513)
It's like Spring-Training in real football.
Nothing personal, but let's forget the star-in-
College shit. Now you're going to learn to
Play Football. Let's try running into things.
First you have to learn to throw your weight
Way out in front. It's got to be ahead of you.
As close to the ground as possible. If you
Don't run into something, you fall down.
Like when you run down hill and lose control.
But in practice here and in real football
You will almost always run into something,
Equal and opposite, and the result will
Lift you both up, like continents colliding.
And the stronger will go forward. That's
What you're getting paid to fucking do.

Robert Ashley
Foreign Experiences (opera, 1994)

514)
No, George, there is your mother, my mother and birth control.
These are three reasons why we should not get married.

Robert Ashley
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (opera, 1991)

515) Up close and personal the [Washington, D.C.] capital community was phony beyond belief or toleration [...] a city of hypocrisy, a Mecca of hypocrisy, a Vatican of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of the place impoverished conversation, undermined friendship, stupefied the mind, saddened the heart. Washington, I learned, was to hypocrisy what Mexico City is to smog, what France is to ethnocentrism, what Chernobyl is to nuclear risk, what Newcastle was to coals.

Paul Weaver
News and the Culture of Lying (1994)

516) A Rhode Island College psychologist says he has uncovered a strange quirk in the voting behavior of people who believe in psychic powers, UFOs, and other elements of the supernatural. While most believers tend to be liberal in their views, Tom Randall [...] says his surveys have shown that a disproportionate number tended to vote for third-party conservatives. [...] Third-party supporters had, by far, the highest level of belief in the paranormal. (Republicans had the lowest.) Randall said that the findings seem to suggest that such supporters of third-party conservatives may be embracing candidates who offer quick, easy, and almost magical solutions to problems. "I suspect a degree of magical thinking characterizes (the type of voter) who is dazzled by the charismatic charm of, say, a Ross Perot..."

C. Eugene Emery, Jr.
"New Age Believers Favor Third-Party Conservatives" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1994)

517) With the advent of spin doctors, lawyers finally have someone they can look down on.

Ed Fitzgerald (10/13/94)

518) The problem for the press is that its core values, such as objectivity and skepticism, do not mesh well with the rally-round-the-flag passions that swept the country in wartime.

Howard Kurtz
Media Circus (1993)

519) As a species, we seem to have reached a plateau in our intellectual development. There is no sign that we are getting smarter. [...] We have learned a lot in 2,000 years, yet much ancient wisdom still seems sound, which makes me think that we have not been making much progress. We still do not know how to resolve conflicts between individual goals and global interests. We are so bad at making decisions that, whenever we can, we leave to chance what we are unsure about.

Marvin Minsky
"Will Robots Inherit the Earth?" in
Scientific American (10/94)

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