Friday Photography: Giant Crab Invades Boston!

Daryl Samuel

(3089/898) A quick look back

961) "You were just babies then! she said.

"What?" I said.

"You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!"

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.

"I - I don't know," I said.

"Well I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be portrayed in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look juts wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. [...]

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise.

"Mary," I said, "I don't think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it The Children's Crusade."

She was my friend after that.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

962) You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "My God, my God -" I said to myself, "it's the Children's Crusade."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

963) High school is closer to the core of the American experience that anything else I can think of.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Introduction to
Our Time Is Now: Notes From
the High School Underground (1970)
John Birmingham, ed. [B16]

964) Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Address to Graduating Class
at Bennington College, 1970" in
Wampeters, Foma and Granfaloons (1974)

[Note: The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) erroneously lists this and other Vonnegut quotes as coming from an essay called "When I Was Twenty-One".]

965) We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Mother Night (1961)

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)


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

(3089/898) Dune

958) The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

Frank Herbert
Dune (1965)
spoken by the character
"Paul-Muad'Dib Atreides"

959) One of the most terrible moments in a boy's life ... is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It's a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can't evade it.

Frank Herbert
Dune (1965)
spoken by the character "Paul-Muad'Dib Atreides"

960) Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. When the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Frank Herbert
Dune (1965)

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

(3089/898) Human affairs

951) There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

Karl Popper
The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) [OM]

952) You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

Vaclav Havel
Living In Truth (1986) [CQ]

953) The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Christian Science (1907) [CQ]

954) All sides in a trial want to hide at least some of the truth. ... The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth. ... The prosecution ... wants to make sure the process by which the evidence was obtained is not truthfully presented, because, as often as not, that process will raise questions. ... The judge also has a truth he wants to hide: He often hasn’t been completely candid in describing the facts or the law.

Alan M. Dershowitz
in U.S. News & World Report (8/9/1982) [WQ]

955) When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

William Wrigley, Jr. (widely attributed)
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (5/27/95)

956) They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.

Robert Penn Warren
All The King's Men (1946)
posted by Padraic M. Malinowski [ISQ] (5/26/95)

957) Romanticism is dangerous. Romanticism untrammeled by intellect gives rise to fascism.

Stephen Jay Gould
interviewed by Wim Kayzer (4/9/92)
Glorious Accident (documentary TV series, 1993)

Sources

[CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[IQM] - Internet Quotations mailing list
[ISQ] - Internet Serial-Quotations mailing list
[OM] - Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (1991)
[WQ] - Wikiquote


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

(3089/898) Silence

947) Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (attributed)
posted by Deven Naniwadekar [UAQ] (5/26/95)

[Note: Also attributed to Dionysius the Elder]

948)
Think all you speak; but speak not all you think:
Thoughts are your own; your words are so no more.
Where wisdom steers, wind cannot make you sink:
Lips never err, when she does keep the door.

Henry Delaune
"Thought and Speech" (first century, 64)
Patrikon doron, or, a Legacie to his sonnes
digested into quadrins (1651)

949) Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

Latin proverb
posted by Deven Naniwadekar [UAQ] (5/26/95)

950) It is always best not to tell people of your troubles. Half of them are not interested and the other half are glad you're getting what's coming to you.

[unknown]
posted by Deven Naniwadekar [UAQ] (5/26/95)

Sources

[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup


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

(3089/898) Coming down from the trees

936) Americans are the only race which passed directly from barbarism to decadence without knowing civilization.

La Liberte (French newspaper, 1932)
quoted in "Hoover, Napoleon & Hearst" in
Time (6/25/1932)

[Note: This quote exists in a number of different versions, with various attributions, but this is the only one for which I've found any degree of verification. The most widely distributed version is:

America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneracy [or "decadence"] without the usual interval of civilization.

This is most often attributed to Georges Clemenceau (who was quoted in the Saturday Review of Literature (12/1/45) [CQ]), Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw. Other attributions are to Mark Twain (of course), John O'Hara and Frank Lloyd Wright. See also the next quote.]

937) America is the only country to pass from childhood to senility without ever becoming adult.

[unknown]
posted by oddsbotkin [UAQ] (5/23/95)

[Note: Cf. the quote above, #936]

938) Poets and artists live on the frontiers. they have no feedback; they have only feed-forward. They have no identity; they are probes.

Marshall McLuhan (attributed)
posted by Howard J. Lambert [IQM] (5/23/95)

939) An ecological trap occurs when biological evolution moves too slowly to adapt a species to the rate of environmental change around it. A similar thing is happening to the human species since their skills, institutions and ideas are not growing fast enough to cope with the rate of change in their total environment.

Geoffrey Vickers (attributed)
posted by Howard J. Lambert [IQM] (5/23/95)

940) When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.

African proverb
posted by Kevin Anthony Boudreaux [IQM] (5/25/95)

941) Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.

Louise Beal (widely attributed)
posted by Kevin Anthony Boudreaux [IQM] (5/24/95)

942) It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"Scandal in Bohemia"
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) [CQ]
posted by Kevin Anthony Boudreaux [IQM] (5/24/95)

943) There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Alfred North Whitehead
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1953) [B16]

944) In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.

Chris Patten
(British Conservative politician)
London Evening Standard (5/2/91) [CQ]

945) Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't all have Brandeises, Cardozos and Frankfurters and stuff like that there.

Roman Hruska
U.S. Senator from Nebraska,
defending President Richard Nixon's
nomination of G. Harrold Carswell
to the Supreme Court (1970) [B16]

946) Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. Me, I say the stiffening of the notochord in the Cambrian was where it all went wrong, it was all downhill from there.

Douglas Adams and Chris Nedin
partly from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979),
seen on the Internet Dinosaur mailing list

[Note: "Yes [the quote] is mine, sort of. The first part is well known as a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy quote ... I added the bit about the stiffening of the notochord. It is a celebration of invertebrates (since I am an invertebrate paleontologist) and a reminder that there is more to paleontology than vertebrates and dinosaurs." Chris Nedin, e-mail, 5/26/95 (Note that the "notochord" is a primitive precursor to the spine.)]

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)
[CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[IQM] - Internet Quotations mailing list
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup


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

(3089/898) Unknown usenet

934) Lately (particularly since I've spent more time reading net-news) I've come to believe more in 'dialectical moronism' wherein one person presents a thesis of foolishness, an opponent counters with the antithesis of idiocy, and eventually everyone settles down to the synthesis of insanity, at which point it all starts over again.

[unknown]
posted by Russ Allbery [UAQ] (5/20/95)

935) Usenet is a way of being annoyed by people you never would have met.

[unknown]
Russ Allbery [UAQ] (5/20/95)

[Note: cf. #663 Godwin, #817 Spafford, #846-848 Spafford.]

Sources

[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup


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

(3089/898) Seek simplicity and distrust it

933) The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

Alfred North Whitehead
The Concept of Nature (1926)
posted by Kevin Anthony Boudreaux [UAQ] (5/24/95)

Sources

[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup

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