SEARCH    Moving Company Quoteland Topic Matches: Listening Author Matches: Alistair Cooke Linda Evangelista Alistair Grant Sadi Gulistan Sonny Liston Quotation Matches: Trent: Let me tell you something Mike you're money, and you know what else, you're a big winner. I'm gonna ask you a simple question and I want you to listen to me: who's the big winner here tonight at the casino? Huh? Mikey, that's who. Mikey's the big winner. Mikey wins. - Principal: Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. - Dr. Evil: The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it. - Basil Exposition: Austin, the Cold War is over! Austin Powers: Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh comrades? Eh? Basil Exposition: Austin... we won. Austin Powers: Oh, smashing, groovy, yay capitalism! - Harry: Yeah I called her up, she gave me a bunch of crap about me not listening to her, or something, I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention. - Frank: Jane, since I've met you I've noticed things that I never knew were there before; birds singing, dew glistening on a newly formed leaf, stoplights. - Ferris: I do have a test today. that wasn't bull. It's on European socialism. I mean, really, what's the point? I'm not European. I don't plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they're socialists They could be fasict anarcists. It still doesn't change the fact that i don't own a car. - Bluto: My advice to you is to start drinking heavily. Otter: Better listen to him, Flounder, he's in pre-med. - Commodus: You wrote to me once, listing the four chief virtues. Wisdom, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. As I read the list I knew I had none of them. But i have other virtues, father. Ambition, that can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness. Courage. Perhaps not on the battlefield but there are many forms of courage. Devotion, to my family, to you. But none of my virtues were on your list. Even then, it was as if you didn't want me for your son. - Obi-Wan: I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade like your father did. It's your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times, before the Empire. - (no category) As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people. With each succeeding generation, the growing demand of the people that its elective officials shall not lead but merely register the popular will has steadily undermined the independence of those who derive their power from popular election. The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point. -James Truslow Adams Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her Americas heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. -John Quincy Adams There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded. I think its one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation of over 200 million people can be made into a productive citizen. Im realist enough to believe this cant be. Were always going to have our prisons, were always going to have our places of preventive detention for psychopaths, and were always going to have a certain number of people in our community who have no desire to achieve or who have no desire to even fit in an amicable way with the rest of society. And these people should be separated from the community, not in a callous way but they should be separated as far as any idea that their opinions shall have any effect on the course we follow. -Spiro T. Agnew When I examined my political faith I found that my strongest belief was in democracy according to my own definition. Democracythe essential thing as distinguished from this or that democratic governmentwas primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament, and not an economic structure or a political machine. The testament involved certain basic beliefsthat the personality was sacrosanct, which was the meaning of liberty; that policy should be settled by free discussion; that normally a minority should be ready to yield to a majority, which in turn should respect a minoritys sacred things. It seemed to me that democracy had been in the past too narrowly defined and had been identified illogically with some particular economic or political system such as laissez-faire or British parliamentarism. I could imagine a democracy which economically was largely socialist and which had not our constitutional pattern. -John Buchan Ye been oure lord, dooth with youre owene thyngRight as yow list. -Chaucer There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear somethingyes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italiansgoing on maneuversyes, only on maneuvers! -Sir Winston Churchill The substance of the eminent Socialist gentlemans speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss. -Sir Winston Churchill At present the peace of the world has been preserved, not by statesmen, but by capitalists. -Benjamin Disraeli Any test that turns on what is offensive to the communitys standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they dont like, provided the matter relates to sexual impurity or has a tendency to excite lustful thoughts. This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win. -William O. Douglas Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize. -Richard Feynman, Joking when asked by news reporters to give a brief summary of his Nobel-winning work on quantum electrodynamics. I do not want a honeymoon with you. I want a good marriage. I want progress, and I want problemsolving which requires my best efforts and also your best efforts. I have no need to learn how Congress speaks for the people. As President, I intend to listen. But I also intend to listen to the people themselvesall the peopleas I promised last Friday. I want to be sure that we are all tuned in to the real voice of America. -Gerald R. Ford It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truthand listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. -Patrick Henry It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. -Eric Hoffer There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young,When the buds of April blossomed, and the birds of spring-time sung!The gardens brightest glories by summer suns are nursed,But oh, the sweet, sweet violets, the flowers that opened first!There is no place like the old place, where you and I were born,Where we lifted first our eyelids on the splendors of the mornFrom the milk-white breast that warmed us, from the clinging arms that bore,Where the dear eyes glistened oer us that will look on us no more!There is no friend like the old friend, who has shared our morning days,No greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise:Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold. There is no love like the old love, that we courted in our pride;Though our leaves are falling, falling, and were fading side by side,There are blossoms all around us with the colors of our dawn,And we live in borrowed sunshine when the day-star is withdrawn. There are no times like the old times,they shall never be forgot!There is no place like the old place,keep green the dear old spot!There are no friends like our old friends,may Heaven prolong their lives!There are no loves like our old loves,God bless our loving wives! -Oliver Wendell Holmes Listen, Christ,You did alright in your day, I reckonBut that days gone now. They ghosted you up a swell story, too,Called it BibleBut its dead now. The popes and the preachersveMade too much money from it. Theyve sold you too manyKings, generals, robbers, and killersEven to the Czar and the Cossacks,Even to Rockefellers church,Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. You aint no good no more. Theyve pawned youTill youve done wore out. Goodbye,Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,Beat it on away from here now. Make way for a new guy with no religion at allA real guy namedMarx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker MEI said, ME!Go Ahead on now,Youre getting in the way of things, Lord. And please take Saint Ghandi sic with you when you go,And Saint Pope Pius,And Saint Aimee McPherson,And big black Saint BectonOf the Consecrated Dime. And step on the gas, Christ!Move!Dont be so slow about movin!The world is mine from now onAnd nobodys gonna sell METo a king, or a general,Or a millionaire. -Langston Hughes Every good citizen should be willing to devote a brief time during some one day in the year, when necessary, to the making up of a listing of his income for taxes to contribute to his Government, not the scriptural tithe, but a small percentage of his net profits. -Cordell Hull But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicanswe are federalists. -Thomas Jefferson We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense. -John Fitzgerald Kennedy If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to allexcept the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. -John Fitzgerald Kennedy They capitalists will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide. -Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. -Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,We bargain for the graves we lie in;At the Devils booth are all things sold,Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;For a cap and bells our lives we pay,Bubbles we buy with a whole souls tasking:T is heaven alone that is given away,T is only God may be had for the asking;No price is set on the lavish summer;June may be had by the poorest comer. And what is so rare as a day in June?Then, if ever, come perfect days;Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,And over it softly her warm ear lays:Whether we look, or whether we listen,We hear life murmur, or see it glisten. -James Russell Lowell On completely popular government: Its superiority in reference to present well-being rests upon two principles, of as universal truth and applicability as any general propositions which can be laid down respecting human affairs. The first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded, when the person interested is himself able, and habitually disposed, to stand up for them. The second is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it. -John Stuart Mill You think of those kids out there. I say kids. I have seen them. They are the greatest. You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issueI mean you name itget rid of the war; there will be another one. Out there weve got kids who are just doing their duty. I have seen them. They stand tall, and they are proud. I am sure they are scared. I was when I was there. But when it really comes down to it, they stand up and, boy, you have to talk up to those men. And they are going to do fine; weve got to stand back of them. -Richard Milhous Nixon If she America forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution. -Carl Sandburg You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold. -George Bernard Shaw When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victorymust follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battlebe Thou near them! With themin spiritwe also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with anavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied itfor our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. -Mark Twain Action(s) When I talked, no one listened to me. But as soon as I acted I became persuasive, and I no longer find anyone incredulous. -Giosu Actors, Acting ... most of all the actor will love the boys and girls, the men and women, who sit in the cheapest seats, in the very last row of the top gallery. They have given more than they can afford to come. In the most self-effacing spirit of fellowship they are listening to catch every word, watching to miss no slightest gesture or expression. To save his life the actor cannot help feeling these nearest and dearest. He cannot help wishing to do his best for them. He cannot help loving them best of all. -Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting and the Problems of Production, ch. 3, by Alexander Woollcott (1917) An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening. -George Glass Adventure If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged. -Virginia Woolf Adversity Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist -- it reduces him to his fighting weight. -Josh Billings Advice To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs. -Ghose Aurobindo A fool think he needs no advice, but a wise man listens to others. Proverbs 12:15 -Bible Older and wiser voices can always help you find the right path, if you are only willing to listen. -Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks At 50 I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite. -G. K. Chesterton The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. -Oliver Wendell Holmes Anybody who ask for advice nowadays just hasn't been listening. -Source Unknown Age Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. -Source Unknown Walk in the rain, jump in mud puddles, collect rocks, rainbows and roses, smell flowers, blow bubbles, stop along the way, build sandcastles, say hello to everyone, go barefoot, go on adventures, act silly, fly kites, have a merry heart, talk with animals, sing in the shower, read childrens' books, take bubble baths, get new sneakers, hold hands and hug and kiss, dance, laugh and cry for the health of it, wonder and wander around, feel happy and precious and innocent, feel scared, feel sad, feel mad, give up worry and guilt and shame, say yes, say no, say the magic words, ask lots of questions, ride bicycles, draw and paint, see things differently, fall down and get up again, look at the sky, watch the sun rise and sun set, watch clouds and name their shapes, watch the moon and stars come out, trust the universe, stay up late, climb trees, daydream, do nothing and do it very well, learn new stuff, be excited about everything, be a clown, enjoy having a body, listen to music, find out how things work, make up new rules, tell stories, save the world, make friends with the other kids on the block, and do anything else that brings more happiness, celebration, health, love, joy, creativity, pleasure, abundance, grace, self-esteem, courage, balance, spontaneity, passion, beauty, peace, relaxation, communication and life energy to...all living beings on this planet. -Bruce Williamson, It's Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood, 1987 America Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. -Matthew Arnold We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of the Americans. -Ruben Askew If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe. -Charles Dickens No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life. -Henry James It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation. -Camille Anna Paglia I sometimes think we ought to bring a bill before Congress changing our national symbol from the eagle to the buffalo, because we are more like the buffalo than the eagle. The eagle is a powerful bird. It flies alone. It rises up into the sky with authority. It is master of all it surveys. The eagle is an individualist and was selected from among the rest of the birds to be our symbol. But the buffalo was never alone. It always ran in a herd with other buffaloes. And, friends, I call your attention that the buffaloes are gone from the open range, but the eagles are still soaring. -Norman Vincent Peale The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left. -Orson Welles Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world. -Woodrow Wilson Anarchy The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a vanguard party, or a State bureaucracy. -Noam Chomsky It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence. -William Golding Angels Were we as eloquent as angels we still would please people much more by listening rather than talking. -Charles Caleb Colton Anger My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. James 1:19-20 -Bible Argument & Debate I would be presumptuous, indeed, to present myself against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities; but this is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty -William Jennings Bryan, Cross of Gold, Speech concluding debate on the Chicago Platform at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, July 9, 1896 Art Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? -Nadine Gordimer If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy. -Aldous Huxley The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. -Henry Miller Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith. -Salman Rushdie Opusculum paedagogicum The pears are not viols, Nudes or bottles. They resemble nothing else. They are yellow forms Composed of curves Bulging toward the base. They are touched red. They are not flat surfaces Having curved outlines. They are round Tapering toward the top. In the way they are modelled There are bits of blue. A hard dry leaf hangs From the stem. The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin. The shadows of the pears Are blobs on the green cloth. The pears are not seen As the observer wills. -Wallace Stevens, Study of Two Pears Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding. -Tristan Tzara It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures. -Vincent van Gogh Artist, The The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed. -Ernesto "Che" Guevara My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic, dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can't understand why that mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque shapes as reference points. That is what I'm after: that mood which is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences at very special moments. -Ian Hornak, "The 57th Street Review", January, 1976 What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images. -Ian Hornak, SneedGallery Catalogue (circulated) 1976 My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point. -James Thurber Atheism People will then often say, But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.) -Douglas Adams Attachment It is easy to talk of sitting at home contented, when others are seeing or making shows. But not to have been where it is supposed, and seldom supposed falsely, that all would go if they could; to be able to say nothing when everyone is talking; to have no opinion when everyone is judging; to hear exclamations of rapture without power to depress; to listen to falsehoods without right to contradict, is, after all, a state of temporary inferiority, in which the mind is rather hardened by stubbornness, than supported by fortitude. If the world be worth winning let us enjoy it, if it is to be despised let us despise it by conviction. But the world is not to be despised but as it is compared with something better. -Samuel Johnson Attitude Generalists, people with moderately strong attachments to many ideas, should be hard to interrupt, and once interrupted, should have weaker, shorter negative reactions since they have alternative paths to realize their plans. Specialists, people with stronger attachments to fewer ideas, should be easier to interrupt, and once interrupted, should have stronger, more sustained negative reactions because they have fewer alternative pathways to realize their plans. Generalists should be the upbeat, positive people in the profession while specialists should be their grouchy, negative counterparts. -Karl Weick, "Theory Building as Disciplined Imagination Academy of Management Review - 1989 (page 526)" Authors & Writing No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. -W. H. Auden I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not. -Alan Bennett Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion. -Arnold Bennett It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing. -Jorge Luis Borges, cited in A biographical study of a poet of Buenos Aires by Evaristo Carriego, 1930 Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation. -Pearl Buck Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual. -Anthony Burgess If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist. -Quentin Crisp I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history. -Philip K. Dick, Exegesis Philip K. Dick's journal, 1981 Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry. -William Golding, Rough Magic Lecture, February 16, 1977 They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. -Lillian Hellman If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. -Lillian Hellman They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him. -Ernest Hemingway It isn't easy, it does take an incredible amount of discipline, you don't just write just when you feel like it or you're not going to build up much of a body of work. Inspiration comes to you while you're writing rather than before....For me the discipline of writing and the discipline of prayer are identical, in that I have to let myself be got out of the way because that's not a do-it-yourself activity, and listen....When you write, don't think, write. You think before, you think after, you don't think during. When I'm praying, when I'm truly praying, I'm not thinking, I'm not speaking, I'm shutting up, so perhaps if God has something to say I can hear it. So writing too is an act of listening, listening to what has to be said. -Madeleine L'Engle, Perkins Lecture Series, Wichita Falls, 1996 Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it. -J. Russel Lynes Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche. -Toni Morrison A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. -Vladimir Nabokov Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. -Vladimir Nabokov I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence. -Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The Doomed - More Notes On The Death Of The American Dream (page 296) My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass. But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do. -John Updike Baseball Listen, I was the first black manager in baseball and there was incredible pressure. I don't blame anyone else. I was too tough . . . I lack patience. I probably got on guys a little too hard, with the wrong tone of voice. -Frank Robinson, In Sports magazine, August, 1981 Belief I don't think anything is unrealistic if you believe you can do it. -Mike Ditka Birds O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, and yet the Evening listens. -John Keats Books The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest. -Robert Benchley All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness. -Ernest Hemingway For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? -Milan Kundera The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. -Milan Kundera It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important. -Ian McEwan There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end. -Flannery O'Connor Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs -- unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times. -Hunter S. Thompson Boredom Bore -- a person who talks when you wish him to listen. -Ambrose Bierce Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. -Bertrand Russell Business Compromise is usually bad. It should be a last resort. If two departments or divisions have a problem they can't solve and it comes up to you, listen to both sides and then pick one or the other. This places solid accountability on the winner to make it work. Condition your people to avoid compromise. -Robert Townsend Camping Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong. -George Carlin Capitalism The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date. -Albert Camus Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country. -Eric Hoffer The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. -John Maynard Keynes When all the world is socialist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything. -Nikita Khrushchev The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy. -Lewis H. Lapham Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps. -Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people. -Abraham Lincoln The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily -- and perhaps most tellingly -- described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit. -Joseph Schumpeter The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls. -Joseph Schumpeter What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart. -Raymond Williams Cats If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats. -Aldous Huxley Caution There are no permanent changes because change itself is permanent. It behooves the industrialist to research and the investor to be vigilant. -Ralph L. Woods Celebrity Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. -John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, ch. 6, 1989 Character No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. -H. L. Mencken, The Art Eternal, "New York Evening Mail, 1918" Children Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. -James Baldwin Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list. -Letty Cottin Pogrebin Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision. -Denis Waitley Christianity Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind. -Mikhail Gorbachev Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America. -Florence King City Life, Cities The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know. -Margaret Mead A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again. -Margaret Mead Civilization It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depends. Historically this has been achieved by the influence of the various religious creeds and by traditions and superstitions which made man submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason. The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. This may well prove a hurdle which man will repeatedly reach, only to be thrown back into barbarism. -Friedrich A. Hayek It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with. -Robert Louis Stevenson Class By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. -Friedrich Engels Commitment I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life's greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret. -Anthony Robbins Communication From listening comes wisdom and from speaking, repentance. -Proverb You will get good attention and people will be more inclined to listen to you if you can make a statement whereby their response is, No Shit! or at least, No kidding! -Gael Boardman It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of supersophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners. -Erma Bombeck, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries..., 1971 Communism Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless. -Kenneth Baker I pass the test that says a man who isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head. -William Casey One is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one's dues, in short, without paying. -Michel De Certeau The substance of the eminent Socialist gentlemen's speech is that making a profit is a sin. It is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss! -Sir Winston Churchill It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses. -Sir Winston Churchill Socialists think profits are a vice; I consider losses the real vice. -Sir Winston Churchill Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist. -Thomas Mann By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage. -Ian McEwan Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born. -Hector Hugh Munro When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use. -Josef Stalin To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing. -Oscar Wilde Confidence Ninety-two percent of the stuff told you in confidence you couldn't get anyone else to listen to. -Franklin Pierce Adams The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. -Dag Hammarskjold Confusion The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of. -Samuel Beckett, interview, Tom F. Driver, Congress Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens -- and then everybody disagrees. -Boris Marshalov Consumerism Somebody said to me, But the Beatles were anti-materialistic. That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, Now, let's write a swimming pool. -Paul McCartney Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him. The consumers patronize those shops in which they can buy what they want at the cheapest price. Their buying and their abstention from buying decides who should own and run the plants and the farms. They make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities. They are merciless bosses, full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. For them nothing counts other than their own satisfaction. They do not care a whit for past merit and vested interests. If something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. In their capacity as buyers and consumers they are hard-hearted and callous, without consideration for other people. http://www.mises.org/humanaction.asp -Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, XV. THE MARKET, 4. The Sovereignty of the Consumers Contraception, Birth Control If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival. -Ursula K. LeGuin Control He who has the pepper may season as he lists. -George Herbert Conversation A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember. -John Mason Brown The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly --because if they don't speak fast nobody will listen to them. -Michael Caine No man ever listened himself out of a job. -Calvin Coolidge What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to. -Hansell B. Duckett What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to. -Hansell B. Duckett Listening to someone talk isn't at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape. -Oriana Fallaci There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart. -Johnson The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. -Fran Lebowitz Corruption When I want to buy up any politician I always find the anti-monopolists the most purchasable -- they don't come so high. -William Vanderbilt Criticism I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up. -Cyril Connolly The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews. -William Faulkner If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference. -Abraham Lincoln In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. -Susan Sontag Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water. -Thornton Wilder Culture One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. -Pauline Kael Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. -Jean Francois Lyotard Death A lion is much more dreadful to him that never saw him, than he is to his keeper who feedeth him every day. A pitched battle is more frightful and scaring to a new-listed soldier, that never took his place in the field before, nor saw the dreadful countenance of an army ready to engage, nor heard the thundering noise of cannon, and volleys of shot, the shouts of armies, and groans of dying men on every side, than it is to an old soldier who has been used to such things. The like we may observe in seamen, who it may be trembled at first, and now can sing in a storm. Scarce any thing is more necessary for weak and timorous believers to meditate on, than the time of their separation. Our hearts will be apt to start and boggle at the first view of death; but it is good to do by them as men use to do by young colts; ride them up to that which they fright at, and make them smell to it, which is the way to cure them. Look, as bread, says one, is more necessary than other food, so the meditation of death is more necessary than many other meditations. Every time we change our habitations, we should realise therein our great change: our souls must shortly leave this, and be lodged for a longer season in another mansion. When we put off our clothes at night, we have a fit occasion to consider, that we must strip nearer one of these days, and put off, not our clothes only, but the body that wears them too. http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/ipb-e/epl-10/web/flavel-pneumatologia07.html -John Flavel, A Treatise of the Soul of Man Deception/Lying Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically -- for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist -- but then what isn t? -Quentin Crisp I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die. -Christopher Hampton Where lies are easily admitted, the father of lies is not easily kept out. Source unknown A great leader molds public opinion, a wise leader listens to it. -Source Unknown Decisions I take great comfort in having people around who can walk in my office and tell me what's on their mind. Part of my job is -- they say, what's your job? My job is decision-maker. I make a lot of decisions. Obviously, some of which you've seen, and a lot of them you don't. And they're big ones and little ones. But you make a lot of decisions. And if you don't -- if you're uncertain about all the facts surrounding a decision, you've got to rely upon people. And you've then got to create an environment in which people are willing to come in and say, here's what's on my mind. It's important at the presidential level. It's important in business. You've got to have people comfortable about saying, Here's what I think you ought to do, Mr. CEO. You've got to listen and have a -- I've always believed in a flat organizational chart. I think the worst thing that can happen for decision-makers is to get a filtered point of view. -George W. Bush, Importance of Small Business in Economic Growth, answering the question: How do you remain upbeat when you're surrounded by the burdens of leadership?, January 19, 2006 Democracy Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life. -Mikhail Gorbachev Desires Listen to what you know instead of what you fear. -Richard Bach Despair I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance. -Katherine Anne Porter Determination One of the saddest lines in the world is, 'Oh come now - be realistic.' The best parts of this world were not fashioned by those who were realistic. They were fashioned by those who dared to look hard at their wishes and gave them horses to ride. -Richard Nelson Bolles When anyone tells me I can't do anything. I'm just not listening any more. -Florence Griffith Joyner Scientists have proven that it's impossible to long-jump 30 feet, but I don't listen to that kind of talk. Thoughts like that have a way of sinking into your feet. -Carl Lewis One of the saddest lines in the world is, 'Oh come now - be realistic.' The best parts of this world were not fashioned by those who were realistic. They were fashioned by those who dared to look hard at their wishes and gave them horses to ride. -Richard A. Nelson Difficulty Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top -- or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things. Life is one crisis after another. -Richard Milhous Nixon Doctors For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year? -Virginia Woolf Doubt I will listen to anyone's convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself. -Johann von Goethe Dreams You will achieve grand dream, a day at a time, so set goals for each day -- not long and difficult projects, but chores that will take you, step by step, toward your rainbow. Write them down, if you must, but limit your list so that you won't have to drag today's undone matters into tomorrow. Remember that you cannot build your pyramid in twenty-four hours. Be patient. Never allow your day to become so cluttered that you neglect your most important goal -- to do the best you can, enjoy this day, and rest satisfied with what you have accomplished. -Og Mandino Eccentric, Eccentricity Only the other day I was inquiring of an entire bed of old-fashioned roses, forced to listen to my ramblings on the meaning of the universe as I sat cross-legged in the lotus position in front of them. -Prince Of Wales Charles Economics The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices... inflation is itself a problem. But the legitimate and hysterical fears of inflation are - quite aside from the evil of inflation itself - likely, in their own right, to be problems. In short, I fear inflation. And I fear the fear of inflation. Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative, but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise. Even if the military outlook were serene - and it is not - modern democracies must expect in the future to be much of the time at, or near, the point where inflation is a concern. Our greatest economic problem will be to face that concern realistically, to weigh inflation's quantitative evil against the evils of actions taken against it, to develop methods of adjusting to the residue of inflation which attainment of the 'golden mean' might involve. The challenge is great but the prognosis is cheerful. Responding to the question: What is the most important economic problem to be faced by the United States in the next twenty years? -Paul A. Samuelson, 1958 I think, without question, that unemployment of more than 6 per cent is something to be concerned about. You don't push the panic button, but you don't relax and enjoy it either... I myself don't believe in a numbers game in which you give a maximum tolerable percentage, because I think, truly, it does vary with the times... I would hesitate to specify the figure today, but I will say this: it would be, in my mind, less than a 4 per cent figure - that is, for the period ahead. I would not, realistically, think we could hope for a 2 per cent figure in the near future, as certain European countries have been able to do. But I do think that if we are pretty zealous in this matter and insist upon getting low figures - say, 3.5 per cent - then our very success in accomplishing that may lead to a new epoch just beyond when we could hope to go below 3 per cent... -Paul A. Samuelson, (interview), "U.S. News World Report", December, 1960 Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil. -Joseph Schumpeter Education Essentialists hope that when students leave school, they will possess not only basic skills and an extensive body of knowledge, but also disciplined, practical minds, capable of applying schoolhouse lessons in the real world. -William C. Bagley Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours. -Benjamin Disraeli Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. -Robert Frost America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering. -Billy Graham When the moral sense is wanting, we endeavor to supply the defect by education, by appeals to reason and calculation, by presenting to the being so unhappily conformed, other motives to do good and to eschew evil, such as the love, or the hatred, or the rejection of those among whom he lives, and whose society is necessary to his happiness and even existence; demonstrations by sound calculation that honesty promotes interest in the long run; the rewards and penalties established by the laws; and ultimately the prospects of a future state of retribution for the evil as well as the good done while here. These are the correctives which are supplied by education, and which exercise the functions of the moralist, the preacher, and legislator; and they lead into a course of correct action all those whose depravity is not too profound to be eradicated. -Thomas Jefferson, to Thomas Law, 1814 If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary means to an great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. -John Henry Newman, Idea of a University, 1852 Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets. -Oscar Wilde Ego The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now Emotions The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist. -Thomas Carlyle Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists--talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. -Ralph Waldo Emerson A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. -Oscar Wilde Enjoyment Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth --look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment. -S Entertainment The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them. -Kin Hubbard Envy / Jealousy Helpless, unknown, and unremembered, most human beings, however sensitive, idealistic, intelligent, go through life as passengers rather than chauffeurs. Although we may pretend that it is the chauffeur who is the social inferior, most of us, like Toad of Toad Hall, would not mind a turn at the wheel ourselves. -Ralph Harper Evangelism Some plague the people with too long sermons; for the faculty of listening is a tender thing, and soon becomes weary and satiated. -Martin Luther To call a man evangelical who is not evangelistic is an utter contradiction. -G. Campbell Morgan Evil To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness. -Confucius Evolution After listening to a lecture on evolution by a science professor, a student wrote a poem and titled it The Amazing Professor. The poem read: Once I was a tadpole when I began to begin. Then I was a frog with my tail tucked in. Next I was a monkey on a coconut tree. Now I am a doctor with a Ph.D. -Source Unknown Excess I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it's so petty. -Imelda Marcos Expectation The idea that positive illusions are in the service of sef-esteem virtually requires that they stay in check. If one develops substantially unrealistic expectations regarding the future that greatly exceed what one is actually able to accomplish, then one is set up for failure and disappointment, leading to lower self-esteem. -Shelley E. Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (describing illusion of control bias), 1989 One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people's expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about it. -Tiger Woods, An interview with Tiger Woods, www.golf.com Experience It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet. -Franz Kafka In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word. -Bertrand Russell Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make. -Donald Trump Failure A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it. -Alexander Dumas I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not. If I could, be... a great athlete and make a million a year, be a wit, a born -- vivant and a lady killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist ... and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably, at the outset of life. Be alike possible for a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more of less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully and pick out on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failure are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs carrying shame and gladness with them. -William James The wise man realistically accepts as part of life and builds a philosophy to meet them and make the most of them. He lives on the principle of nothing attempted, nothing gained and is resolved that if he fails he is going to fail while trying to succeed. -Wilferd A. Peterson Faith In order to be a realist you must believe in miracles. -Henry Christopher Bailey Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever. -Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet" Family With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state. -Percy Wynham Lewis Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her. -J. M. Synge Fanaticism Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons. -Friedrich Nietzsche A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. -Franklin D. Roosevelt Farming The farmer works the soil. The agriculturalist works the farmer. -Eugene F. Ware Fascism Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction. -Leon Trotsky Fate & Destiny I have thought this way several times in my life but only when circumstances have led me to a bad pass. No man who has chosen well and wisely will ever credit it to fate; the only real fatalist is a man on his way down the pipe. There is no solace in fatalism. -Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The Doomed - More Notes On The Death Of The American Dream (page 93) Fear When one has the feeling of dislike for evil, when one feels tranquil, one finds pleasure in listening to good teachings; when one has these feelings and appreciates them, one is free of fear. -Buddha Confront your fears, list them, get to know them, and only then will you be able to put them aside and move ahead. -Jerry Gillies There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to your fear. -General George Patton If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been. -Robert H. Schuller Film / Filmmaking / Movies Every time we got something into the camera it was as if we were saying to the 6 million ghosts -- with a wry smile on our faces, and a sense of accomplishment -- That's for you! On shooting Schindler's List -Ben Kingsley I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by. -Orson Welles Firefighting YER OF THE VIGILE DEL FUOCO Lord who light the skyes and fill up the abysses, burn in our breast the flame of sacrifice. Strenghten the spirit of service that burn in us, make safe our eye, steady our foot, to make effective the rescue that in your name we bringto brothers in danger. When the siren shrieks in the streets of the town, listen the throb of our earths devoted to renounce. When in competition with eagles we climb to You, support us Your sored hand. When the fire irresistible flares up, burns the evil nestled in the houses of men, not the life and affections of Your sons. Lord, we are the bearer of Your Cross, and risk is our daily bread. A day without risk is not lived, because for we believers death is life, is light: in the dread of collapses, in the fury of waters, in the hell of fires. Our life is the fire, our faith is God.For Saint Barbara martyr.AMEN -Anon., The prayer of italian firefighters Flattery Every flatterer lives at the expense of him who listens to him. -Jean De La Fontaine Food Eat not garlic nor onions, lest they find out thy boorish origin by the smell; walk slowly and speak deliberately, but not in such a way as to make it seem thou art listening to thyself, for all affectation is bad. Dine sparingly and sup more sparingly still; for the health of the whole body is forged in the workshop of the stomach. Be temperate in drinking, bearing in mind that wine in excess keeps neither secrets nor promises. Take care, Sancho, not to chew on both sides, and not to eruct in anybody's presence. Eruct! said Sancho; I don't know what that means. To eruct, Sancho, said Don Quixote, means to belch, and that is one of the filthiest words in the Spanish language, though a very expressive one; and therefore nice folk have had recourse to the Latin, and instead of belch say eruct, and instead of belches say eructations; and if some do not understand these terms it matters little, for custom will bring them into use in the course of time, so that they will be readily understood; this is the way a language is enriched; custom and the public are all-powerful there. In truth, senor, said Sancho, one of the counsels and cautions I mean to bear in mind shall be this, not to belch, for I'm constantly doing it. Eruct, Sancho, not belch, said Don Quixote. Eruct, I shall say henceforth, and I swear not to forget it, said Sancho. -Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Football Coaches have to watch for what they don't want to see and listen to what they don't want to hear. -John Madden Forgiveness Classic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. ROLLING IN THE MUCK IS NOT THE BEST WAY OF GETTING CLEAN. -Aldous Huxley Freedom Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. -Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms. -Seneca (Seneca the Elder) Friends One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error. -Edward George Bulwer-Lytton The gift of friendship... a willingness to listen... a pair of helping hands... a whisper from the heart. That someone cares and understands. -Source Unknown Future, The When the great white silence comes and fills the boughs of the trees with a thickening, glistening brilliance, and all is cold and barren, where be the blossom? It is in the memory. It is in the wisdom. It is in the growth of last spring, and it is coming forth again. For when the season has turned and winter is gone, the buds come again, and behold, there is another blossom. If the ongoingeness of life is beheld in a single blossom, why do you think that you are less that its life? Do you think that you only bloom in sping, produce your fruit in summer, drop your leaves in autumn and then die in winter? But are you not greater than the greatest blossom? Is not your life more important? Indeed it is. And as the blossoms continue to bloom every spring, so will you live, life after life. What a story your blossoms could tell of all the seasons you've seen. -J. Z. Knight, #NAME? Generalize, Generalizations A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers. -Patrick Kavanagh Goals The goal you set must be challenging. At the same time, it should be realistic and attainable, not impossible to reach. It should be challenging enough to make you stretch, but not so far that you break. -Rick Hansen Goals should be SMART: S = Specific M = Measurable A = Assignable (who does what) R = Realistic T = Time-Related -Source Unknown God Fundamentalists believe Jesus was God becoming man. I believe that Jesus was man becoming God. -Eric Butterworth I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery -- such suffering, such dreadful suffering -- and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all? -D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence The existentialist -Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946 Golf Golf is not, on the whole, a game for realists. By its exactitudes of measurement it invites the attention of perfectionists. -Heywood Hale Broun, Tumultuous Merriment, 1979 You can talk to a fade but a hook won't listen. -Lee Trevino Goodness Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. -Leo Buscaglia Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it. -Pau (Pablo) Casals Gossip A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself. -Lisa Kirk There are two good rules which ought to be written on every heart; never to believe anything bad about anybody unless you positively know it to be true; and never to tell that unless you feel that it is absolutely necessary, and that God is listening while you tell it. -Henry Van Dyke Government A Republican by principle and devotion, I will, until my death, oppose all Royalists and all enemies of my Government and the Republic. -Jean Baptiste Bernadotte For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard. -Richard Milhous Nixon Greatness & Great Things To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit. To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. When we listen to the better angels of our nature, we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basic things--such as goodness, decency, love, kindness. Greatness comes in simple trappings. -Richard Milhous Nixon, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1969 Greed You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker. -Malcolm X Grief, Grieving Dear Friend, Please be patient with me; I need to grieve in my own way and in my own time. Please don't take away my grief or try to fix my pain. The best thing you can do is listen to me and let me cry on your shoulder. Don't be afraid to cry with me. Your tears will tell me how much you care. Please forgive me if I seem insensitive to your problems. I feel depleted and drained, like an empty vessel, with nothing left to give. Please let me express my feelings and talk about my memories. Feel free to share your own stories of my loved one with me. I need to hear them. Please understand why I must turn a deaf ear to criticism or tired clich http://www.grievinggodsway.com/ -Margaret Brownley If I be the first of us to die, Let grief not blacken long your sky. Be bold yet modest in your grieving. There is a change but not a leaving. For just as death is part of life, The dead live on forever in the living. And all the gathered riches of our journey, The moments shared, the mysteries explored, The steady layering of intimacy stored, The things that made us laugh or weep or sing, The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring, The wordless language of look and touch, The knowing, Each giving and each taking, These are not flowers that fade, Nor trees that fall and crumble, Nor are they stone, For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand. What we were, we are. What we had, we have. A conjoined past imperishably present. So when you walk the wood where once we walkedtogether And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow, Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land, And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand, And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you, Be still. Close your eyes. Breathe. Listen for my footfall in your heart. I am not gone but merely walk within you. -Nicholas Evans, from The Smoke Jumper copyright Nicholas Evans, 2001 Gun Control I used to issue leaflets asking people to enlist as recruits. One of the arguments I had used was distasteful to the Commissioner: 'Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.' The Commissioner referred to this and said that he appreciated my presence in the conference in spite of the differences between us. And I had to justify my standpoint as courteously as I could. N.B.: This quote refers to the British disarmament of the Indian Army. Gandhi never advocated the individual right to bear arms. -Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi, An Autobiography, The story of my experiments with truth (Chapter XXVII, Recruiting Campaign, pg 446-447, Beacon Press, 1957) Heroes/Heroism Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes. -Jean Anouilh History Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist. -H. L. Mencken Humanity I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing. -William Faulkner, Nobel Acceptance Speech Humor Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke. -Ambrose Bierce Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. -Dorothy Parker There's a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. -Dorothy Parker Humor is, I think, the sublets and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers -Leo Rosten Idealism The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels. -Malcolm De Chazal The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable. -Charles Horton Cooley An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous. -Henry Ford Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world. -Emma Goldman An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. -Sydney J. Harris Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal. -Oliver Wendell Holmes Idealist: a cynic in the making. -Irving Layton The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell. -Friedrich Nietzsche Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. -Ayn Rand I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way. -Carl Sandburg When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter. -Logan Pearsall Smith Ideas Great ideas come into the world as quietly as doves. Perhaps then , if we listen attentively we shall hear, among the uproar of empires and nations, the faint fluttering of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. Some will say this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. Each and every one, on the foundations of their own suffering and joy builds for all. -Albert Camus Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things. -Dogen Imagination The human imagination...has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open. -John Berger, The Soul and the Operator, in Expressen (Stockholm), March 19, 1990 You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. -Franz Kafka Imitation Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done. -James Fenton Independence Let me listen to myself and not to them. -Gertrude Stein Individuality Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb. -Lewis H. Lapham By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State -Ian McEwan, A Move Abroad, preface (1989) Infidelity According to my sister, the expert novelist Jackie Collins, most men stray. And sex doesn't mean anything to most men. But I wouldn't date a man who slept around. Absolutely not. I've divorced people for that. -Joan Collins Inflation The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. -John Maynard Keynes Inheritance Queer little twists go into the making of an individual. To supress them all and follow clock and calendar and creed until the individual is lost in the neutral grey of the host is to be less than true to our inheritance.... Life, that gorgeous quality of life, is not accomplished by following another man's rules. It is true we have the same hungers and same thirsts, but they are for different things and in different ways and in different seasons.... Lay down your own day, follow it to its noon, your own noon, or you will sit in an outer hall listening to the chimes but never reaching high enough to strike your own. -Angelo Patri Insects As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized! -Mark Twain Inspirational Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. -George Eliot None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. -Ralph Waldo Emerson Instinct To see life from the perspective of intuition is to have vision. To see life from the perspective of intuition is to see life from the perspective of wholeness. It is to understand that life is basically one and that we are part of life. While the intellect can only see the details, intuition sees the whole. To see life from the perspective of intuition is like looking at life from the summit of the mountain, whereas seeing life only from the perspective of intellect is like looking at life from the foot of the mountain. Through learning to listen to our intuition, we learn to be in contact with the Whole. -Swami Dhyan Giten Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.... -C.S. Lewis, attributed Insults Slander is a poison which kills charity, both in the slanderer and the one who listens. -St. Bernard Slander-mongers and those who listen to slander, if I had my way, would all be strung up, the talkers by the tongue, the listeners by the ears. -Plautus Intelligence If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down. -Ray Bradbury Intellectuals incline to be individualists, or even independents, are not team conscious and tend to regard obedience as a surrender of personality. -Harold Nicolson Intuition The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware. -Herb Goldberg Journalism A journalist is a person who has mistaken their calling. -Otto von Bismarck I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate. -Marguerite Duras Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees. -Marguerite Duras It was when reporters became journalists and when objectivity gave way to searching for truth, that an aura of distrust and fear arose around the New Journalist. -Georgie Anne Geyer A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. -Graham Greene Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one. -Jean De La Fontaine More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth. -Lewis H. Lapham The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak. -G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. -Norman Mailer Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. -Janet Malcolm The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others. -Janet Malcolm A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times? -Bill Moyers, Channel Maker, February 29, 1979 I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth. -Reinhold Niebuhr I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry. -P. J. O'Rourke Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets. -Gerald Priestland Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark. -Arthur Schopenhauer In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that. -Mark Twain If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles. -Evelyn Waugh It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. -Oscar Wilde You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to. -Humbert Wolfe Journeys The richness of the human journey is here. Listen. Pass it on. So that there will not pass from our future the enchantment that begins with the honored words, Once upon a time, long ago and far away, in a deep forest, there lived a child - much like you. -Anon. Judging, Judgment I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you -- it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. -Philip Roth Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment. -Donald Rumsfeld Justice Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity. -G. K. Chesterton I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system -- that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. -Harper Lee Knowledge Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing. -Konrad Lorenz Land This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway. -Bob Dylan Language How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote. -Source Unknown Law Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably. -Truman Capote Learning Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf. -American Indian Proverb All other men are specialists, but his specialty is omniscience. -Sir Arthur Conan Doyle When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die. -Lillian Smith Legacy I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering. -Ernest Hemingway In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching... -Paul A. Samuelson When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people. -John Steinbeck, Once There Was A War, New York: Bantam, p.65., 1958 There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good. -Source Unknown Liberalism There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment. -Roland Barthes The hard-core intentionalist expresses only the most remote concern for consequences - usually, some vague, distant utopia. But this is, in most cases, a rationalization. His real satisfaction comes from a sense of doing the right thing - even when right has, in his mind, no clear connection with reality. http://www.libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosophicalissues/ethics/moralityofgood.html -Robert James Bidinotto, essay: The Morality of Good Intentions, "The Freeman, A publication of The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.", March, 1987 You just stood there screaming Fearing no one was listening to you They say the empty can rattles the most The sound of your own voice must soothe you Hearing only what you want to hear And knowing only what you've heard You, you're smothered in tragedy And you're out to save the world. -James Hetfield The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until one day America will be a Socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened. -Norman Thomas A liberal is a socialist with a wife and two children. -Source Unknown Life Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth. -William W. Purkey Dance like there's nobody watching Love like you'll never get hurt Sing like there's nobody listening Live like it's heaven on earth And speak from the heart to be heard. Purkey is the source of this quotation that is attributed to many others: it was made popular in the song Come From The Heart written by Susannah Clark and Richard Leigh. Purkey closed his speeches with this poem and it has now made it into the public domain. -William W. Purkey Please live. Talk, think, act. And sometimes listen to the music... Look at paintings and at times be moved. Laugh a lot, and at times, cry. And if you find a wonderful girl, then you go for her and love her. -Koushun Takami Listening No one is as deaf as the man who will not listen. -Yiddish Proverb He listens well who takes notes. -Dante Alighieri There is a difference between being listened to and being heard. -Gillian Anderson To talk to someone who does not listen is enough to tense the devil. -Pearl Bailey, Talking to Myself You need to become a good listener. VERY VERY important. As you're working, you hear someone else's lines and how you absorb them becomes your acting. -Jacqueline Bisset, Interview on Chats from the Past Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery. -Joyce Brothers The less you talk, the more you're listened to. -Abigail Van Buren One who cares is one who listens. -J. Richard Clarke It takes a great man to be a good listener. -Calvin Coolidge No one every listened themselves out of a job. -Calvin Coolidge Listen. Don't explain or justify. -William G. Dyer One of the most valuable things we can do to heal one another is listen to each other's stories. -Rebecca Falls A man is already halfway in love with any woman who listens to him. -Brendan Francis Listen to life, and you will hear the voice of life crying, Be! -James Dillet Freeman The older I grow the more I listen to people who don't talk much. -Germain G. Glien I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen. -Ernest Hemingway When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes. -Victor Hugo So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it. -Jiddu Krishnamurti Listening well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well. -John Marshall I always had one ear offstage, listening for the call from the bookie. -Walter Matthau No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why. -Mignon McLaughlin Sometimes it is a great joy just to listen to someone we love talking to. -Vincent McNabb, God's Way of Mercy A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something. -Wilson Mizner Are you really listening... or are you just waiting for your turn to talk? -Robert Montgomery To be listened to is, generally speaking, a nearly unique experience for most people. It is enormously stimulating. It is small wonder that people who have been demanding all their lives to be heard so often fall speechless when confronted with one who gravely agrees to lend an ear. Man clamors for the freedom to express himself and for knowing that he counts. But once offered these conditions, he becomes frightened. -Robert C. Murphy Every person I work with knows something better than me. My job is to listen long enough to find it and use it. -Jack Nichols Set up the listening. Prepare who you are talking to for what you want them to hear. Get people to listen as a possibility rather than a problem. -Mal Pancoast The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words. -Rachel Naomi Remen Listening well and answering well is one of the greatest perfections that can be obtained in conversation. -Fran When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathic, concentrated listening. -Carl R. Rogers, Experiences in Communication The first duty of love is to listen. -Paul Tillich Learn to listen. Opportunity could be knocking at your door very softly. -Frank Tyger Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble. -Frank Tyger You can judge a good listener by asking the talker at the end of the conversation what the listener's position is on the topic. If the talker doesn't know, then the listener has probably done a good job of listening. -Source Unknown There is only one rule to become a good talker, learn how to listen. -Source Unknown Opportunities are often missed because we are broadcasting when we should be listening. -Source Unknown One of the hardest things to do in life is to listen without intent to reply. -Source Unknown Listening: A wise old owl sat in an oak. The longer he sat, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard. Why can't we be like that wise old bird? -Source Unknown His thoughts were slow. His words were few and never formed to glisten. But he was a joy to all his friends, you should have heard him LISTEN! -Source Unknown Skillful listening is the best remedy for loneliness, loquaciousness, and laryngitis. -William Arthur Ward Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him. -Simone Weil, Waiting for God A good listener tries to understand thoroughly what the other person is saying. In the end he may disagree sharply, but before he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with. -Kenneth A. Wells, Guide to Good Leadership To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other. -Jessamyn West Love Son, I'd say you were going at it the wrong end first, said the Judge, turning up his coat-collar. How could you care about one girl? Have you ever cared about one leaf? Riley, listening to the wildcat with an itchy hunter's look, snatched at the leaves blowing about us like midnight butterflies; alive, fluttering as though to escape and fly, one stayed trapped between his fingers. The Judge, too: he caught a leaf; and it was worth more in his hand than in Riley's. Pressing it mildly against his cheek, he distantly said, We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed--begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it--I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life. -Truman Capote, The Glass Harp Listen! Encourage. Say something. Do something. Be yourself. Love -Rev. Dale Turner Machines, Machinery Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor. -Karl Marx Madness If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic. -Thomas Szasz Magic It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television? -Richard Dawkins, Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1, November 12, 1996 Mankind, Man My skull, my eyes, my nose three times, my jaw, my shoulder, my chest, two fingers, a knee, everything from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. Listing what body parts he has broken -Jackie Chan I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There's a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again! -Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition (1952) Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips. -Victor Frankl Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. -H. L. Mencken ...by association with natures enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big. Like the 'Big Man' described by Yuan Tsi (A.D. 210-263), one of China's first romanticists, we 'live in heaven and earth as our house.' -Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937 Manners Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. -Flannery O'Connor Marriage It is well within the order of things That man should listen when his mate sings; But the true male never yet walked Who liked to listen when his mate talked. -Anna Wickham, The Affinity in the Contemplative Quarry Maturity By the age of twenty, any young man should know whether or not he is to be a specialist and just where his tastes lie. By postponing the question we have set on immaturity a premium which controls most American personality to its deathbed. -Robert S. Hillyer Media Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing. -Robert Bresson It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths. -David Edelstein, "Slate magazine" The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom. -Oswald Spengler The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. -George Steiner, Real Presences, 1989 There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. -John Swinton, a toast before the New York Press Club I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth. -William Butler Yeats Memory When one of these flashbacks was reported to me by a conscious patient, I was incredulous. For example, when a mother told me she was suddenly aware, as my electrode touched the cortex, of being in the kitchen listening to the voice of her little boy who was playing outside in the yard. -Wilder Penfield Men Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while. -Marguerite Duras Men & Women A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realist, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads. -Louis L'Amour, The Walking Drum It is well within the order of things that man should listen when his mate sings; but the true male never yet walked who liked to listen when his mate talked. -Anna Wickham Miracles Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist. -David Ben-Gurion In order to be realist you must believe in miracles. -David Ben-Gurion A am realistic -- I expect miracles. -Wayne Dyer Mistakes No one is listening until you make a mistake. -Anon. Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself. -Paul Ambroise Valery Money However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money. -Raymond Chandler Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put. -Lewis H. Lapham While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. -Karl Marx If a man is after money, he's money mad; if he keeps it, he's a capitalist; if he spends it, he's a playboy; if he doesn't get it, he's a never-do-well; if he doesn't try to get it, he lacks ambition. If he gets it without working for it; he's a parasite; and if he accumulates it after a life time of hard work, people call him a fool who never got anything out of life. -Vic Oliver Morals Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure. -Lord (George Gordon) Byron The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary. -Walter Lippmann Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic. -Iris Murdoch That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages. -Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1790 Mother The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone. -Phyllis Mcginley Murder Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen. -E. L. Doctorow Music I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man -Leonard Bernstein We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is. -John Milton Cage, An Autobiographical Statement It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture. -John Milton Cage There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art. -Claude Debussy The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own. -Claude L For a long time I wasn't listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty--it would bring back memories I didn't want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I'm not alive 'cause I'm not making it. And if it was good, I hated it 'cause I wasn't doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious 'cause I could've done it better... -John Lennon You don't need any brains to listen to music. -Luciano Pavarotti He had always wanted to write Music and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikowsky's First Concerto, or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the Music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that Music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers - Show me yours - show me that it is possible - show me your achievement - and the knowledge will give me courage for mine. -Ayn Rand It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys. -Kevin Richardson Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music. -Gioacchino Antonio Rossini Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. -Lewis Thomas Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk. -Oscar Wilde Nation, Nationality, Nationalism Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect. -Eric Hoffer All the nationalists are wasms -- except one, the most powerful of this century, indeed, of the entire democratic age, which is nationalism. -John Lukacs Nature For example, there is a species of butterfly, a night-moth, in which the females are much less common than the males. The moths breed exactly like all animals, the male fertilizes the female and the female lays the eggs. Now, if you take a female night moth----many naturalists have tried this experiment---the male moths will visit this female at night and they will come from hours away. From hours away! Just think! From a distance of several miles all these males sense the only female in the region. One looks for an explanation for this phenomenon but it is not easy. You must assume that they have a sense of smell of some sort like a hunting dog that can pick up and follow a semmingly imperceptible scent. Do you see? Nature abounds with such inexplicable things. But my argument is: if the female moths were as abundant as the males, the latter would not have such a highly developed sense of smell. They've acquired it only because they had to train themseleves to to have it. If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That's all. And that also answers your question. Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than he does himself. -Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919 Negativity We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic. - News Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. -Milan Kundera No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers. -C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. -Tom Stoppard Office Here is a pen and here is a pencil, here's a typewriter, here's a stencil, here's a list of today's appointments, and all the flies in all the ointments, the daily woes that a man endures -- take them, George, they're yours! -Ogden Nash Opera Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television. -Luciano Berio I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager. -Edgar Allan Poe Opinion They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally allowable emotion, it may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman. -Aleister Crowley When anyone tells me I can't do anything... I'm just not listening any more. -Florence Griffith-Joyner Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion. -Madonna Opportunity What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live -- with your self-respect alive and growing. -Maxwell Maltz Listen to the mustn'ts child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn't haves, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me. Anything can happen child. Anything can be. -Shel Silverstein Optimism Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake. -Edward Dahlberg I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. -Walt Disney As both capitalist and communist states -- not to mention the technological world --have evolved under the illusion that men purposefully built them, ideological optimism seeps into every niche of our lives. It is made worse by mass culture which feeds our -Stephen Vizinczey Pacifism I certainly do not consider myself permanently dedicated to a crusade for peace and I am beginning to see the uselessness and absurdity of getting too involved in a 'peace movement.' The chief reason why I have spoken out was that I felt I owed it to my conscience to do so. There are certain things that have to be clearly stated. I had in mind particularly the danger arising from the fact that some of the most belligerent people in this country are Christians, on the one hand fundamentalist Protestants and on the other certain Catholics. They both tend to appeal to the bomb to do a 'holy' work of destruction in the name of Christ and Christian truth. This is completely intolerable and the truth has to be stated. I cannot in conscience remain indifferent. -Thomas Merton, letter to Czeslaw Milosz collected in Courage For Truth: The Letters Of Thomas Merton To Writers (1993), March, 1962 The adherents of the old order have a powerful ally in the natural law of inertia inherent in humanity which is, as it were, a natural defense against change. Thus pacifism faces no easy struggle. The question of whether violence or law shall prevail between states is the most vital of the problems of our eventful era, and the most serious in its repercussions. The beneficial results of a secure world peace are almost inconceivable, but even more inconceivable are the consequences of the threatening world war which many misguided people are prepared to precipitate. The advocates of pacifism are well aware how meager are their resources of personal influence and power. They know that they are still few in number and weak in authority, but when they realistically consider themselves and the ideal they serve, they see themselves as the servants of the greatest of all causes. -Bertha von Suttner, 1905 Patience Every man must patiently bide his time. He must wait -- not in listless idleness but in constant, steady, cheerful endeavors, always willing and fulfilling and accomplishing his task, that when the occasion comes he may be equal to the occasion. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Patriotism The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible. -Marquis De Custine What do the nationalists say about killers punishing murderers and thieves sentencing looters? -Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet" To read the papers and to listen to the news... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well. -Charles Kuralt It is an obscene comparison - you know I am not sure I like it - but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck, he said. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions... ...It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole - and for all the right reasons - felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.' -Dan Rather, admitting, that patriotism run amok was in danger of trampling the freedom of American journalists to ask tough questions Peace When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people? -Frank Borman People 'Exactly,' he said, while he leant forward excitedly, for all the world like a Jack-in-the-box let loose. 'Precisely; and you are a journalist - call yourself one, at least - and it should be part of your business to notice and describe people. I don't mean only the wonderful personage with the clear Saxon features, the fine blue eyes, the noble brow and classic face, but the ordinary person - the person who represents ninety out of every hundred of his own kind - the average Englishman, say, of the middle classes, who is neither very tall nor very short, who wears a moustache which is neither fair nor dark, but which masks his mouth, and a top hat which hides the shape of his head and brow, a man, in fact, who dresses like hundreds of his fellow-creatures, moves like them, speaks like them, has no peculiarity.' -Baroness Emmuska Orczy, from 'The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway' Perception An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing. -H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, p. 16, 1916 Persistence My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am, I fight until the last ball. My list of matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats into victories. -Bjorn Borg Persuasion If you can't get people to listen to you any other way, tell them it's confidential. -Proverb The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what your saying, and they can't know what you've saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting until you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly. -William Bernbach Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy. -Thomas Carlyle Oral delivery aims at persuasion and making the listener believe they are converted. Few persons are capable of being convinced; the majority allow themselves to be persuaded. -Johann von Goethe One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears - by listening to them. -Dean Rusk Pessimism The pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light - and the next tunnel. -Sydney J. Harris A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists. -Don Marquis If all complaints had to be accompanied by the submission of a delicious sandwich then fewer people would voice them while more would be willing to listen. -Michael Wakcher Philosophy Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative. -Karl Popper Photography Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does. -John Berger Planning A plan is a list of actions arranged in whatever sequence is thought likely to achieve an objective. -John Argenti The success of your presentation will be judged not by the knowledge you send but by what the listener receives. -Lily Walters Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give. -William Arthur Ward Play/Games When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream... I see children playing on the grass, ...they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with anther, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game. -Judge Learned Hand Pleasure There is no sterner moralist than pleasure. -Lord (George Gordon) Byron A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go. -Max Eastman Poetry The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. -James Fenton Politics Bush Sr. was a jerk, Quayle an idiot, Clinton was atrocious and disgusting, most of those who persecuted him were hypocritical, Gore is shallow and weak, Bradley is an idealist, Bush Jr. a fool, and all of the independent candidates act like they're on drugs. -David Borenstein, On the politics of the 1990's The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements. -Frank Dane The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad. -Napoleon Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of what is already known. Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies. -Susan Sontag Pornography Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be. -Bertrand Russell Potential I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist. -Max Lerner Poverty To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things -- but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature. -Charles Dickens Power Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny. -Jacques Maritain Praise You can handle people more successfully by enlisting their feelings than by convincing their reason. -Paul P. Parker Prayer It is good to pray for the repair of mistakes, but praying earlier would keep us from making so many. When puzzled, go to prayer and listen. -J. C. Macaulay Don't put people down, unless it's on your prayer list. -Stan Michalski Prayer is first of all listening to God. It's openness. God is always speaking; he's always doing something. Prayer is to enter into that activity. ... Convert your thoughts into prayer. As we are involved in unceasing thinking, so we are called to unceasing prayer. The difference is not that prayer is thinking about other things, but that prayer is thinking in dialogue, ... a conversation with God. -Henri Nouwen Prayer is talking with God and telling Him you love Him, conversing with God about all the things that are important in life, both large and small, and being assured that He is listening. -C. Neil Strait An essential condition of listening to God is that the mind should not be distracted by thoughts of resentment, ill-temper, hatred or vengeance, all of which are comprised in the general term, the wrath of man. -R. V. G. Tasker Prejudice You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out. -George Bernard Shaw Presidency My own participation in the campaign was delayed by the death of my son Calvin, which occurred on the seventh of July. He was a boy of much promise, proficient in his studies, with a scholarly mind, who had just turned sixteen. He had a remarkable insight into things. The day I became President he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, if my father was President I would not work in a tobacco field, Calvin replied, If my father were your father, you would.... We do not know what might have happened to him under other circumstances, but if I had not been President, he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds.In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him. The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do. I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House. -Calvin Coolidge, (autobiography) Principles The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka. -Aleister Crowley Privacy