Armistice Day

The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me to be special.  Even if the reason for it fell apart as the years went on, it was a symbol of something close to the high part of the heart.  Perhaps a life that stretches through two or three wars takes its first war rather seriously, but I still think we should have kept the name "Armistice Day."  Its implications were a little more profound, a little more hopeful.

-- Walt Kelly (1913 - 1973), American animator and cartoonist, creator of the Pogo comic strip, Ten Everlovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo (1959), p. 100

The Farce

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

-- Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891), French poet, Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) (1873)

Three Thousandths

[Kelly Holley-Bockelmann] tried to understand the vastness of space-time by imagining the history of the universe laid out across a 100-yard field.  The Earth was born at the 67-yard line.  Complex multicellular life formed after 96 yards.  Apes began to walk upright in the final two inches.  And all of human civilization -- the end of the ice age, the birth of agriculture, every war and every empire -- had come in the last three thousandths of an inch.

-- Eli Saslow, "The American Brain Drain Claims Another Scientist", New York Times (7 November 2026)

Refusing Themselves

The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.

-- James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784 - 1859), English poet and essayist, Table-Talk (1851), p. 62

Exhausted

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

-- Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005), American playwright, essayist, and author, "The Year it Came Apart", New York magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 (30 December 1974), p. 30

Change Is Not Made

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.

-- Richard Hooker (1554 - 1600), Anglican priest and influential theologian, as quoted in the preface of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Election Night

How shall we avert the dire calamities with which we are threatened?  The answer comes from the graves of our fathers: By the frequent election of new men.  Other help or hope for the salvation of free government there is none under heaven.  If history does not teach this, we have read it all wrong.

-- Jeremiah S. Black (1810 - 1883), American statesman and lawyer.  He served as a justice on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania (1851-1857) and as the Court's Chief Justice (1851-1854), "The Third Term: Reasons Against It"; first published in The North American Review (March 1880)