POLITICS

“Choice is an illusion created between those with power & those without.” -Matrix Reloaded

What used to be called liberal is now called radical,
what used to be called radical is now called insane,
what used to be called reactionary is now called moderate,
and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking.
(Tony Kushner)

"I am for Stanley Aronowitz because someone must say: Ours is a country of enormous wealth. We can use that wealth to guarantee to every American free medical care, decent housing, work at a living wage, child care & nurseries, clean air & clean water. Whether Democrats or Republicans are in power, corporate power will dominate the country, the military-industrial establishment will be in power, the war against the poor will continue. We need to vote for people like Aronowitz & the Green Party, who will still be fighting for us after election day." - Prof. Howard Zinn (author of "A People's History of the United States")

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic & servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." --President Theodore Roosevelt

“What do I want? I want us to be like Australia. I want to look at the newspaper everyday and have the front page be sports.” -Israeli woman who was comforting her child after a bomb, when asked what she wanted in the future. (NPR 6/12/03)

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."  -Gandhi

HEALTH CARE

What the coalition members understand is that as long as somewhere between 39 million and 44 million Americans are without health insurance of any kind, it will be impossible to solve the problems of cost and quality in the health care system.

-David Broder

Washington Post, 1/6/01

In a sense, we already have universal coverage. Anyone without insurance who shows up in a hospital emergency room gets treatment at a huge expense and we all pay for it through inflated premiums.

-Spyros Andreopoulos

Thursday, April 11, 2002 (SF Chronicle)

MEDICINE

The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in cause and prevention of disease. –T. Edison

The art of Medicine consists of Amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease.      ~Voltaire

He who saves one life, it is as if he saves the entire world. -Talmud

“If disease is an expression of individual life under unfavorable conditions, then epidemics must be indicative of mass disturbances of mass life.”- Virchow

VEGETARIANISM AND NUTRITION

'It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.'
Albert Einstein.

"Hell, I've eaten more cheeseburgers than you can count," said John Doyle, a spokesman for the Center for Consumer Freedom, the food industry group leading the fight against the lawsuits and the bans on junk food. "I love cheeseburgers. I feed them to my kids three times a week, and everybody is perfectly healthy. This is food we're talking about. Used in moderation, it can help you stay alive."

BOOKS

1984- George Orwell

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”

“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep people frightened.””

“Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad….Sanity is not statistical…”

The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck

“…the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression Works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

“The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”

“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead- Tom Stoppard

“Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are…condemned. Each move is dictated bye the previous one—that is the meaning of order.”

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

“Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, and exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact—that we… are taking Hamlet to England.”

“Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our, movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…”

Demian- Herman Hesse

“The people who huddle together in fear are filled with dread and malice, no one trusts the other. They hanker after ideals that are ideals no longer but they will hound the man to death who sets up a new one.”

“If I’m not master of my own will, then I’m in no position to direct it as I please.”

“If… a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star…, it wouldn’t succeed. Only—it wouldn’t even try it in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it on what it needs, what is indispensable to its life. …we, too, are confined to a relatively narrow compass which we cannot break out of.”

A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius- Dave Eggers

“You wear snowshoes when the snow is deep and porous. The latticework within the snowshoe’s oval distributes the wearer’s weight over a wider area to keep him or her from falling through the snow. So people, the connections between people, the people you know, become a sort of lattice, and the more people you know, and that know you, and know your situation and your story and your troubles or whatnot, the wider and stronger the lattice, and the less likely you are to fall through the snow.”

“Death, like so many great movies, is sad.

The young fancy themselves immune to death. And why shouldn’t they? At time life can seem endless, filled with belly laughs and butterflies, passion and joy, and good, cold beer.

Of course, with age comes the solemn understanding that forever is but a word. Seasons change, love withers, the good die young. These are hard truths, painful truths—inescapable but, we are told, necessary. Winter begets spring, night ushers in the dawn, and loss sows the seeds of renewal. It is, of course, easy to say these things, just as it is easy to, say, watch a lot of television.

But, easy or not, we rely on such sentiment. To do otherwise would be to jump without hope into a black and endless abyss, falling through an all-enveloping void for all eternity. Really, what’s to gain from saying that the night only grows darker and that hope lies crushed under the jackboots of the wicked? What answers do we have when we arrive at the irreducible realization that there is no salvation in life, that sooner or later, despite our best hopes and most ardent dreams, no matter how good our deeds and truest virtues, no matter how much we work toward our varied ideals of immortality, inevitably the seas will boil, evil will run roughshod over the earth, and the planet will be left a playground in ruins, fit only for cockroaches and vermin.

There is a saying favored by clergymen and aging ballplayers: Pray for rain. But why pray for rain when it’s raining hot, poisoned blood?”

“We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.”

A Curious Incident of a dog in the nighttime- Mark Haddon

“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

What is the What –Dave Eggers

“Now that you are here, on the most sacred and fertile land I have, I can give you one more thing. I can give you this creature, which is called the cow… (God showed man the idea of the cattle and the cattle were magnificent. There were in every way exactly what the monyjang would want.) You can either have these cattle, as my gift to you, or you can have the What. (The man said to G-d, “What is the What?”) I cannot tell you . Still you have to choose. You have to choose between the cattle and the What.”

“Humans are divied between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.”

“Is this noise of the world so cacophonous that mine cannot be heard?”

“There was blame everywhere for what was happening to the Sudanese. And the more we understood how we were connected to so many of the problems of the world, the more we understood the web of money and power and oil that made our suffering possible, the more we felt sure that something would be done to save southern Sudan.”

MOVIES

“…artists use lies to tell the truth while politicians use them to cover the truth up.”- V for Vendetta

"In my opinion, the best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think that the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with." -Juno The Movie