Theodore Gracyk ~ Archive of Quotations

People are not so different from gramophones as they like to believe.

—Bertrand Russell

Week of November 13, 2009

If we see letters which we do not understand,
shall we say that we do not see them?

—Plato

Week of November 6, 2009

Youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Week of October 30, 2009

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Week of October 16, 2009

Youth is wasted on the young.

—George Bernard Shaw

Week of October 2, 2009

There is no such thing as public opinion.
There is only published opinion.

—Winston Churchill

Week of September 18, 2009

Authority has vanished.

—Hannah Arendt

Week of September 11, 2009

To classify is to embalm. Real identity is incompatible with
schools and categories, except by mutilation.

—Mark Rothko

Week of September 4, 2009

Romanticism is the most recent, the most contemporary
expression of beauty.

—Baudelaire

Week of August 28, 2009

Mozart is sublime, and whenever I listen to his music, I feel
something which only music, and only Mozart, can provide.

—Oliver Sacks

Week of August 7, 2009

If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he
need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

—Andrew Fletcher

Week of July 31, 2009

I don't know that ambitiousness is a virtue in a book.
Correctness is. Relevance is, and reach is.

—Amartya Sen

Week of July 24, 2009

Chainsaws: useful in the forest, dubious at the dinner table.

—Randy Cohen

Week of July 10, 2009

About the best poetry, and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere of infinite suggestion.

—A.C. Bradley

Week of June 26, 2009

You know, you only live once. Why not offend as many people as possible?

—Roger Scruton

Week of June 12, 2009

What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the
attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates
a poverty of attention.

—Herbert A. Simon

Week of May 22, 2009

Speech and music have their centers of gravity at different points.

—Eduard Hanslick

Week of May 15, 2009

By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not
violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture.

—Condoleezza Rice justifies waterboarding

Week of May 8, 2009

The most "popular," the most "successful" writers ... are,
ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere address,
perseverance, effrontery—in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks.

—Edgar Allan Poe

Week of April 24, 2009

The river rises, flows over its banks and carries us all away,
as mayflies floating downstream.

—Gilgamesh

Week of April 17, 2009

The trouble is that you think you have time.

—Buddha

Week of April 3, 2009

Men are reasoning rather than reasonable animals,
for the most part governed by their passions.

—Alexander Hamilton

Week of March 27, 2009

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth
becomes a revolutionary act.

—George Orwell

Week of March 20, 2009

Week of March 13, 2009

Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.

—Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Week of March 6, 2009

Being human, we want to find out who made things we admire.

—James Hawes

Week of February 20, 2009

Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lies.

—Sir Phillip Sidney

Week of February 6, 2009

—http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/

Week of February 6, 2009

When cutting an axe handle with an axe, surely the model is at hand.

—Lu Chi

Week of January 30, 2009

That government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.

—Abraham Lincoln

Inauguration Day, 2009

The history of nonsense is scholarship.

—Saul Lieberman

Week of January 9, 2009

Happy happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days.

—Charles Dickens

Week of December 25, 2008

No one will be smiling all the time if real work is going on.

—Mark H. Shapiro

Week of December 19, 2008

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.

—Emily Dickinson

Week of December 12, 2008

The originality of a work of art refers to the originality of
the thing expressed and the way it is expressed.

—P. H. Emerson

Week of December 5, 2008

The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction.

—Helen Keller

Week of November 21, 2008

Road Sign in Opiki, New Zealand

Week of November 14, 2008

It's been a long eight years.

—former Vice President Al Gore campaigns for Obama

Week of November 7, 2008

No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man.

—John McCain assures a voter that Barack Obama is not an Arab

Week of October 25, 2008

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are,
of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons,
entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend.

—David Hume

Week of October 17, 2008

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Week of October 10, 2008

If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.

—Timothy Williamson

Week of October 3, 2008

Somebody's putting something in his Metamucil.

—David Letterman on John McCain

Week of September 26, 2008

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look
at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable
to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists
deemed these events "unlikely."

—Nassim Taleb, statistician, 2006

Week of September 19, 2008

This election is not about issues.

—Rick Davis, advisor to presidential candidate John McCain

Week of September 12, 2008

Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong.

—Vice President Dan Quayle (Republican) 1992

Week of September 5, 2008

It is the habit of the unthinking to turn in times like this to the illusions of economic magic.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt , 1932

Week of Aug. 22, 2008

What is the use of art? There's a nasty one.

—E. M. Forster

Week of Aug. 15, 2008

Experience has its dangers: it may bring wisdom, but it may also bring stiffness and cause hardened deposits in the mind.

—E. F. Benson

Week of Aug. 15, 2008

Collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives
to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never
dreamt of.

—George Orwell

Week of July 25, 2008

Discordant visual art does not cause visceral pain,
discordant music does.

—Tom Service

Week of July 18, 2008

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

—Christopher Hitchens

Week of July 11, 2008

Nothing is just one thing.

—Virginia Woolf

Week of July 4, 2008

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

—George Carlin

Week of June 27, 2008

Of course, God will forgive me. That's his job.

—Heinrich Heine

Week of June 20, 2008

Painting is mute poetry, and poetry a speaking picture.

—Simonides

Week of June 13, 2008

Our wills and fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

—William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

Week of June 6, 2008

The world is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

—Sir Walter Raleigh

Week of May 23, 2008

It's a bad plan that can't be changed.

—Publius Syrus

Week of May 16, 2008

Human affairs can be administered,
but administration is not management.

—Simon Blackburn

Week of May 9, 2008

An action which would be bad if done openly
is not rendered good by secrecy.

—Henry Sidgwick

Week of May 2, 2008

If music is too closely united to words, and tries to form itself according
to the events, it is striving to speak a language which is not its own.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Week of April 25, 2008

Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen
without the shadow of terror.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Week of April 18, 2008

Americans do not take kindly to things being impossible.

—Francois Cusset

Week of April 11, 2008

The work of art in the machine age is a construction;
it is built like the Parthenon.

—Herbert Read

Week of April 4, 2008

Our energy policy has not been very wise.

—President George W. Bush

Week of March 28, 2008

The religion of art makes people worse, because it encourages contempt
for those considered inartistic.

—John Carey

Week of March 21, 2008

Hope is not a plan.

—U.S. Army Maxim

Week of March 14, 2008

I never dared to be radical when young
for fear it would make me conservative when old.

—Robert Frost

Week of Feb. 29, 2008

The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Week of Feb. 22, 2008

The time when music could change the world is past.

—Neil Young, 2008

Week of Feb. 15, 2008

Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach.

—Alexander Pope

Week of Feb. 1, 2008

If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.

—Lewis Carroll

Week of Jan. 25, 2008

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists.
That is why they invented hell.

—Bertrand Russell

Week of Jan. 18, 2008

from http://icanhascheezburger.com/

Week of Jan. 11, 2008

Everything is what it is, and not another thing.

—Joseph Butler, Bishop

Week of Jan. 5, 2008

The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between
the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools
and its thinking by cowards.

—William Francis Butler

Week of Dec. 28, 2007

The act of reading is not natural.

—Maryanne Wolf

Week of Dec. 14, 2007

That which we are, we are.

—Tennyson

Week of Dec. 7, 2007

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

—Leslie Poles Hartley

Week of Nov. 23, 2007

A time of revolution . . . is an uneasy time to live in. It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place.

—Frederick Lewis Allen

Week of Nov. 23, 2007

What is most excellent in any way is always the least showy.

—Erasmus

Week of Nov. 9, 2007

No one likes armed missionaries.

—Robespierre

Week of Nov. 2, 2007

It is a function of all art to give us some perception of an order in life,
by imposing an order upon it.

—T. S. Eliot

Week of October 26, 2007

The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.

—Karl Popper

Week of October 19, 2007

Autumn's the mellow time.

—William Allingham, Irish poet

Week of October 12, 2007

Mechanization means never having to wonder what to pretend to desire next.

—John Daniels

Week of October 5, 2007

What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions
and courting new impressions.

—Walter Pater

Week of September 28, 2007

If only God were a decent man.

—French Proverb

Week of September 14, 2007

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

—Will Durant

Week of September 7, 2007

"I Left My Brain in My Locker"

—Message on shirt marketed to pre-teen girls by Limited Too

Week of August 31, 2007

For us to be able to enter the world that music creates for us,
we need a silence within which to listen.

—Andrew Waggoner

Week of August 24, 2007

Procrastination is even costlier in politics than it is in private life.

—Michael Ignatieff

Week of August 17, 2007

I have always affirmed that I'm a very mediocre painter.
I simply believe that I'm a better painter that my contemporaries.

—Salvador Dali

Week of August 3, 2007

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless;
peacocks and lilies, for example.

—John Ruskin

Week of July 27, 2007

There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

—Cyril Connolly

Week of July 20, 2007

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please:
we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

—Edmund Burke

Week of Independence Day, 2007

There are some things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

—Niels Bohr

Week of June 22, 2007

All problems are divided into two classes, soluble questions, which are trivial,
and important questions, which are insoluble.

—George Santayana

Week of June 8, 2007

English departments ... rely on some kind of mimetic, osmotic process
whereby ideas about form and style and structure get absorbed by the fledgling
academic while she concentrates on the important stuff: content. And if I
just spend enough time bird-watching, I will be able to fly.

—Rachel Toor

Week of June 1, 2007

No matter how pure and impassioned the intention, the inevitable effect of
most artistic or cultural revolutions is to feed the public’s appetite for titillation.

—Joe Boyd

Week of May 25, 2007

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this
because God will not be mocked.

—Jerry Falwell (1933-2007) explains the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks

Week of May 18, 2007

In writing about art, a pretense of objectivity never succeeds.

—Charles Rosen

Week of May 11, 2007

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

—Friedrich von Schlegel

Week of April 27, 2007

Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

—Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Week of April 20, 2007

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

—Frank Zappa

Week of April 13, 2007

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

—Benjamin Disraeli

Week of March 30, 2007

Epilepsy taught me that we're not in control of ourselves.

—Neil Young

Week of March 23, 2007

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

—Aristotle

Week of March 16, 2007

Bad taste is better than no taste.

—Alexis Smith

Week of March 9, 2007

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder,
no symphony for the listener.

—Walter Benjamin

Week of March 2, 2007

It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made.

—Franz Kafka

Week of February 23, 2007

In philosophy, the name of the game is disagreement.

—John Searle

Week of February 9, 2007

There are essentially four wars going on in Iraq.

—Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates

Week of February 2, 2007

I'm vice president and they're not.

—Vice President Dick Cheney responds to his critics

Week of January 26, 2007

Week of January 19, 2007

The highest justification of liberal education is that by forming free and
well-furnished minds it prepares students to fashion for themselves a good life.

—John Stuart Mill

Week of January 12, 2007

I resent in art the definitive explanation for people's behavior.

—filmmaker Robert Altman

Week of December 29, 2006

The old-fashioned bookstore was a charming place, but charm alone
will not solve the problem of modern book distribution.

—Carnegie Corporation report, 1930

Week of December 22, 2006

To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

—Theodore Roosevelt

Week of December 15, 2006

Grave. Deteriorating. Daunting.

—The Iraq Study Group summarizes U.S. prospects in Iraq

Week of December 8, 2006

Freedom and individualism in the creation of art is an irritant,
like so much sand thrown into our shells.

—Kirk Varnedoe

Week of November 24, 2006

Election Day, 2006

How could a society that cared too little for truth make sufficiently
well-informed judgments and decisions concerning the most suitable
disposition of its public business?

— Harry G. Frankfurt

Week of November 3, 2006

In college I assumed that just about everyone would major in philosophy if not for worries about getting a job; wasn't it obvious that all the really interesting questions were philosophical ones? I quickly learned that this point of view was not widely shared.

— Erick Wielenberg

Week of October 28, 2006

I'm not in the commercial plane so that means I'm not on TV like preachers are,
like the politicians are, like the philosophers are.

— Sun Ra, jazz musician

Week of October 21, 2006

Stupidity has a certain charm -- ignorance does not.

—Frank Zappa

Week of October 13, 2006

Time to put your war uniform on.

—President Bush to Secretary of State Colin Powell
immediately prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq
(Source: Bob Woodward)

Week of September 29, 2006

No matter what the demands of 'self-expression' may be, nothing is anything
without fully articulate, conscious form.

—Robert Hughes

Week of September 22, 2006

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do,
and that is to contradict other philosophers.

—William James

Week of September 15, 2006

I'm sure there's a lot of good songs getting recorded today, but I can't hear them.
I'm just hearing buzz.

—Bob Dylan

Week of September 8, 2006

If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.

—Eric Gill, typographer

Week of September 1, 2006

Men must be taught as if you taught them not
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.

—Alexander Pope

Week of August 25, 2006

Imagination has no source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it departs from reality.

—Wallace Stevens

Week of August 18, 2006

No patents on life.

Week of August 4, 2006

Happiness? That's nothing more than a good health and a poor memory.

—Albert Schweitzer

Week of July 28, 2006

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.

—Benjamin Franklin

Week of July 21, 2006

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1862

Week of July 4, 2006

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism
--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Week of July 1, 2006

To be merely shocking is vulgar.

— Igor Stravinsky

Week of June 23, 2006

If people are not interested in reading Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason,'
I can't make them do it.

— bookseller Andy Ross explains the demise of independent bookstores

Week of June 16, 2006

If a musical experience is forcibly transferred to a political plane,
it no longer has the thing that made it attractive. There is something
uniquely groovy about the musical experience; it is its own beginning
and end. It threatens no one.

— Jerry Garcia

Week of June 9, 2006

Historians always yearn for closure, a date when their narratives can end.

— Niall Ferguson

Week of June 2, 2006

When shall we live, if not now?

— Seneca

Week of May 26, 2006

I've got 1,500 faculty who've all got free speech. In fact, they think they have a multiplier of free speech.

— Stephen Trachtenberg,
president of George Washington University

Week of May 12, 2006

Gobbledygook.

— Harry T. Edwards, U.S. Circuit Court judge, summarizes the Executive Branch legal defense of its wiretap policies

Week of May 5, 2006

Making children cry since 2004.

— slogan of the Birdwar record label

Week of April 28, 2006

I wish I could hold George Bush down and thrash him with Bob Dylan songs until he either agrees to stop being an idiot or resigns.

— Gordon Cook

Week of April 21, 2006

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

— George Santayana

Week of April 14, 2006

I still have no big idea of writing.
My only idea is that if you are doing non-fiction it should be truthful.

— V S Naipaul

Week of April 7, 2006

The rage and the pride have married and produced a sturdy son: the disdain.

— Oriana Fallaci

Week of March 31, 2006

It is no great matter to associate with the good and gentle; for this is a naturally
pleasing to all ... But to be able to live peaceably with hard and perverse persons,
or with the disorderly, or with such as go contrary to us, is a great grace, and a
most commendable thing.

— Thomas à Kempis

Week of March 24, 2006

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

— Samuel Johnson, 1775

Week of March 17, 2006

Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

— Garrison Keiller on the President

Week of March 3, 2006

If ego were marketable, all Ph.D. graduates would get tenure.

— Gary North

Week of February 24, 2006

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.

— John Stuart Mill

Week of February 10, 2006

Posterity will not see such a talent for a century to come.

— Josef Haydn on W. A. Mozart

Week of Mozart's 250th Birthday

You would never tell Ralph Ellison that Invisible Man is his most Negro book,
would you? ... identity labels have nothing to do with how anyone actually
experiences life.

— Philip Roth

Week of January 14, 2006

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.

— Arnold Toynbee

Week of January 7, 2006

The cyber guys can talk all they want about the cyber community, but they
still can't tell you the color of each other's eyes. What kind of community is that?

— Bob Weir

Week of Dec. 30, 2005

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons
or things to be seized.

— The United States Constitution

Week of Dec. 16, 2005, as Congress calls for investigations on domestic
eavesdropping without judicial oversight

Pain is what we're in most of the time.
And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need.

— John Lennon

Week of Dec. 8, 2005 (25th anniversary of Lennon's death)

It is quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will
always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than
from scientific psychology.

— Noam Chomsky

Week of November 25, 2005

Education which stops with efficiency may prove to be the greatest menace to society.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Week of November 11, 2005

Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Peace, peace," and there is no peace!

— Martin Luther, 1517

Week of Reformation Day, 2005

The greatest ideas are the greatest events.

— Nietzsche

Week of October 28, 2005

"What do you think is the meaning of true happiness?" Calvin asks Hobbes.
"Is it money, cars and women? Or is it just money and cars?"

— Cartoonist Bill Watterson

Week of October 14, 2005

I'm bored out of my mind when I have to converse in the realm of ideas.

— Jean Paul Sartre

Week of October 7, 2005

Virginia Woolf used to read every book she reviewed twice: the first time
surrendering to the author, the second questioning every point and not
letting him or her get away with anything. It's a practice that every critic
should follow.

— Rupert Christiansen

Week of September 30, 2005

Music doesn't argue, discuss, or quarrel.

— Harold Arlen

Week of September 23, 2005

It’s simply a myth that the old order was more honest and intelligent than the new.

— Michael Kazin, The Wilson Quarterly

Week of September 9, 2005

Every natural disaster comes in two waves. First the wind and rain arrives,
then the political storm.

— Denmark's Kristeligt Dagblad on Hurricane Katrina

Week of September 2, 2005

As I look out among your smiling, eager faces, I can readily understand
why this college is flat on its back.

— Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, 1932

Week of August 26, 2005

I haven't read a book in my life.

— Victoria Beckham ("Posh" Spice)

Week of August 19, 2005

We scan and approve the better; we go for the worse.

— Ovid

Week of August 5, 2005

All art of the past must be destroyed.

— Pierre Boulez

Week of July 29, 2005

Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties,
nations and epochs, it is the rule.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Week of July 22, 2005

If men were rational in their conduct, intelligence would be enough
to make the world almost a paradise.

— Bertrand Russell

Week of July 15, 2005

When history becomes ineluctable and transcends us, wisdom dictates
that those in power should at least pretend to be the instigators of change.

— François Mitterrand, 1996

Week of July 4, 2005

Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody
had said it before him.

— Mark Twain

Week of June 24, 2005

When our country is wrong she is worse than other countries when they are
wrong, for she has more light than other countries, and we somehow ought to
make her feel that we are sorry and ashamed for her.

— William Dean Howells, 1912

Week of June 17, 2005

We may have to give up the notion of a popular Church.

— Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 1996 (Benedict XVI)

Week of June 3, 2005

Cynicism is reality with maybe an alternate spelling.

— Woody Allen

Week of May 20, 2005

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

— Stalin

Week of V.E. Day, 2005

Even that vulgar and Tavern-Music, which makes one man merry, another mad,
strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First
Composer. There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers.

— Sir Thomas Browne

Week of May 6, 2005

Our age is the most parochial since Homer.

— Bertrand Russell

Week of April 29, 2005

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

— conclusion of a book review by Matt Taibbi

Week of April 22, 2005

Pope is dead, Pope is dead. Hello!

— Rachel McEntee, Fox News,
makes a premature announcement

Week of April 8, 2005

The philosophical writer (in especial contrast to the poet)
follows the trade not of a jeweler but of a lens-grinder.

— R. G. Collingwood

Week of March 29, 2005

Modern economic life for humans is like a monkey driving a car.

— Colin F. Camerer

Week of March 22, 2005

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.

— E. H. Gombrich

Week of March 15, 2005

If politicians speak in soundbites, how can we expect
voters to sit through a Bruckner symphony?

— Norman Lebrecht

Week of March 1, 2005

Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,
And we have all the fun,
That's the way we do in college life.
Hooray!

— College Drinking Song, 1912

Week of February 21, 2005

There are no mysteries out of ourselves.

— Herman Melville

Week of February 7, 2005

Some things are up to us, and some things are not up to us.

— Epictetus

Week of January 29, 2005

Prudence is the footprint of wisdom.

—Bronson Alcott

Week of January 21, 2005

Reason and free inquiry can be neutral and tolerant only of those
opinions which submit to the test of reason and inquiry.

—Walter Lippmann

Week of January 8, 2005

Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings;
some art appeals to the feeling through the route of the intelligence.

—Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Week of January 1, 2005

Week of December 25, 2004

In order to be reputable it must be wasteful.

-- Thorstein Veblen

Week of December 17, 2004

Beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil war for the
soul of man.

-- Dostoyevsky

Week of December 10, 2004

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy
for those who feel.

-- Horace Walpole

Week of December 3, 2004

Cheap liquor is not good, and good liquor is not cheap.

-- Dorothy Draper

Week of November 26, 2004

I have no special talents: I am only passionately curious.

-- Albert Einstein

Week of November 19, 2004

You can't read the Old Testament without knowing God was
concerned about the environment, war and peace, poverty.

-- Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary
of the National Council of Churches

Week of November 12, 2004

The press have been cowed, because they didn't want to be
unpatriotic.

--Former President Jimmy Carter

Election Day, 2004

Our concern about Islamic fundamentalism is that there's no
separation of church and state, yet we are about to erode
that here.

--George Soros

Week of October 23, 2004

I'm not going to be your monkey.

--John Stewart

Week of October 16, 2004

I sought to challenge the zeitgeist.

--Glenn Gould

Week of October 9, 2004

I could make a career of being blue.
I could dress in black and read Camus.

--Stephin Merritt

Week of October 1, 2004

Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how?
This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all
questions.

-- Bertrand Russell, 1911

Week of September 19, 2004

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic, even
one given a clothing allowance, will dress like a schlemiel.

-- Regina Barreca

Week of September 19, 2004

Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were
avenging September 11th, when Iraq had nothing to do with
September 11th.

-- Richard Clarke, Bush Administration counter-terrorism official
who in January 2001 warned President Bush of an impending
al Qaeda attack

September 11, 2004

You don't even live once.

-- Karl Kraus

Week of September 1, 2004

A common song sung to a great melody is another way to
find beauty

-- Lu Chi

Week of September 1, 2004

We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be the
Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe
in Free Societies Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon to
Try to Shake the Conscience of the Free World.

-- President George Bush

Week of August 13, 2004

In any given situation, there are always going to be more
dumb people than smart people.

-- Ken Kesey

Week of August 13, 2004

I spend my days writing symphonies, concertos, ballads,
and I am not a political thinker.

-- Aaron Copland

Week of August 6, 2004

The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert
sands of the Arabian Peninsula.

-- President George H. W. Bush, 1991

Week of July 25, 2004

Every true work of art must express a distinct feeling.

-- Caspar David Friedrich

Week of July 18, 2004

I want the frighteningly original all the time.

-- Frank Zappa

Week of July 11, 2004

People do not believe what they believe they believe.

-- Pascal Boyer

Week of July 4, 2004

Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those
have always been the two most beautiful words in
the English language.

-- Henry James

Week of June 25, 2004

It is the beginning of the end when you discover
that you have a style.

-- Dashiell Hammett

Week of June 18, 2004

Facts are stupid things.

-- Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)

Week of June 11, 2004

Art is the secret of how to produce by a false thing
the effect of a true.

-- Thomas Hardy, 1891

Week of June 4, 2004

Science, separated from philosophy, is the opium of
the suburbs.

-- W. B. Yeats

Week of May 28, 2004

Do the right thing.

-- Colin Powell, Secretary of State, gives a
university commencement address

Week of May 21, 2004

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of
solidity to pure wind.

-- George Orwell

Week of May 14, 2004

Morale is fragile because it rests not so much on
present conditions -- although those are certainly
important -- but on one's faith in the future.

-- Stanley Fish on higher education

Week of May 7, 2004

No age is ever contemporary with itself.

-- Mallarmé

Week of April 30, 2004

It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.

-- Gore Vidal

Week of April 23, 2004

To the memory of myself.

-- dedication page of Dmitri Shostakovich’s
String Quartet No. 8

Week of April 9, 2004

Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence.

-- Louis Althusser

Week of March 27, 2004

Writing about yourself, for yourself, doesn't necessarily
pay well.

-- Loudon Wainwright III

Week of March 12, 2004

They never told me in education school that my biggest
battle wouldn't be over funding or discipline, but over the
simple issue of whether teachers should actually expect
students to learn.

-- Elise Vogler, American high school teacher

Week of March 5, 2004

The conventional view serves to protect us from the
painful job of thinking.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

Week of February 28, 2004

Joyce Carol Oates writes faster than I can read.

-- Martin Levin

Week of February 21, 2004

The future is coming at us faster than it ever has.

-- Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty

Week of February 14, 2004

Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other
people's theories and an oblivion of one's own.

-- Terry Eagleton

Week of February 7, 2004

For real achievement, nothing beats total obscurity.

-- Frank Zappa

Week of January 23, 2004

I think. . . /there. . . /4 a.m.

-- Kai Krause

Week of January 16, 2004

Smugness, to my mind, is a greatly under-rated amusement.

-- Christopher Orlet

Week of January 9, 2004

If music is a language, then who is speaking?

-- Edward T. Cone

Week of December 21, 2003

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

-- John Lennon

Week of December 14, 2003

Novels and memoirs are on a wrong course. They are either inward-gazing, solipsistic and impotent or unconscious and rarefied, written by recidivist realists who pretend the twentieth century didn't happen.

-- Dale Peck

Week of December 7, 2003

The myth of egoism will die with the myth of the privacy
of consciousness.

-- Christine M. Korsgaard

Week of November 28, 2003

We read to know we're not alone.

-- C. S. Lewis

Week of November 14, 2003

No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough.

-- Roger Ebert

Week of November 7, 2003

The ability to generate a novel philosophical idea is
something one labours to acquire over a lifetime.

-- Colin McGinn

Week of October 31, 2003

I want to be to film what Bob Dylan was to music.

-- Quentin Tarantino

Week of October 16, 2003

He strove to be the best he could at all times.

-- Rick Rubin remembers Johnny Cash

Week of October 9, 2003

Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

--Edward Said, 1935-2003

Week of October 2, 2003

Meaning is emergent from a context which itself is
changing. It evolves during the creative process.

--Thomas Leddy

Week of September 26, 2003

For the last 40 years, we've always said to high school
students that if you work hard, there will be a place for
you somewhere in the system. This [year’s budget]
begins to call that promise into question.

--University of California spokesman Brad Hayward
comments on recent trends in public funding of higher
education

Week of September 19, 2003

I'll sleep when I'm dead.

--Warren Zevon, 1947-2003

Week of September 12, 2003

I interpret the Green Party as a movement of the
middle and upper-middle class, as actually having a
certain satisfaction with the way things are--which is
to say, the reason you should vote for the Greens is
because you want to feel the excitement of political
engagement, the adventure of it, but you don't really
care what it's going to mean for other people if the
Republicans get elected.

--Paul Berman

Labor Day 2003, traditional start of the 2004 Presidential campaign

Would you try to build a cabinet when you did not
posses even the rudimentary woodworking skills or
knowledge of the tools necessary to build the cabinet?
Of course not, then why do so many people think they
can write poetry without an iota of preparation?

--Barney F. McClelland, paraphrasing an
unnamed source

Week of August 29, 2003

Language is a social art.

--W.V.O. Quine

Week of August 22, 2003

One good thing about music -- when it hits,
you feel no pain.

--Bob Marley

Week of August 15, 2003

Most people think that when they hear a piece of music,
they’re not doing anything but that something is being
done to them.

--John Cage

Week of August 1, 2003

Great art is never extreme.

--Robert Motherwell, 1944

Week of July 25, 2003

Now religion and art are the two most important
phenomena in the world; or rather the most
important phenomenon, for they are basically the
same thing.

--Northrop Frye, 1935

Week of July 11, 2003

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department has prevailed
in every major legal battle decided so far in terrorism's legal
war, turning aside repeated attempts to show that the Bush
administration's policies are eroding civil liberties and
constitutional rights.

Week of July 4, 2003

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.

--William Faulkner

Week of June 28, 2003

The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary
construction.

--Helen Keller

Week of June 14, 2003

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies,
histories, languages dropped, English and spelling
gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored.
. . . No wonder books stopped selling.

--Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451"

Week of June 7, 2003

I'm in the amusement business, along with theme
parks, popcorn and horror shows. If you want to
get out of the amusement business, you've got to
go to the university and learn a real trade. But real
trades don't exist in the entertainment business,
which falls under the cotton candy business. At the
shows we play, they sell more junk out there than
you can dream of. It has nothing to do with music.

--Bob Dylan, USA Today, 09/09/2001

Week of May 21, 2003

Looking at a great work of art makes one feel more
fully aware of one’s thoughts yet no longer wearied
by them, more exposed to one’s emotions yet no
longer drained by them, more integrated, more
composed — more, in a word, conscious.

--Julian Spalding, The London Times

Week of May 14, 2003

Man, alone, violates the established order.

-- Vladimir Vernadsky

Week of May 7, 2003

People think collectors support artists. But it’s
universities that support artists.

-- Chris Burden

Week of April 25, 2003

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated
precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is,
regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those
who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.

--Albert Murray, “The Omni-Americans”

Week of April 18, 2003

I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher;
but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always
breaking in.

--Oliver Edwards

Week of April 11, 2003

We should beware of too much theory.

--Simon Blackburn

Week of March 28, 2003

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which
we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when
what we want is to move the stars to pity.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Week of March 21, 2003

A book may be good for nothing; or there may be
only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read
it all through?

--Samuel Johnson

Week of March 14, 2003

Everything I encounter displays to me its absurd
aspect first.

-- Vaclav Havel

Week of March 7, 2003

If you don't say anything, you won't be called on
to repeat it.

-- Calvin Coolidge

Week of February 28, 2003

A work of art in itself is a gesture and it may be
warm or cold, inviting or repellant.

-- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, 1923.

Week of February 21, 2003

There is a finality about naming; once a phenomenon
has been named, it takes on a form that distinguishes it
from other phenomena whose names are different.

-- Alan Wolf

Week of February 14, 2003

You know what they said?
Well, some of it was true!

--Joe Strummer, 1952-2002

Week of February 7, 2003

Subdue your appetites and you have conquered human nature!

--Wackford Squeers (in Charles Dickens’
Nicholas Nickleby)

Week of January 21, 2003

Let us never cease from thinking -- what is this 'civilisation' in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?

--Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)

Week of January 14, 2003

Why is there a mind-body problem when there is no
digestion-stomach problem?

--John Searle, 1984

Week of January 7, 2003

Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever
wished to foresee the future might consult the past.

--Machiavelli

Week of December 29, 2002

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

--Abraham Lincoln

Week of December 21, 2002

Act first, think later -- that way, you have something to think about.

-- Marcia Tucker, Artist

Week of December 14, 2002

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

-- Glenn Gould

Week of December 7, 2002

Travel is really a test of the imagination.
Homesickness is failure.

--Hugo Williams

Week of November 28, 2002

The history of the cinema is of boys
photographing girls.

--Jean-Luc Godard

Week of November 21, 2002

Wretched excess is just barely enough.

--Shirley O. Corriher

Week of November 14, 2002

I don't want to go around pretending to be me.

--Philip Larkin

Week of November 7, 2002

A three-legged dog walks into a bar and says
I'm looking for the man who shot my paw.

-- Related by Christopher Orlet
in The Vocabulary Review

Week of October 28, 2002

Nature makes the boy toward,
nurture sees him forward.

--Richard Mulcaster, 1582

Week of October 21, 2002

Culture is public because meaning is.

-- Clifford Geertz, 1973

Week of October 14, 2002

The public history of modern art is the story of
conventional people not knowing what they are
dealing with.

--Robert Motherwell , 1951

Week of September 20, 2002

Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,

Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?

And sullen hymns of defeat?

-- Walt Whitman

Week of September 11, 2002

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of
suffering.

-- Tom Stoppard

Week of September 7, 2002

-- Colin Lucas, Vice Chancellor, Oxford University

The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 25, 2002