Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 30, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 30, 2010



I had always thought of Paradise
In form and image as a library.

- Jorge Luis Borges, Poem of the Gifts, 1959 (translated by Alastair Reid). Borges also wrote "The Library of Babel".

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Jun. 15, 2010

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Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 29, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 29, 2010



"Once you label me, you negate me."

- Soren Kierkegaard

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Jun. 25, 2010

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Monday, June 28, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 28, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 28, 2010



we went a hunting for those damned evildoers
down in old Afghanistan
then we lost the track and headed back to Iraq
with our sights set on Iran

through the desert runs a money trail
we kill and die for to defend
from the banks to the bankers
to the tanks to the tankers
it's a war that knows no end

and no wonder why very few wonder why
with all this sweet sweet sweet sugarcoating
nightly news gone entertainment biz
big business out showboatin
won't somebody tell it like it is

- Martin Sexton, from his song Sugarcoating, recorded on his 2010 album of the same name.



Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 23, 2010

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Sunday, June 27, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 27, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 27, 2010



"Worry not, Catamounts. I might be a twit--I'm uncertain of the parameters--but I do not labor under any illusion my updates will grace the pages, or, scratch that, the screens, of our beloved alumni bulletin. Fontana was correct in his prediction that Catamount Notes, under the Ryson regime, would be an electronic affair. I received an e-mail today announcing the site was officially live. The same old lies. Now they are linked to other lies. You can leap between them."

- Sam Lipsyte, from his novel Home Land.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 22, 2010

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Saturday, June 26, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 26, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 26, 2010



"The Provision House came as a welcome relief. Parts of it had survived since 1782 (which was decades better than almost anything in St John's). But it was empty now, just the clump of heels on wood, white schoolrooms, white corridors and bare rooms in the attic. We found a pram made out of fur, a map of the world in Inuktitut and a three-piece sealskin suit. It was like walking around in the mind of Man Ray, all that light and the oddities abandoned."

- John Gimlette, on visiting an old Moravian mission in "Theatre of Fish: Travels through Newfoundland and Labrador".

Submitted by: Jean Rogers
Jun. 16, 2010

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Friday, June 25, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 25, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 25, 2010



"I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mindcrushing. It is soul-deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing."

- Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Jun. 23, 2010

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Thursday, June 24, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 24, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 24, 2010



"I have not bought the latest set of World Books. In fact, having been selected to be an author in the World Book, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias."

- Randy Pausch, in The Last Lecture, from the chapter "You'll Find Me Under "V"".

Submitted by: Duffy O'Craven
Jun. 22, 2010

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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 23, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 23, 2010



"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -- will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."

- John Maynard Keynes, from Essays in Persuasion.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 17, 2010

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 22, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 22, 2010



"My experience is that I can feel that I'm in the Grail Castle when I'm living with people I love, doing what I love. I get that sense of being fulfilled. But, by god, it doesn't take much to make me feel I've lost the Castle, it's gone. One way to lose the Grail is to go to a cocktail party. That's my idea of not being there at all."

- Joseph Campbell, quoted in A Joseph Campbell Companion by Diane Osbon.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Apr. 30, 2010

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Monday, June 21, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 21, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 21, 2010



"Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting and...stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to "walk about" into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"

- Wassily Kandinsky, 1910

Submitted by: Brian K. Read
May 17, 2010

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Sunday, June 20, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 20, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 20, 2010



Oh, poor Dad. I'm sorry I made fun of you.

Now I'm spelling Nietszche wrong, too.

- Lydia Davis, from her (very) short story "Nietszche".

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 16, 2010

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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 19, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 19, 2010



"You expected that the trial was over at the time you were writing; but you can little conceive the talents for procrastination that have been exhibited in this affair. Day after day have we been disappointed by the non-arrival of the magnanimous Wilkinson; day after day have fresh murmurs and complaints been uttered; and day after day are we told that the next mail will probably bring his noble self, or at least some accounts when he may be expected. We are now enjoying a kind of suspension of hostilities; the grand jury having been dismissed the day before yesterday for five or six days, that they might go home, see their wives, get their clothes washed, and flog their negroes."

- Washington Irving, describing the treason trial of Aaron Burr, in a letter dated June 4, 1807. From the collection, The life & letters of Washington Irving.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Jun. 17, 2010

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Friday, June 18, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 18, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 18, 2010



"In response to this, Phillip Robinson and his colleagues at Civil Justice have come up with an idea which is both noble in its motivations and devastatingly, dazzlingly, breathtakingly cynical. This is the idea: how do you drive change in America? Real, noncosmetic change? Answer: by finding ways for lawyers to make money."

- John Lanchester, on how activists are fighting mortgage fraud in the U.S., in his wonderful 2010 book I.O.U., which ponders the financial meltdown.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 17, 2010

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 17, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 17, 2010



"Nonetheless, the "Twitter Revolution" was an irresistible meme during the post-election protests, a story that wrote itself. Various analysts were eager to chime in about the purported role of Twitter in the Green Movement. Some were politics experts, like the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder. Others were experts on new media, like Sascha Segan of PC Magazine. Western journalists who couldn't reach -- or didn't bother reaching? -- people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets posted with tag #iranelection. Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."

- Golnaz Esfandiari, "The Twitter Devolution", Foreign Policy, 7 June 2010.

[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/07/the_twitter_revolution_that_wasnt]

Submitted by: Chris Doherty
Jun. 11, 2010

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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 16, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 16, 2010



"It's a good -- oh, gosh, from the nearest -- the way you measure things in Arkansas I guess is to the nearest Wal-Mart. It's probably a good 45 minutes to an hour to the nearest, you know, sit-down restaurant or anything like that."

- Whitney Bettis, describing how remote the Albert Pike campground is. The Arkansas campground was recently hit by flash floods, causing several deaths.

[http://archives.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1006/11/rlst.01.html]

Submitted by: Duffy OCraven
Jun. 15, 2010

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 15, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 15, 2010



"YOU HAVE ASPERGER'S?"

"No. I just like to pretend I do. It makes me sound more interesting."

- Moby, techno musician, from a New York Times profile.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/nyregion/28routine.html]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 14, 2010

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Monday, June 14, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 14, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 14, 2010



"We need to do something about the celebrity surplus, and I have an idea, which I got from agriculture. Think about it: What do we do when our farms produce surplus wheat, and it start to pile up in grain silos? We export it to other countries! Do you see where I'm going with this? That's right: We need to start putting minor celebrities into grain silos."

- Dave Barry, from his book I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood.

Submitted by: Connie Kleinjans
Jun. 8, 2010

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Sunday, June 13, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 13, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 13, 2010



"Once in awhile he'd make up a word -- tensicity, fibracionous, pheromonimal -- but he never once got caught out. His proprietors liked those kinds of words in the small print on packages because they sounded scientific and had a convincing effect.

"He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos that came from above telling him he'd done a good job meant nothing to him because they'd been dictated by semi-literates; all they proved was that no one at [the company] was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police."

- Margaret Atwood, in "Oryx and Crake", 2003.

Submitted by: Thomas J. Newlin
Jun. 8, 2010

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Saturday, June 12, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 12, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 12, 2010



"I don't think we can call it the Gulf of Mexico any more. We broke it; we bought it."

- Stephen Colbert, after referring to the "Gulf of America", on the Comedy Central television program The Colbert Report, 2010-06-07.

Submitted by: D. Glenn Arthur Jr.
Jun. 8, 2010

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Friday, June 11, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 11, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 11, 2010



"These caps have just left the ground of the Bruddersford United Association Football Club. Thirty-five thousand men and boys have just seen what most of them call "t'United" play Bolton Wanderers. Many of them should never have been there at all. It would not be difficult to prove by statistics and those mournful little budgets (How a Man May Live--or rather, avoid death--on Thirty-five Shillings a Week) that seem to attract some minds, that these fellows could not afford the entrance fee. When some mills are only working half the week and others not at all, a shilling is a respectable sum of money. It would puzzle an economist to know where all these shillings came from. But if he lived in Bruddersford, though he might wonder where they came from, he would certainly understand why they were produced. To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art; it turned you into a critic, happy in your judgement of fine points, ready in a second to estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touch line, a lightning shot, a clearance kick by back or goalkeeper; it turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced away towards the opposite goal, elated, downcast, bitter, triumphant by turn at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you; and what is more, it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgements like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with Conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its Art. Moreover it offered you more than a shilling's worth of material for talk during the rest of the week. A man who had missed the last home match of "t'United" had to enter social life on a tiptoe in Bruddersford."

- J.B. Priestley, from his novel The Good Companions.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
May 28, 2010

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Thursday, June 10, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 10, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 10, 2010



"Mon pauvre monsieur," she said when I asked whether she had continued to smoke during her pregnancies. "Of course, we all did then. You don't enter a religious order when you have children." There was another puff on the Stuyvesant. "Today, we're told we're not allowed to smoke, to eat unpasteurised cheese or seafood or even to a drink a glass of wine when we are pregnant. It's time to stop all that."

- Elisabeth Badinter, French philosopher, and author of the new book, Le Conflit: La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict: The Woman and The Mother), from an interview with Adam Sage.

[http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article7070165.ece]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 7, 2010

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Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 9, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 9, 2010



"Most of you are bankers--many, graduates or future graduates of this fine school. My message to you tonight is to remember where we have been. We have collectively been to hell and back. Let's not go there again. Let's remember that bankers should never succumb to what is trendy or fashionable or convenient but should instead focus on what is sustainable and in the interest of providing for the long-term good of their customers."

- Richard Fisher, President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, in a June 3, 2010 speech.

[http://dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2010/fs100603.cfm]

Submitted by: Reddy, Michael
Jun. 7, 2010

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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 8, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 8, 2010



"I have travelled the world to watch soccer and write about it, and celebrate it. Yet it is here, blocks away from my home, that I know, heartscalded, the terrible meaning of it all. The game brings joy, breaks your heart, brings joy, breaks your heart, brings joy, breaks your heart...The meaning whirls and turns as the ball does; as the world does."

- John Doyle, television critic, from his 2010 memoir, The World is a Ball, on being a soccer fan and covering the World Cup.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jun. 6, 2010

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Monday, June 7, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 7, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 7, 2010



I knew my days were numbered when o'er the trenches lumbered
More modern machinations de la guerre
No match for rapid fire or the steel birds of the sky
With a final rear guard action I retreat
No match for tangled wire or the armoured engines whine
Reluctant I retire and take my leave


Today I ride with special forces on those wily Afghan horses
Dostum's Northern Alliance give their thanks
No matter defeat or victory, in battle it occurs to me
That we may see a swelling in our ranks


- Corb Lund, singing about the cavalry, from the song Horse Soldier! Horse Soldier!, recorded on his 2007 album of the same name.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Apr. 14, 2010

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Sunday, June 6, 2010

Quotation of the day for June 6, 2010

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Quotation of the Day for June 6, 2010



"When individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be taken into account in the first place. When an individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with only the usual small profit, he is satisfied, and he is not concerned as to what becomes of the commodity afterwards or who are its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees, care that the tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock?"

- Friedrich Engels, communist theorist, in Dialectics of Nature (1883) on environmental degradation.

[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch09.htm]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Jun. 2, 2010

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