card





It was, of course, a lie what you read about my
religious convictions, a lie which is being
systematically repeated. I do not believe in a
personal god and I have never denied this but
have expressed it clearly. If something is in
me which can be called religious, then it is
the unbounded admiration for the structure
of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
             ~ Albert Einstein



It's not what you don't know that hurts you.
It's what you know that just isn't so.
             ~ Satchel Paige






All natural institutions of churches, whether
Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me
no other than human inventions, set up to
terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize
power and profit.
             ~ Thomas Paine





It is hard to free fools from chains they revere.
             ~ Voltaire






. . . the Government of the United States of
America is not, in any sense, founded on the
Christian religion . . .
             ~ George Washington Administration,
                Treaty of Tripoli





None are more hopelessly enslaved than those
who falsely believe they are free.
             ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe






Religion, comprises a system of wishful illusions
together with a disavowal of reality,
such as we find in an isolated form
nowhere else but in amentia,
in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
             ~ Sigmund Freud






I am amazed how many people on this planet are
happy and free and never even saw the US constitution.
             ~ Reason





The compulsion to do good is an innate American
trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that
they always should, may, and actually can choose
somebody with whom to share their blessings.
Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people
into the acceptance of gifts.
             ~ Ivan Illich




There are three truths: my truth, your truth,
and the truth.
             ~ Chinese proverb




Prohibition goes beyond reason in that it
attempts to control a man's appetite through
legislation. A prohibition law strikes a
blow at the very principles this country
was founded upon.
             ~ Abraham Lincoln





Religion is the end of love and honesty,
the beginning of confusion;
faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.
             ~ Tao Te Ching





Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
             ~ Elbert Hubbard








When you give food to the poor, they call you a
saint. When you ask why the poor have no food,
they call you a communist.
             ~ Archbishop Helder Camara




Git yer guns, the liberal folks are gonna let the
coloreds vote!
             ~ Unknown





A celibate clergy is an especially good idea,
because it tends to suppress any hereditary
propensity toward fanaticism.
             ~ Carl Sagan






The greatest artists of this world
are never puritans,
and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
             ~ H. L. Mencken







Religion is an insult to human dignity.
With or without it, you'd have good people doing
good things and evil people doing bad things, but
for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
             ~ Steven Weinberg





Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty
sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
             ~ John Morley







If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually
does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate,
they eventually do. The same happens in the
absence of prayers.
             ~ Steve Allen






If you believe in the existence of fairies at the
bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for
the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis,
ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest
of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
             ~ Jonathan Meades




Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read
history, is man's original virtue. It is through
disobedience that progress has been made,
through disobedience and through rebellion.
             ~ Oscar Wilde






Any fool can make a rule,
and any fool will mind it.
             ~ Henry David Thoreau






No one rules if no one obeys.
             ~ TaoDo





I do not feel obliged to believe that the
same God who has endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect has intended us
to forgo their use.
             ~ Galileo Galilei





A man's ethical behavior should be based
effectually on sympathy, education, and
social ties and needs;
no religious basis is necessary.
Man would indeed be in a poor way
if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment
and hope of reward after death.
             ~ Albert Einstein





The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid
cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have
afflicted the human race have had their origin
in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
             ~ Thomas Paine






The exact contrary of what is generally believed
is often the truth.
             ~ Jean de la Bruyère







The truth is that there is nothing noble in being
superior to somebody else. The only real nobility
is in being superior to your former self.
             ~ Whitney Young





Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy
and who try to combine their greed for wealth
with their desire for a happy afterlife.
             ~ Kahlil Gibran





There must be more to life
than having everything.
             ~ Maurice Sendak





If you understand everything,
you must be misinformed.
             ~ Japanese Proverb






When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a
Christian or a European, or anything else, you
are being violent. Do you see why it is violent?
It is because you are separating yourself
from the rest of mankind.
When you separate yourself by belief,
by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.
So a man who is seeking to understand violence
does not belong to any country, to any religion, o any political party or partial system;
he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
             ~ J. Krishnamurthi


I saw a human skull the other day.F
There was an inscription below it:
Look long and hard at me,
for I was once as you are
and you will soon be as I am.
             ~ Unknown







Be happy while you're living,
for you're a long time dead.
             ~ Scottish proverb





Life is too short to waste in critical peep or
cynic bark, quarrel or reprimand:
It will soon be dark.
             ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson








We will be known by the tracks we leave behind.
             ~ Dakota proverb










Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.
             ~ Satchel Paige






Your every decision conspires
to make this moment happen.
             ~ Christi Philpott





Everyone's values are defined by what they
will tolerate when it is done to others.
             ~ William Greider





The modern conservative is engaged
in one of man's oldest exercises
in moral philosophy;
that is the search for a superior moral
justification for selfishness.
             ~ John K. Galbraith






May your fondest wish be granted.
             ~ Traditional Chinese curse




Just as a picture is drawn by an artist,
surroundings are created by the activities
of the mind.
             ~ Buddha







I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas
against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect
should be good and it would spread a lively terror.
             ~ Winston Churchill commenting on
                the British use of poison gas against
                he Iraqis after World War I





Because I do it with one small ship,
I am called a terrorist.
You do it with a whole fleet
and are called an emperor.
             ~ St. Augustine







A terrorist is someone who has a bomb
but can’t afford an air force.
             ~ William Blum





Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism.
Well, there's a really easy way;
stop participating in it.
             ~ Noam Chomsky






Once you have seen certain things, you can't
un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political
an act as seeing something.
             ~ Arundhati Roy





Stopping terrorism is simple. Just quit screwing
around with other people's countries and the
terrorists will go home. But the government of
the United States wants to go on screwing around
with other people's countries, refuses to stop,
indeed views it as Manifest Destiny for the
United States Government to persist in screwing
around with other people's countries, and views the inconvenience, increased tax burden,
loss of civil liberties, and even deaths among the American people
as just another cost of doing business.
             ~ Michael Rivero



Believe those who are seeking the truth;
doubt those who find it.
             ~ Andre Gide







Everyone laughs and cries in the same language.
             ~ dreamslaughter





To be wronged is nothing
unless you continue to remember it.
             ~ Confucius








Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the
imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
             ~ Samuel Johnson






Every great advance in natural knowledge has
involved the absolute rejection of authority.
             ~ Thomas Huxley







When encountering a new philosophy or religion,
do not convert, but rather assimilate.
             ~ Shawn Mikula




The multitude of books is a great evil.
There is no limit to this fever for writing.
~ Martin Luther





If the doctor told me
I had only six minutes to live,
I'd type a little faster.
             ~ Isaac Asimov







Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery,
I feel a strong impulse to see it
tried on him personally.
             ~ Abraham Lincoln








Peace is over rated. Any slave can have peace.
Just pick the cotton.
             ~ TheSong





I prayed for twenty years but received no answer
until I prayed with my legs.
             ~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave







Written laws are like spider's webs;
they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor,
but would be torn in pieces
by the rich and powerful.
             ~ Anacharsis




You simply cannot hang a millionaire in America.
             ~ Bourke Cockran






Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side?
And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
             ~ Mark Twain








In matters of conscience,
the law of majority has no place.
             ~ Mohandas Gandhi







Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
             ~ Tao Te Ching





The first clergyman was the first rascal
who met the first fool.
              Voltaire











I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
             ~ Robert Frost








The state has not the right to leave every man
free to profess and embrace whatever religion
he may desire.
             ~ Pope Pius IX







I know of no crime that has not been defended
by the church, in one form or other.
The church is not a pioneer;
it accepts a new truth, last of all,
and only when denial has become useless.
             ~ Robert G. Ingersoll






Reality is that which,
when you stop believing in it,
doesn't go away.
             ~ Philip K. Dick







You know your god is man-made when he hates
all the same people you do.
             ~ [Usenet]





If you talk to God, you are praying.
 If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
             ~ Thomas Szasz





One man's magic is another man's engineering.
Supernatural is a null word.
             ~ Robert Heinlein







Insanity in individuals is something rare;
but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs
it is the rule.
             ~ Nietzsche






Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.
The obedient must be slaves.
             ~ Henry David Thoreau






The crimes of the United States have been
systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless,
but very few people have
actually talked about them.
             ~ Harold Pinter




The truth is more important than the facts.
             ~ Frank Lloyd Wright









Never be deceived that the rich will
allow you to vote away their wealth.
             ~ Lucy Parsons








Religion is what keeps the poor
from murdering the rich.
             ~ Napoleon





The Pope!?!
How many divisions has he got?
             ~ Joseph Stalin







Kill a man, and you are an assassin.
Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror.
Kill everyone, and you are a god.
             ~ Jean Rostand





I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians.
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
             ~ Mohandas Gandhi (disputed)








Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
             ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson








Take only memories; leave nothing but footprints.
             ~ Chief Seattle









The wise man will love; all others will desire.
             ~ Afranius





When did I realize I was God?
Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized
I was talking to myself.
             ~ Jack Gurney - "The Ruling Class"







Isn't killing people in the name of God
a pretty good definition of insanity?
             ~ Arthur C. Clarke





I contend that we are both atheists.
I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
When you understand why you dismiss all
the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours.
             ~ Stephen Roberts




The law, in its majestic equality,
forbids the rich, as well as the poor,
to sleep under the bridges,
to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
             ~ Anatole France




Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem.
Our problem is that people are obedient all
over the world in the face of poverty and s
tarvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.
Our problem is that people are obedient
while the jails are full of petty thieves,
and all the while the grand thieves are
running the country. That's our problem.
             ~ Howard Zinn



We must question the story logic of having an
all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates
faulty humans, and then blames them
for his own mistakes.
             ~ Gene Roddenberry





If child molestation is actually your concern,
how come we don't see Bradley tanks
knocking down Catholic churches?
             ~ Bill Hicks, 1993,
                referencing the Waco siege







Secular schools can never be tolerated
because such schools have no religious
instruction, and a general moral instruction
without a religious foundation is built on air;
consequently, all character training and religion
must be derived from faith ...
we need believing people.
             ~ Adolf Hitler





Which is it, is man one of God's blunders
or is God one of man's?
             ~ Nietzsche









I have examined all of the known superstitions
of the world and I do not find in our superstitions
of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are
all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity
has made one-half the world fools
and the other half hypocrites.
             ~ Unknown
                (Thomas Jefferson disputed)




Do you see now that your self-righteousness
was nothing more than breeding
and years of privilege?
You know, we are one nation under a god.
Yes, you were right. An angry, crack slinging god
who decorates with bullets and spent condoms,
a blind god whose eyes are just like yours.
             ~ Solipsist by Henry Rollins




Patriotism is your conviction that this country
is superior to all other countries
because you were born in it.
             ~ George Bernard Shaw








Unless Americans come to realize that they
are not stronger in the world because they
have the bomb but weaker because of their
vulnerability to atomic attack, they are not
likely to conduct their policy, in a spirit that
furthers the arrival at an understanding.
             ~ Albert Einstein





Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most
wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of
things for the greatest good of everyone.
             ~ John Maynard Keynes






The same people that wrote the bible
thought the world was flat.
             ~ Unknown - (disputed)





The enemy is anybody who's going to
get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
             ~ Joseph Heller





The ink of the scholar is holier than
the blood of the martyr.
             ~ Prophet Muhammad




I'm ineffably tired of pro-war ideologues
moaning about how the anti-war folk are
just 'complaining' without 'offering solutions'
to global dilemmas. Peace doesn't need a
freekin moral, ethical, economical, or
political qualification; war does.
Peace doesn't ravage, plunder, rape, or kill; war does.
Peace does not need justification, war does.
             ~ <|OnAir|>



If pigs could vote, the man with the slop
bucket would be elected swineherd every
time, no matter how much slaughtering
he did on the side.
             ~ Orson Scott Card



I never would have agreed to the formulation
of the Central Intelligence Agency back in
forty-seven, if I had known it would become
the American Gestapo.
             ~ Harry S Truman, 1961 (disputed)





The people who have really made history
are the martyrs.
             ~ Aleister Crowley






Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko.
And we stand a better chance under that
guise because all the serious people like
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kennedy and
Gandhi got shot.
             ~ John Lennon






If I could find a way to get [Saddam Hussein]
out of there, even putting a contract out on him
, … ahh … if the CIA still did that sort of thing
, . . . ahh . . . assuming it ever did . . . . . . .
I would be for it.
             ~ Richard Nixon





Does anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was?
 . . . And do you know how far away he was? . . .
Two hundred and fifty feet. He was two hundred
and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving
target.He got off three shots with a bolt action
rifle in six seconds, and got two hits, including a head shot.
Do you know where those men learned to shoot like that? . . . In the Marines! Outstanding!
Those individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies
leave my island, you will be able to do the same thing!
             ~ Full Metal Jacket


I love talking about the Kennedy assassination.
The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it.
I'm fascinated that our government could lie to
us so blatantly, so obviously for so long,
and we do absolutely nothing about it.
             ~ Bill Hicks




The nationalist not only does not disapprove
of atrocities committed by his own side,
but he has a remarkable capacity
for not even hearing about them.
             ~ George Orwell






Men who believe absurdities
will commit atrocities.
             ~ Voltaire




Our government has kept us in a perpetual state
of fear, kept us in a continuous stampede of
patriotic fervor, with the cry of grave national
emergency. Always there has been some terrible
evil at home or some monstrous foreign power
that was going to gobble us up
if we did not blindly rally behind it.
             ~ General Douglas MacArthur


Few people are capable of expressing with
equanimity opinions which differ from the
prejudices of their social environment.
Most people are even incapable of
forming such opinions.
             ~ Albert Einstein





If we'd been born where they were born and
taught what they were taught,
we would believe what they believe.
             ~ A church sign in Northern Ireland







We choose our joys and sorrows
long before we experience them.
             ~ Kahlil Gibran






My humble friend,
we know not how to live this life
which is so short yet seek one that never ends.
             ~ Anatole France





It makes no difference
as to the name of the God,
since love is the real God of all in the world.
             ~ Apache







Life is like an overlong drama through which
we sit being nagged by the vague memories
of having read the reviews.
             ~ John Updike






On the outskirts of every agony
sits some observant fellow who points.
             ~ Virginia Woolf







God favors no group. Only religions do that.
             ~ Bumper Sticker





Guns make us powerful;
butter will only make us fat.
             ~ Nazi Hermann Göring








Everyone likes to say Hitler did this and Hitler
did that. But the truth is Hitler did very little.
He was a world class asshole, but the evil
actually done, from the death camps to
World War Two, was all done by citizens
who were afraid to question if what they
were told by their government was the truth
or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.
             ~ Michael Rivero



... The CIA has overthrown functioning
democracies in over twenty countries.
             ~ John Stockwell, former CIA official







Each nation knowing it has the only true
religion and the only sane system of government,
each despising all the others, each an ass
and not suspecting it.
             ~ Mark Twain







All men are created equal.
They are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, among these are
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
             ~ Ho Chi Minh, 1945,
                as Democratic Republic of Vietnam
                was created







If there has to be a blood bath,
let's get it over with.
             ~Ronald Reagan, Vietnam






You will kill ten of our men,
and we will kill one of yours,
and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
             ~ Ho Chi Minh







I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong ...
No Vietcong ever called me nigger.
             ~ Muhammad Ali,
                stripped of boxing title, convicted of a
                felony for refusing to serve
                during the Vietnam War






I can envision a small cottage somewhere, with a lot of writing paper, and a dog, and a fireplace and maybe enough money to give myself some Irish coffee now and then and entertain my two friends.
             ~ Richard Van de Geer, letter, 1975,
                last American to die in Vietnam War,
                Time, 1985



If you are required to kill someone today,
on the promise of a political leader
that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow,
believe me, you are not only a double murderer,
you are a suicide, too.
             ~ Katherine Anne Porter







Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000
American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting,
we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through
crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit
that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
             ~ Dalton Trumbo



Vietnamese deaths during the Vietnam war were
up to 4,000,000 people.
The approximate population of Vietnam was
35 million in 1960.
This means that the war killed 11 percent
of the total population of Vietnam.
The population of the United States is
308,000,000. Proportionately,
11 percent of this is 34,000,000.
That would be like killing every man,
woman and child in
Iowa,
Mississippi,
Arkansas,
Kansas,
Utah,
Nevada,
New Mexico,
West Virginia,
Nebraska,
Idaho,
Maine,
New Hampshire,
Hawaii,
Rhode Island,
Montana,
Delaware,
South Dakota,
Alaska,
North Dakota,
Vermont,
Wyoming
and District of Columbia.



Those who hate and fight must stop themselves;
otherwise it is not stopped.
             ~ Spock, Day of the Dove






I spent thirty-three years in the marines,
most of my time being a high-class
muscle man for big business, for Wall Street
and the bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
             ~ General Smedley Butler, Marine





When a stupid man is doing something he is
ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
             ~ George Bernard Shaw









Nothing except a battle lost can be half as
melancholy as a battle won.
             ~ Duke of Wellington






I thought dying for your country was the
worst thing that could happen to you.
I think killing for your country can be a lot worse;
because that's the memory that haunts.
             ~ Bob Kerry told to The New York Times





I dream that someday the United States will be
on the side of the peasants in some civil war.
I dream that we will be the ones who will help
the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about
land reform and education and health facilities
for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or
Amnesty International comes to count the bodies
and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
             ~ Richard Cohen



Throughout the world, on any given day, a man,
woman or child is likely to be displaced,
tortured, killed or disappeared,
at the hands of governments
or armed political groups. More often than not,
the United States shares the blame.
             ~ Amnesty International,
                in its annual report on U.S. Military aid
                and human rights, 1996



It is not so much the suffering
as the senselessness of it
that is unendurable.
             ~ Nietzsche







They made a wasteland and called it peace.
             ~ Tacitus







We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us
victory, because we believe we are right;
but those on the other side pray to Him, too,
for victory, believing they are right.
What must He think of us?
             ~ Abraham Lincoln





Pity the warrior that kills all his foe.
             ~ Seyetik and Sisko, citing a
                fragment of G'Trok's Fall of Kang



I am tired of fighting, our chiefs are killed...
it is cold and we have no blankets.
The little children are freezing to death...
hear me, my chiefs, I am tired:
my heart is sick and sad.
From where the sun now stands...
I will fight no more forever...
             ~ Chief Joseph





I did not know how to say goodbye.
It was harder still, when I refused to say it.
             ~ Native American saying




If we could read the secret history
of our enemies, we should find in each
man's life sorrow and suffering
enough to disarm all hostility.
             ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow





Usually when people are sad,
they don't do anything.
They just cry over their condition.
But when they get angry,
they bring about a change.
             ~ Malcolm X






When great changes occur in history,
when great principles are involved,
as a rule the majority are wrong.
             ~ Eugene V. Debs






The Church says that the earth is flat,
but I know that it is round, for I have
seen its shadow on the moon, and I
have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.
             ~ Robert G. Ingersoll
                Quoting Ferdinand Magellan
                - no citation






A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum
shows that faith does not prove anything.
             ~ Nietzsche







In all the disputes, which have excited
Christians against each other,
Rome has invariably decided in favor
of that opinion which tended most
towards the suppression of the human
intellect and the annihilation
of the reasoning powers.
             ~ Voltaire





Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced,
not because it has been sober, responsible,
and cautious, but because it has been playful,
rebellious, and immature.
             ~ Tom Robbins





Fascism is capitalism in decay.
             ~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin








Giving money and power to government is like
giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
             ~ P. J. O'Rourke







The police are not here to create disorder.
They're here to preserve disorder.
             ~ Ex-Chicago Mayor Daley
                during the 1968 riots







Pain is certain, suffering is optional.
             ~ Buddha







We need a common enemy to unite us.
             ~ Condoleezza Rice, March 2000







I don't know that atheists should be
considered citizens, nor should they
be considered patriots.
This is one nation under God.
             ~ President George Bush,
                August 27, 1988





You're not to be so blind with patriotism
that you can't face reality.
Wrong is wrong,
no matter who does it or says it.
             ~ Malcolm X






In the end,
we will remember not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends.
             ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.






Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies,
each with two hundred billion stars,
then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
             ~ Ron Patterson




The great nations
have always acted like gangsters,
and the small nations like prostitutes.
             ~ Stanley Kubrick





Science has done more for the development of
western civilization in one hundred years
than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
             ~ Jeff Burroughs




It is my conviction that killing
under the cloak of war is nothing
but an act of murder.
             ~ Albert Einstein







I'm so sick of arming the world, then
sending troops over to destroy the
fucking arms; you know what I mean?
We keep arming these little countries,
then we go and blow the shit out of them.
We're like the bullies of the world, y'know.
We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane,
throwing the pistol at the sheepherder's feet.

‘Pick it up.’

‘I don't wanna pick it up, mister, you'll shoot me.’

‘Pick up the gun.’

‘Mister, I don't want no trouble, I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff. I ain't looking for no trouble, Mister.’

‘Pick up the gun.’

The sheepherder picks up the gun,

three shots ring out.

‘You all saw him, he had a gun.’
             ~ Bill Hicks


I am convinced that I am acting
as the agent of our Creator.
By fighting off the Jews,
I am doing the Lord's work.
             ~ Adolf Hitler







It is part of the general pattern of misguided
policy that our country is now geared to an
arms economy which was bred in an artificially
induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured
upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
             ~ General Douglas MacArthur




Americans used to roar like lions for liberty;
now we bleat like sheep for security.
             ~ Norman Vincent Peale






The most heinous and the cruelest crimes
of which history has record have been committed
under the cover of religion
or equally noble motives.
             ~ Mohandas Gandhi






I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked
the local missionary priest,

‘If I did not know about God and sin,
would I go to hell?’

‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’

‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
             ~ Annie Dillard




Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful
without having to believe that there are fairies
at the bottom of it too?
             ~ Douglas Adams







Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave
every place worse than they found it.
             ~ Charles Dickens





I sometimes think that God in creating man
somewhat overestimated his ability.
             ~ Oscar Wilde







Now, my good man, this is no time
for making enemies.
             ~ Voltaire, deathbed,
                when asked to renounce Satan






If English was good enough for Jesus,
it's good enough for them Mexicans.
             ~ Texas politician,
                Spanish as a second language




Probably no nation is rich enough
to pay for both war and education.
             ~ Braham Flexner





The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
The history of liberty is a history of limitations
of governmental power, not the increase of it.
             ~ Woodrow Wilson





Most of the things worth doing in the world
had been declared impossible
before they were done.
             ~ Louis Brandeis







It does me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are twenty gods, or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
             ~ Thomas Jefferson






In nature,
there are neither rewards nor punishments;
there are consequences.
             ~ Robert G. Ingersoll







No Nazi woman will ever be motivated
to work for money. Serving men is our only wish.
             ~ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink






We always obeyed the law.
Isn't that what you do in America?
Even if you don't agree with a law personally,
you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos.
             ~ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink,
                explaining Nazi policy





I hit him to get his attention.
I shot him to calm him down.
I killed him to reason with him.
             ~ Henry Rollins






Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
Under the clouds of war,
it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
             ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower




How good bad music and bad reasons sound
when we march against an enemy!
             ~ Nietzsche





How long would authority ... exist,
if not for the willingness of the mass to become
soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
             ~ Emma Goldman






My final point about alcohol, about drugs,
about pornography; what business is it of
yours what I do, read, buy, see, fuck
or take into my body as long as I don't harm
another human being whilst on this planet?
And for those of you having a little moral
dilemma on how to answer this,
I'll answer for you.
None of your fucking business!
Take that to the bank,
cash it and take it on a vacation outta my fucking life.
             ~ Bill Hicks




If you ever drop your keys into a river of
molten lava, let 'em go, because, man, they're gone.
             ~ Jack Handey





You get what anyone gets; you get a lifetime.
             ~ Death, Neil Gaiman Comic Sandman








Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of
awesome mystical power. We know this
because they manage to be invisible
and pink at the same time.
Like all religions, the Faith of the
Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon
both logic and faith.
We have faith that they are pink;
we logically know that they are invisible
because we can't see them.
             ~ Steve Eley



All our lauded technological progress,
our very civilization, is like the axe
in the hand of the pathological criminal.
             ~ Albert Einstein



I don’t really miss God,
but I sure miss Santa Claus!
             ~ Courtney Love






Part Two