People are always blaming their circumstances for what
they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people
who get on in this world are the people who get up and
look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't
find them, make them.
--G.B. Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession, 1893

"Deadlines are important..."
George W Bush ... heard on NPR today regarding deadline of May 15 for seniors to sign-up for Medicare Part D... or else.

Except for wars, huh, W? Those are endless.

I'm not sure if this is exact but

"The republicans are always talking about how government does not work. Bill Clinton ran it just fine. It only doesn't work when the republicans try to run it."

-Bill Maher.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

-James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)

If we are facing in the right direction,
all we have to do is keep on walking.
--Buddhist Saying

Our greatest glory is not in never failing,
but in rising up every time we fail.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hope no one minds, a few of my fav's

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864

Turn on to politics, or politics will turn on you.
-Ralph Nader

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well - Martin Luther King

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.-Noam Chomsky

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. - Mark Twain we shoul tell this one to the ones so opposed to flag burning.


Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.- Tom Paine

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives...I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National city Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested...Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents... "-General Smedley Butler

By all means, post as many as you want.




I ask you, could anything be more true and honest than this?




The aspects of things that are most important for us are
hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In joining battle, seek the quick victory. If battle is protracted, your weapons will be blunted and your troops demoralized. If you lay siege to a walled city, you exhaust your strength. If your armies are kept in the field for a long time, your national reserves will not suffice. Where you have blunted your weapons, demoralized your troops, exhausted your strength and depleted all available resources, the neighboring rulers will take advantage of your adversity to strike. And even with the wisest of counsel, you will not be able to turn the ensuing consequences to the good. There never has been a state that has benefited from an extended war.
--Sun Tzu

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949)
I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the
defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.
Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Quotation: Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to
watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trails.

Calvin:

People think it must be fun to be a super genius,
but they don't realize how hard it is to put up
with all the idiots in the world.



Hobbes:

Isn't your pants' zipper
supposed to be in the front?

For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions.

Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will.

If that's the charge, I stand guilty and I am proud of it.

--David Rockefeller, from his autobiography "Memoirs"

What's driving the conflict is the radical inequality between the Jewish minority, that rules all of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and the disenfranchised Palestinian majority, who are paying the price for the luxury that Israel lives in...But what pays for that normality for Israelis is the total dispossession of the majority population. And Israel believes that it can hide them behind walls, in ghettos, as was done to Jews in Europe in the 1930s and '40s.
--Ali Abunimah, Activist, Author

There's no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.
--Golda Meir, Former PM of Israel




You don't simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away. I prefer to advocate a positive policy, to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.
--Ariel Sharon, former Israeli PM - Aug 24, 1988




The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized...Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And, forever.
-- Menachem Begin, Former Israeli PM

It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.
--Ariel Sharon, Agence France Presse, 11/15/1998

We are the ones responsible to determine whether the war that our marines, soldiers and airmen are fighting in is worth the cause...
--Scott Ritter

Patriotism means to stand by the country.
It does not mean to stand by the president
or any other public official...
--Theodore Roosevelt

Liberty and democracy become unholy
when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
--Mahatma Gandhi

In times of universal deceit,
telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell

Our country is now geared to an arms economy
bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war
hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.
--General Douglas MacArthur

Every nation has its war party.
It is not the party of democracy.
It is the party of autocracy.
It seeks to dominate absolutely.
--Senator Robert M. La Follette

I am not blaming those who are resolved to rule, only
those who show an even greater readiness to submit.
--Thucydides

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the
oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
--General Smedley Butler

After every "victory" you have more enemies.
--Jeanette Winterson

But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it… it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect...
--George Orwell , Preface to Animal Farm

This Preface was censored when the book came out in 1945
and it was only published in The Times Literary Supplement
on 15 September 1972. Twenty seven years after Animal Farm
was first published.

Ability is what you are capable of doing.
Motivation determines what you do.
Attitude determines how well you do it.
--Lou Holtz





The long span of the bridge of your life is supported by countless cables called habits, attitudes, and desires. What you do in life depends upon what you are and what you want. What you get from life depends upon how much you want it, how much you are willing to work and plan and co-operate and use your resources. The long span of the bridge of your life is supported by countless cables that you are spinning now, and that is why today is such an important day. Make the cables strong!
--George Elliott

Our deepest fear is NOT that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God: your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
--Nelson Mandela

Never has so much military and economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively, and if after all of this time, and all of this sacrifice, and all of this support, there is still no end in sight, then I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and policies of the past.
Richard Nixon, 1968, Campaign statement running against LBJ.



Does this statement apply in todays war reality?

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
--John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

Herein lies the tragedy:
not that men are poor--all men know something of poverty;
not that men are wicked--who is good?
Not that men are ignorant --what is truth?
Nay, but that men know so little of men.
--W.E.B. Du Bois





What's the evidence?
We've got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys [the Iranians] have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We're coming up with jack shit.
--Intelligence officer reporting to Seymour Hersh

There seems to be so much sorrow on the planet. Can you work within the framework of the test before you? Can you put on your armor and shields of sacredness and walk through the sorrow, fear and disappointment of what other Humans have done, without judgment of them or without being discouraged?

The more light you carry, the more you will see that which is sorrowful on Earth. Only the masters can "see" these things as reasonable within the scheme of why you're here. It is important that the Lighthouses are not distracted by the storms as they shine their lights. Otherwise, they become useless.
--Kryon Channelling: Where is Aunt Martha

To love. To be loved.
To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable
violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you.

To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated
or complicate what is simple.
To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch. To try and understand.
To never look away. And never, never, to forget.
--Arundhati Roy

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
--Archibald MacLeish, poet and librarian (1892-1982)

I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ. - Gandhi

Very well put, Yank. My daughter told me this weekend, it's not a surprize to me that people in general dislike, even hate "Christians"....it was earned.

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected
are as outraged as those who are.
--Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor (1706-1790)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities~

VOLTAIRE

Bush is on a crusade to break souls, not save them.


~YANKHADENUF

The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of
action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
--Marcus Tullius Cicero







But in the mud and scum of things
There always, always something sings.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood...War is hell.
--General William Tecumseh Sherman

War is not the continuation of politics with different means,
it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
--Alfred Adler

Look at you in war...
There has never been a just one,
never an honorable one,
on the part of the instigator of the war.
--Mark Twain from "The Mysterious Stranger," published 1910

from my Dem precienct chair:



Talking Points Memo: Josh Marshall cites, a reader comment from rp:




Every basketball coach will tell you the way to win games is to 'get the other team out of its game, and make them play your game." To a certain extent, even listening to Rove and the Republican Screech Monkeys is a waste of time. Rove & Co. is going to take the lowest of low roads in the next 75 days, accusing every Dem House candidate of being Osama bin Laden's personal valet. The attacks are going to be vile, fraudulent, and personal.
If the Dems "take the bait" -- defend themselves in the conventional way -- they will lose. Why? Because they'll burn their ad dollars playing Rove's game. They will have "localized" the election.
What to do? Stay focused on one and only message -- "You -- the Voters -- have ONE DAY to hold the Bush Administration accountable for what's happened in Iraq, and here at home. ONE DAY -- election day. If you like the way things are going, vote Republican. If you think things need to change, VOTE DEMOCRATIC. Seize the day. It's your very last chance."

"What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty."
Gandhi

I believe what I said yesterday.
I don't know what I said,
but I know what I think,
and I assume it's what I said.
Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

"People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than think their way into a new way of acting."
From the book, "Delivering Results", by Richard Pascale

No quarter. No surrender. They wanted to destroy Social Security, and I want them zapped with every bit of juice America's third-rail can provide.
— Ezra Klein

Dwight D. Eisenhower





I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.





I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.





There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure.





When you appeal to force, there's one thing you must never do - lose.





Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.





Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.






Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.





Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give you the signal.





Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.





How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?





I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.





If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.





In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.





Only Americans can hurt America.





Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.





The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!





Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.





Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.





War settles nothing.

He proved the impossible:
that the poor were bankable.
JONATHAN J. MORDUCH

the first few that come to mind:




Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its
government when it deserves it.
Mark Twain


Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute. - Abraham Lincoln



The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it. - Edward Dowling



If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - JFK



The great words of Mahatma Gandhi came to mind:
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"



"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;

2. From spiritual faith to great courage;

3. From courage to liberty;

4. From liberty to abundance;

5. From abundance to complacency;

6. From complacency to apathy;

7. From apathy to dependence;

8. From dependence back into bondage "


But Lily Tomlin said it best.


"No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."