Driven

Ferraris are art, but they love being driven.

-- Chris Evans, British presenter and DJ, Live magazine, the Mail on Sunday (UK) newspaper, 29 November 2009

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.  Murphy's First Corollary: If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.

-- George E. Woodberry (1855-1930), American poet, critic, and teacher

Struggle

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world.

-- Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 - 10 September 1797), English social philosopher and pioneering advocate of women's rights, mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)

Rosie The Riveter

Today, 24 April 2015, Mary Doyle Keefe passed away at the age of 92.  She was just 19 years old when Norman Rockwell paid her $10 to pose for a 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post as "Rosie the Riveter".

Not Smart Enough

I personally think we are just not smart enough - and won't be for a very long time - to feel comfortable about the consequences of changing heredity, even in a single individual.

-- David Baltimore, a former president of the California Institute of Technology, on a call for a moratorium on using a gene editing technique to change human DNA, New York Times, 20 March 2015

Earth Laughs

Earth laughs in flowers.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American philosopher and poet, Hamatreya (1846)

Resign Themselves

In today's society a good many people seem to have the idea that if one is born without talent, there is nothing he can do about it; they simply resign themselves to what they consider their "fate".  Consequently they go through life without living it to the fullest or ever knowing life's true joy.  That is man's greatest tragedy.

-- Shinichi Suzuki (1898-1998), violinist, inventor of the Suzuki method of music education, Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education (1977, 1983)

Representation

Representation gets a bad rap.  Its inadequacy is inbuilt; it's doomed to fail us; the thing it strives to capture and communicate endlessly eludes it.  But it's what we have, so we use our crude visual and verbal tools to circumscribe, gibber, and gesture.  Drooling a bit, we imagine a method of communication that would translate its subject perfectly and entirely. Prior to the age of #nofilter, photography was believed to contain this possibility.  Sometimes the medium -- particularly the documentary genre -- still pretends.

-- Cassie Packard, London-based arts writer, "Martha Rosler Tackles the Problem of Representation," Hyperallergic, 16 October 2014

Passive Resistance

"Passive resistance," said Ferdinand Lassalle, with an obtuseness thoroughly German, "is the resistance which does not resist." Never was there a greater mistake.  It is the only resistance which in these days of military discipline resists with any result.  There is not a tyrant in the civilized world today who would not do anything in his power to precipitate a bloody revolution rather than see himself confronted by any large fraction of his subjects determined not to obey.  An insurrection is easily quelled; but no army is willing or able to train its guns on inoffensive people who do not even gather in the streets but stay at home and stand back on their rights.  Neither the ballot nor the bayonet is to play any great part in the coming struggle; passive resistance is the instrument by which the revolutionary force is destined to secure in the last great conflict the people's rights forever.

-- Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939), American editor, publisher, and proponent of anarchism, Passive Resistance

Our Friend's Or Our Foe's

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone.  I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence, third president of the United States, Letter to Miles King (26 September 1814)

Random Billionaire

It just takes a random billionaire to change a race and maybe change the country.

-- Trevor Potter, a Republican campaign finance lawyer, talking in part about Robert Mercer, a major financial supporter of Ted Cruz's candidacy, 11 April 2015

A Society Of Privacy

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.  The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe.  Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

-- Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982) Russian novelist, philosopher, playwright, screenwriter, The Fountainhead (1943)

True Secret To Genius

The true secret to genius is in creativity, not in technical mechanics.

-- Al Seckel (1958-), American authority on visual and other types of sensory illusions, and how they relate to perception

To Click Or Not

We are, to some degree, our own editors when we choose to click or not. Perhaps we'll soon be seeing videos of all such violent deaths that a ready cell phone happens to record.  To say that one hopes not is not to wish for censorship but for consistent, respectful restraint.

-- Philip Gourevitch on the Walter Scott video, The New Yorker, 9 April 2015

Different

To shred the bodies of young women and children with a homemade bomb, you've got to be different from other people.

-- Assistant U.S. Attorney William Weinreb in closing arguments in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted 8 April 2015 in the Boston Marathon bombing

A Sad Soul

A sad soul can kill quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

-- John Steinbeck (1902-1968), American author, 1962 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962)

Everywhere

Look around you.  Everywhere.  They are there.  In every home -- lurking in dark corners ... small, bi-pedal entities with almost human brains play their games in which adults are the pawns.  They play and wait for the time when they will take over the world!

-- John Blair Moore, (1948-), 20th century American comic book writer/artist, Invaders from Home, Piranha Press (1990), Book 1 of 6