(3089/898) Lipstick Traces

136) 'Never get out of the boat.' Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way.

Apocalypse Now (film, 1979)
produced & directed by Francis Coppola
written by John Millius & Francis Coppola
narration written by Michael Herr
spoken by the character "Captain Williard"
played by Martin Sheen

137) There are going to be times when we can't wait for somebody. Now, you're either on the bus or off the bus. If you're on the bus, and you get left behind, then you'll find it again. If you're off the bus in the first place - then it won't make a damn.

Ken Kesey
quoted by Tom Wolfe in
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

138) Our answer [...] is to rely on youth - not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.

Robert F. Kennedy
campaign speech (1968)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History
of the 20th Century (1989)

139) Generation to generation [...] nothing changes in Bohemia.

Nik Cohn
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom:
Rock From the Beginning (1969)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History
of the 20th Century (1989)

140) Everyone knows history moves in circles; the surprise is how big the circles are.

Greil Marcus
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989)

141) Nothing is true; everything is permitted.

Rashid al-Din Sinan
Islamic gnostic, leader of the Levantine Assassins (1192)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History
of the 20th Century (1989)

142) In Berkeley in the mid-1960s, I used to wonder at the way friends made the world new each day by cartwheeling down the street, moment to moment exchanging Trotskyism for anarchism for Stalinism for the occult for drugs for religion while professors who in the 1930s were Communists and now were Freudians explained it all. In every case there was a received answer to every question, which meant there were no questions. Everything seemed possible, and the prospect was terrifying - so "nothing is true," one basis for "everything is possible," was exchanged for one truth, whatever it was. Everything was present save a critical spirit, which might have made real the great adventure in doubt that, as Decartes described it, lay behind his "Cogito, ergo sum": his dead slogan. No doubt the mad multiplication of choices by which "the sixties" were known led straight to a surrender of choice in the next decades, a surrender to authoritarian religion, authoritarian politics- for some, freedom from doubt was always the point, peace of mind worth any price.

Greil Marcus
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History
of the 20th Century (1989)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 854 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.