(3089/898) Answers a burden

385) Absexual (ab sek' shoo el) n. 1. Individuals, especially in the public eye, who exhibit an obsessive negative focus on sexual images or other people's sexual behavior 2. a word coined by sex educator and writer Carol Queen. 3. Andrea Dworkin, Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schafly, Dan Quayle [...]

Future Sex magazine (5/94)

386) The current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism, for we shall find arresting similarities between the two disciplines.

Karen Armstrong
A History of God (1993)

387)
What seems wrong to you is right for him
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship
These mean nothing to Me.
        I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than on another.
        Hindus do Hindu things
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.

Jalal ad-Din Rumi
God speaking to Moses in
The Masnawi (The Sufi Bible)
quoted in This Longing: Teaching Stories and
Selected Letters of Rumi (1988),
trans. and ed. by Coleman Banks and John Moyne,
cited by Karen Armstrong in
A History of God (1993)

388) Have you ever caught yourself reading? You know, you're sitting in a chair engrossed in a good book, enjoying the story and the author's prose-style, and then suddenly, it's as if you have an out-of-the-body experience and you catch sight of yourself as you really are: not trading wisecracks with Philip Marlowe, or struggling with Moriarty atop the Reichenbach Falls, but as someone sitting alone in a room, with a book open on your lap. It can be quite shocking. [...] It is this rare ability to step in and out of the picture which distinguishes reading. Professor Keats perceived as much when he wrote to his sister describing the pleasure he should take in being able to sit beside a window on Lake Geneva and spend all day reading, like the picture of someone reading. Like a picture of someone reading [...] that's a lovely revealing sentence [...] It conjures up such a powerful image of someone not only living but lost in the pages of a book, oblivious to the exterior physical world, to the hand which turns the page, even to the eye and visual field which conducts the printed information to the brain. Without a book I am chained to the earth. Reading I am Prometheus Unbound.

Philip Kerr
A Philosophical Investigation (1992)

389) Questions are a burden for others. Answers are a prison for oneself.

Propaganda slogan
The Prisoner (TV series, 1967)
series created by George Markstein
and developed by Patrick McGoohan

390) The real national disease in the United States is not RSI [Repetitive Strain Injuries] but the ongoing quest to blame your problems on other people and to use the body of law to make them pay through their noses for your misery, misfortune, or stupidity.

Bill Machrone
"Pigs, Ducks, and RSI"
PC Magazine (5/17/94)

391) As we argue about evolution, the widespread applications of antibiotics and pesticides are producing new strains of insects and bacteria that are resistant to virtually everything we can throw at them. The even more rapidly mutating AIDS virus is sweeping away whole segments of societies. A booming genetic-engineering industry is on the threshold of creating wonders (and perhaps horrors) undreamed of before, while the world's natural life forms are going extinct at a rate that matches the worst cataclysms recorded from prehistoric times. Whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not, evolution, as ever, matters a great deal.

Part of the problem is that evolution is still widely perceived as no more than a theory. Scientists, the creationists say, are proceeding on faith just like everyone else,; its their religion versus ours. Although there is abundant hard proof of natural selection and the origin of species in the form of fossils embedded in the rock of ages, the evidence is far more subtle among living creatures. [...] When creationists see [disagreements between experts], they sense a flaw in the basic idea. But good science, unlike dogma, thrives on constant testing and debate. The fact that the field of evolutionary biology itself keeps evolving is a sign of health.

Douglas H. Chadwick
"Evolution, Right Before Our Eyes" in
New York Times Book Review (5/22/94)

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 757 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.