The saga begins (3089/898)

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals v. 16 (1867) [CQ]

In November of 1990, I began collecting from the stuff I was reading interesting quotes, excerpts and ideas, at first informally, and then in a slightly more organized manner. When I had a hard disk crash about 4 years ago (for a drive I hadn't backed up in quite some time) I had (if I remember correctly) about 4500+ selections. Of these, 3089 remain, the latest dated 1998. (I have more collected since then, but I've sorta given up numbering them.)

It's now August 7 of 2006, and, barring any unanticipated events, such as resignation or impeachment and conviction, there remain 898 days for us to suffer through the reign of George W. Bush.

So, that's 3089 quotes dying to be shared, and 898 days in which I desperately need to be distracted. The math works out to an average of just under 3.5 quotes a day, so here's the first three -- let's see how long I can keep this up.

1) Nearly everyone in the art professions positively beams when I say that I believe in an integration of stage and film arts. Subsequent to this enthusiastic approval, however, I have seldom experienced anything but timidic back-pedaling, from either filmmakers or choreographers, because of an imagined threat to their particular specialties. "The Bewitched" endured more of this than any other work of mine.

Fairly early in my creative life I discovered that what filmmakers and choreographers really want is musical yardage goods, to constitute 'background' for whatever spur-of-the-moment ideas they might concoct. To them it is literally inconceivable that a dramatic composer could fashion a purpose in drama that is equal to theirs. Collaboration is just a word. If they are not autocrats what can life be worth?

At first I was amused. Later, this turned into a feeling of contempt. Tentatively. I outlined something called "Yardage Goods", to offer "background" for every human emotion or reaction, from moral depravity to volcanic cataclysm. It was to be sold by the piece, or - more inexpensively- by the bolt. There was even an outline for "Background Music for Filibusters in the U.S. Senate." But my daimon does not function through negativism, and the idea barely got beyond an outline.

Harry Partch
liner notes for The Bewitched (LP recording, 1957)

2) The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices ... [that] usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems ... A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors ... [Good administrators] depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they've done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections ... One of the hardest things to find is people who actually make decisions.

Frank Herbert
God Emperor of Dune (1981)

3) Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code - family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy, ... restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an "obscene" sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than the failure to abide by the code.

Robert Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land (orig. 1961, uncut 1991)

Sources

[CQ] - The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)


There's no rhyme or reason to this -- I just plan on posting them as I collected them, at an average pace of 3.5 quotes per day.