Thursday, July 26, 2012

Spark

You're only given a little spark of madness.  You mustn't lose it.

-- Robin Williams

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Waiting

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

-- Sally Kristen Ride (26 May 1951 - 23 July 2012), American physicist, first American woman and youngest American (1983) to enter space, interview at Scholastic's Web site, 20 November 1998

Monday, July 23, 2012

Move Along

The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.

-- Sheri S. Tepper (1929-), author, The Small God in Ch. 44: The Visitor

Thursday, July 19, 2012

To The Utmost

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

-- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), American physicist, The Character of Physical Law (1965)

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Get Your Facts First

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Rudyard Kipling, An Interview with Mark Twain, p. 180, From sea to sea: letters of travel, (1899)

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Culture

Such dread was a large part of the post-9/11 decade.  A culture of fear had created a culture of spending to control it, which, in turn, had led to a belief that the government had to be able to stop every single plot before it took place, regardless of whether it involved one network of twenty terrorists or one single deranged person.  This expectation propelled more spending and even more zero-defect expectations.  There were tens of thousands of unsolved murders in the United States by 2010, but few newspapers ever blared this across their front pages or even tried to investigate how their police departments had to failed to solve them all over the years.  But when it came to terrorism, newspaper and other media outlets amplified each mistake, which amplified the threat, which amplified the fear, which prompted more spending, and on and on and on.

-- Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, in "Top Secret America:  The Rise of the New American Security State", Chapter 3

Monday, July 16, 2012

Great Need

There's a great need in our government right now for honesty.  I speak my mind.  You might not always like what you hear, but you're gonna hear it anyway.  I call it like I see it; I tell the truth.  And if I don't know something, I'll say so.  Then I'll try to find the answer.

-- James George Janos (15 July 1951-), AKA Jesse Ventura, American politician, actor, US Navy UDT veteran, retired professional wrestler, talk show host, teacher, 38th Governor of Minnesota, "I Ain't Got Time To Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up" (1999)

Friday, July 13, 2012

35

Tonight I hung out at my 35th high school class reunion for a while.  High school is really getting to be a long time ago.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Courage

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

-- Nelle Harper Lee (1926-), American novelist, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

To control and sort young people for the sake of institutional efficiency is to crush the human spirit.

-- Ron Miller, author, editor, and publisher, What Are Schools For? pg. 145 (1990)

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Delighted

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

-- Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979), British historian and philosopher of history, "Christianity, Diplomacy and War" (1953), p 43

Monday, July 09, 2012

Freedom Of Movement

The right to travel enables the free exercise of the other rights we most cherish. We should not have to check our constitutional freedoms at the curb simply because we decide to leave the house. Sadly, freedom of movement has been one of the most disparaged rights throughout human history, and our country is no exception. If we are ever to be truly free, then we must possess an absolute, uninhibited right to travel throughout America and the world free from interference by government.

-- Judge Andrew Napolitano, Reason.com, 19 December 2011


Fun

It's a triumphant day for fundamental physics.  Now some fun begins.

-- Nima Arkani-Hamed, physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, on the discovery of a new subatomic particle hoped to be the Higgs boson, New York Times, 5 July 2012

Friday, July 06, 2012

Gains

Our gains are not measured in the losses of others.  They are counted in the conflicts we avert, the prosperity we share, and the peace we extend.

-- George W. Bush (6 July 1946-), 43rd US President, speech at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Vally, CA (19 November 1999)

Thursday, July 05, 2012

Not Our Job

It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

-- Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., New York Times, 29 June 2012

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Knack

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

-- Albert Camus (1913-1960), Algerian-French author and Absurdist philosopher, The Plague (1947)

Monday, July 02, 2012

This Honest

This is the only state where the proponents are this honest about what exactly their motivation is.

-- Michelle Movahed, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, about a law in Mississippi that would effectively leave the state's only abortion clinic without physicians, New York Times, 23 June 2012