Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Quotation of the day for November 13, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for November 13, 2018



"Due to his injury, he always had to either wear the iron armor, or an iron chest plate he had fashioned for himself, to keep his heart beating. If that explanation doesn't sound medically correct, hey, he's a comicbook hero and I'm not a cardiologist."

- Stan Lee, of Marvel Comics fan, describing Iron Man from his 2002 memoir, "Excelsior!" Lee died Nov. 12, 2018 at age 95.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Nov. 12, 2018

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Sunday, November 11, 2018

Quotation of the day for November 11, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for November 11, 2018



"The end of the war was so swift and dramatic that no one had time to adjust feelings to changed circumstances. I learned on the morning of November 11, a few hours in advance of the general public, that the armistice was coming. I went out into the street, and told a Belgian soldier, who said: 'Tiens, c'est chic!' I went into a tobacconist's and told the lady who served me. "I am glad of that," she said, "because now we shall be able to get rid of the interned Germans." At eleven o'clock, when the Armistice was announced, I was in Tottenham Court Road. Within two minutes everybody in all the shops and offices had come into the street. They commandeered the buses, and made them go where they liked. I saw a man and a woman, complete strangers to each other, meet in the middle of the road and kiss as they passed.

"Late into the night I stayed alone in the streets, watching the temper of the crowd, as I had done in the August days four years before. The crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror, except to snatch at pleasure more recklessly than before. I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet. True, I rejoiced also, but I could find nothing in common between my rejoicing and that of the crowd."

- Bertrand Russell, from his Autobiography, recalling the end of the First World War on November 11, 1918.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Nov. 9, 2018

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Thursday, November 8, 2018

Quotation of the day for November 8, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for November 8, 2018



"We need more weed!"

- Trevor Tobin, co-owner of marijuana retailer High North in Labrador City, Newfoundland. Marijuana was legalized for recreational use in Canada this year, but suppliers have had problems keeping up with demand.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/world/canada/canada-marijuana-shortage.html]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Nov. 7, 2018

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Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Quotation of the day for November 7, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for November 7, 2018



"Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school - all in effect abandoned in the sky - the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation. Certainly his own studio apartment on the 25th floor was the last place Laing would have chosen as an early skirmish-ground. This over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity. Curiously enough, despite all Laing's efforts to detach himself from his two thousand neighbours and the regime of trivial disputes and irritations that provided their only corporate life, it was here if anywhere that the first significant event had taken place - on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hind-quarter of the alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school."

- J. G. Ballard, from his 1975 novel High-Rise.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Nov. 6, 2018

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Monday, November 5, 2018

Quotation of the day for November 5, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for November 5, 2018



"Mike Myers phoned me up and said, "We've got this thing which we think is great, do you want to hear it?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Do you think Freddie would want to hear it?" Now Freddie was really sick by that time but I said, "Yeah, I'm sure he will." Mike gave me a tape which I took 'round to Freddie and played to him and Freddie loved it, he just laughed and thought it was great, this little video.

...

"It's a great scene. The funny thing was, we always regarded ["Bohemian Rhapsody"] tongue in cheek ourselves. If it would come on the radio, we would all be headbanging when it came to the heavy bit as well, us as a group. It was very close to our sense of humor."

- Brian May, guitarist of Queen, on the band's song Bohemian Rhapsody being used in the movie Wayne's World.

[https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/party-on-queens-brian-may-remembers-bohemian-rhapsody-on-40th-anniversary-67545/]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Nov. 2, 2018

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Sunday, November 4, 2018

Quotation of the day for November 4, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for November 4, 2018



"People always askin' me, what is the Blues?
Well, the Blues is when you ain't got no money.
The Blues is when you hot-stepping out the French windows,
when you've left your crocodile shoes under another back-door man's bed,
the Blues is when you've had enough,
you cock your Glock and declare to God and the Devil - "Let the party begin."

- Alabama 3, from the itroduction to the band's album, Blues.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 1, 2018

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Saturday, November 3, 2018

Quotation of the day for November 3, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for November 3, 2018



"If for some reason you were confined to a single adjective to describe Las Vegas, then you would have to settle for the following: un-Islamic. Las Vegas is tremendously un-Islamic. When, at the Sin City airport, I settled into one of the motorised fridges known hereabouts as taxis, I was asked if I wanted "some music". I said I didn't, knowing that I was going to get some music everywhere I went, whether I wanted some music or not. And that's the very least of it. The whoops from the craps tables (all yea and ow and YESSS), the variegated birdsong of mobile phones ("What's good, buddy?") and the madhouse nursery jingles of the slot machines, horribly prolonged and as pleasing to the ear as a defective car alarm, and then the cataract of coins into the acoustically enhanced money trays. And some music."

- Martin Amis, from his 2006 essay "Losing Las Vegas," about competing in the World Series of Poker.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Nov. 2, 2018

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Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Quotation of the day for May 9, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for May 9, 2018



"West calls his struggle the right to be a "free thinker," and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom--a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror's freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas."

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his essay "I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 8, 2018

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Saturday, May 5, 2018

Quotation of the day for May 5, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for May 5, 2018



"The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation."

- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, perhaps predicting Facebook. Marx was born 200 years ago, on May 5, 1818.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 5, 2018

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Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Quotation of the day for May 1, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for May 1, 2018



My Will is easy to decide,

For there is nothing To divide

My kin don't need to fuss and moan--

"Moss does not cling to a rolling stone"

My body?--Oh!--If I could choose

I would want to ashes it reduce,

And let The merry breezes blow

My dust to where some flowers grow



Perhaps some fading flower then

Would come to life and bloom again



This is my Last and Final Will.--

Good Luck to All of you,

- Joe Hill, labour activist. He wrote this will on November 18, 1915, the day before being executed for a murder he had been framed for. Happy May Day!

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
May 1, 2018

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Thursday, April 19, 2018

Quotation of the day for April 19, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for April 19, 2018



"I had a great longing to move, to hear another language, eat new food, to be in a great country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible."

- Sybille Bedford, from A Visit to Don Otavio, her memoir of travelling in Mexico.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Apr. 18, 2018

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Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Quotation of the day for April 4, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for April 4, 2018



"We ain't goin' let nobody turn us around."

- Martin Luther King, civil rights leader, in 1965, after the march from Selma to Montgomery. King was assassinated April 4, 1968.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Apr. 4, 2018

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Friday, March 23, 2018

Quotation of the day for March 23, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for March 23, 2018



"You played hockey to make a living. I couldn't get a job in Vernon because I was Chinese. There was a lot of discrimination in those days against Chinese people, Greek people, Ukrainian people."

- Larry Kwong, recalling life in British Columbia in the 1940s. Kwong, who died recently at age 94, was the first hockey player of Asian descent to appear in an NHL game, in 1948.

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/larry-kwong-was-the-nhls-first-player-of-asian-descent/article38312927/]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Mar. 22, 2018

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Friday, March 9, 2018

Quotation of the day for March 9, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for March 9, 2018



"We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all."

- Kazuo Ishiguro, from his novel Never Let Me Go.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Mar. 8, 2018

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Friday, February 16, 2018

Quotation of the day for February 16, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for February 16, 2018



"I look at things in a very probabilistic way. You're not going to be guaranteed anything, but if you can go from a 70% chance to a 73% chance, I'll probably take that. If I can get up to 73%, maybe there's something that can get me to a 75% chance. You're working the margins. If you ever took Econ, the margins are where everything happens."

- Daniel Pink, author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, in a GQ interview.

[https://www.gq.com/story/the-secret-to-being-a-productive-human-take-more-breaks-and-naps]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Feb. 15, 2018

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Saturday, February 3, 2018

Quotation of the day for February 3, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for February 3, 2018



"The cryptocurrency stuff doesn't make any sense to me. I've been wrong before, but why does it make sense to pay a huge amount of money for a random set of bits that is one security compromise away from being worth nothing?"

- David Cheriton, Stanford University computer science professor and early Google investor, in a 2018 Globe and Mail interview.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Jan. 31, 2018

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Friday, February 2, 2018

Quotation of the day for February 2, 2018

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Quotation of the Day for February 2, 2018



"Hence you see why "liberal studies" are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study, - that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile."

- Seneca, Moral letters to Lucilius, from Letter 88.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Feb. 1, 2018

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