Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 31, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 31, 2012



"Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, from Wind, Sand and Stars.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Jan. 9, 2012

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Monday, January 30, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 30, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 30, 2012



"There is additional and compelling consideration which recent economic experience has brought into a strong light. The exploitation of a class of workers who are in an unequal position with respect to bargaining power and are thus relatively defenseless against the denial of a living wage is not only detrimental to their health and well being but casts a direct burden for their support upon the community. What these workers lose in wages the taxpayers are called upon to pay.... The community is not bound to provide what is in effect a subsidy for unconscionable employers."

- Charles Evans Hughes, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Jan. 12, 2012

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Sunday, January 29, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 29, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 29, 2012



"Some people find it exceedingly difficult to get along with me and I have to choose my jobs very carefully. I have no patience with phonies, hacks, dolts, or obnoxious incompetents and I take some pride in the fact that these people invariably dislike me. I admire perfection or any effort toward it and I would not work for anyone who disagreed with me on this score."

- Hunter S. Thompson, applying to The New York Times at age 22, which didn't respond. Quoted in Thompson's book The Proud Highway.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Jan. 26, 2012

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Saturday, January 28, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 28, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 28, 2012



"Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and 'progress,' everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, 'Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.'"

- Robert Anson Wilson

Submitted by: Bob Bruin
Jan. 12, 2012

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Friday, January 27, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 27, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 27, 2012



"For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic activated their immune systems -- hence the 'birther' movement and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right's aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them."

- Gary Kamiya

[http://www.salon.com/2012/01/08/the_anti_obama_cult/singleton/]

Submitted by: Bob Bruhin
Jan. 8, 2012

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Thursday, January 26, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 26, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 26, 2012



The village of Hollywood was planned according to the notion
People in these parts have of heaven. In these parts
They have come to the conclusion that God
Requiring a heaven and a hell, didn't need to
Plan two establishments but
Just one: heaven. It
Serves the unprosperous, unsuccessful
As hell.

- Bertolt Brecht, "Hollywood Elegies".

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jan. 25, 2012

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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 25, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 25, 2012



"Not only may one imagine that what is higher derives always and only from what is lower; one may imagine that - given the polarity and, more important, the ludicrousness of the world - everything derives from its opposite: day from night, frailty from strength, deformity from beauty, fortune from misfortune. Victory is made up exclusively of beatings."

- Ladislav Klima, Czech philosopher and novelist.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jan. 8, 2012

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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 24, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 24, 2012



"...(only in a rock-and-roll band, by the way, can someone like Keith Richards perceive himself as the responsible one)..."

- Malcolm Gladwell, in "Creation Myth", The New Yorker, May 16, 2011.

Submitted by: Jeff Copeland
Jan. 17, 2012

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Monday, January 23, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 23, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 23, 2012



"'No accident that _débâcle_ is a French word,' observed my brother once.... The word _débâcle_ suggests the going-wrong of an elaborately conceived plan: a disaster that somehow leaves the principal parties not only having lost what they were aware that they were risking but much more besides, as if an attempt to charm the boss by inviting him to dinner and cooking an ambitious favourite dish of his were to result in the death by poisoning of his wife, the loss of one's job, collapse of one's marriage, one's bankruptcy, turn to violent crime, and subsequent death in a shoot-out with police - when all one was worried about was the risk of curdling the hollandaise. Compare the implication of mismanagement, of organization going wrong, in the Gallic _débâcle_ with the candidly chaotic, intimate quality of the Italian _fiasco_, or the blokishly masculine and pragmatic (and I would suggest implicitly reversible and therefore, in its deep assumptions, optimistic) American _fuck-up_."

- John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure.

Submitted by: Duncan Thornton
Jan. 10, 2012

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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 22, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 22, 2012



"Even more than critical thinking or time management, what the white-collar economy requires from most workers is the ability to spend the bulk of their waking hours completing tasks of no inherent importance or interest to them, to show up every day, and to not complain overmuch about it."

- Christopher R. Beha

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Jan. 18, 2012

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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 21, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 21, 2012



"As a friend of mine from Texas says: 'I'll believe corporations are people when the State of Texas executes one'."

- Bill Moyers, in a interview on the Colbert Report (Dec. 10, 2011).

Submitted by: Mike McGuffin
Jan. 11, 2012

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Friday, January 20, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 20, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 20, 2012



"In other words, I think it is very, very difficult for outsiders to come into a situation like this and to do only good. I think their presence is apt to confuse the political realities, rather than to be helpful to the resolution of them."

- George Kennan, discussing Vietnam in 1966.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jan. 12, 2012

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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 19, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 19, 2012



"Do I drink actual alcohol when I`m presenting? Yes. Lager. Although where I`m from, that`s considered a soft drink."

- Ricky Gervais, tweeting about his oncoming hosting of the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Quoted by Alex Strachan, Postmedia News, January 14, 2012.

Submitted by: Z.D. Hora
Jan. 14, 2012

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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 18, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 18, 2012



"A new mythology, essential to the twentieth-century American funeral rite has grown up--or rather has been built up step by step--to justify the peculiar customs surrounding the disposal of our dead... Gradually, almost imperceptibly, over the years the funeral men have constructed their own grotesque cloud-cuckooland where the trappings of Gracious Living are transformed, as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying..."

- Jessica Mitford, from The American Way Of Death.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jan. 10, 2012

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 17, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 17, 2012



"Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! You see that's not true. You injure other people today also using social media. You've informed on them. You've created more records about them. You've added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you're only hurting yourself I wouldn't bother pointing it out to you. See, that's the difference, okay? The reason that this all works is that even when you know you're hurting other people, you're too selfish to stop. And there are hundreds of millions of people like you. That's why it works."

- Eben Moglen, law professor at Columbia University and digital privacy advocate, denouncing a reporter for recognizing the dangers of social media, but not breaking the Facebook habit.

[http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/13/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jan. 10, 2012

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Monday, January 16, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 16, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 16, 2012



"A lifetime of manual labour bred a man who, in the end, yielded more than the industry standard of 200 cubic inches of cremated remains. This is the problem with standards in an industry where the raw materials are annoyingly non-standard. An off-the-shelf casket measures 24 inches across but the fact is that a growing number of corn-fed North Americans do not. They have a hard enough time finding belts, or fitting into airplane seats, and when they die, they represent an under-addressed market. In answer, Batesville, one of the big casket manufacturers, has already retooled its plants, launching a line of plus-sized caskets called Dimensions ("New Caskets to Offer a Little Extra Room for Life's Final Journey"), and the Goliath Casket, Inc., of Lynn, Indiana, which covets the big-and-tall niche, manufactures a 52-inch-wide casket (almost four and a half feet) nicknamed, among the likes of us, the B-52."

- Tom Jokinen, in his memoir of being a trainee undertaker, Curtains.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jan. 11, 2012

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Sunday, January 15, 2012

Quotation of the day for January 15, 2012

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Quotation of the Day for January 15, 2012



"I am almost incapable of logical thought, but I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious, in case that disorderly repository has anything to tell me. I hear a great deal of music. I am on friendly terms with John Barleycorn. I take long hot baths. I garden. I go into retreat among the Amish. I watch birds. I go for long walks in the country. And I take frequent vacations so that my brain can lie fallow -- no golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration, only a bicycle."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Dec. 23, 2011

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