12/27: We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but … the powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers. -- Benjamin R. Barber, Consumed (2007)
12/20: All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
12/13: Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible (1898)
12/6: Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters. … He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor. -- President Grover Cleveland, “The State of the Union” (1888)
11/29: Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations -- to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. -- Senator J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (1966)
11/22: The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of a person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. -- Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1796)
11/15: As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth … to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of the currently produced wealth. … In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped. -- Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve 1934-1948
11/8: No Sift
11/1: We live now in hard times, not end times. -- Jon Stewart, at the Rally to Restore Sanity, October 30, 2010
10/25: Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. -- Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to James Madison (1785)
10/18: Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs. -- Isaiah Berlin
10/11: Remember this: The house doesn't beat the player. It just gives him an opportunity to beat himself. -- Nick the Greek, charter member of the Poker Hall of Fame
10/4: Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory. -- Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher
9/27: That's the point of social democracy: It's not just that working people get an extra chicken in the pot; more important, they get the right to stir the pot. -- Thomas Geoghegan, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
9/20: There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
Sign was painted, it said "Private Property."
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.
-- Woody Guthrie, "This Land is Your Land" (1940)
9/13: It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee, but it is very rare to find one who is ten times as efficient. It is common, however, to see one man possessing not ten times but a thousand times the wealth of his neighbor. -- Willford I. King The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States (1915)
9/6: When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?" -- Don Marquis
8/30: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. -- Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)
8/23: If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid. -- John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” 1930
8/16: We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. -- Albert Einstein, 1930
8/9: By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. … The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children. -- Sir William Blackstone Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769)
8/2: The press-politics system that produces this kind of news is so inward-looking that it threatens to sever the government from the people. -- Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston When the Press Fails (2008)
7/26: The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
7/19: Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be. --Sydney J. Harris
7/12: We must make atonement for all the terrible crimes we read of in the newspapers. We must make atonement for the still worse ones, which we do not read about in the papers. -- Albert Schweitzer
7/5: No Sift
6/28: Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. -- Benjamin Disraeli
6/21: No amount of architect's plans, bricks and mortar will build a house. Someone must have the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the good sense of its program. It must find popular feeling, organize it, and make that the motive power of government. ... The task of reform consists not in presenting a state with progressive laws, but in getting the people to want them. -- Walter Lippmann A Preface to Politics (1913)
6/14: There is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves. -- Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho (1764)
6/7: Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. -- George Friedman, "Flotillas and Wars of Public Opinion" May 31, 2010
5/31: There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. -- Marshall McLuhan
5/24: Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. -- John W. Gardner
5/17: The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy. -- Judge Barbara Crabb, “Freedom From Religion Foundation v Obama” (2010)
5/10: No Sift
5/3: People will do anything, no matter how stupid, in order to avoid facing their own souls. -- Carl Jung
4/26: Unless your business model depends on bilking people, there is little to fear from these new rules. -- President Barack Obama, "Remarks on Wall Street Reform," April 22
4/19: They say in Harlan County
there are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
-- Florence Reece, “Which Side Are You On?” (1931)
4/12: If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. -- James Madison, The Federalist #51
4/5: I reject your reality and substitute my own. -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
3/29: Winning takes talent. To repeat takes character. -- John Wooden
3/22: Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else. -- Franklin Roosevelt, from a letter to Samuel Rosenman (1940)
3/15: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. -- Bishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in Ending Poverty as We Know It by William Quigley (2003)
3/8: I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five [people] that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. -- Senator Joseph McCarthy, 9 February 1950
So who did President Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder hire? Nine lawyers who represented or advocated for terrorist detainees. Who are these government officials? Eric Holder will only name two. Why the secrecy behind the other seven? Whose values do they share? Tell Eric Holder: Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al Qaeda 7. -- from "Who Are the Al Qaeda Seven?" video by Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe", 2 March 2010
3/1: Let me tell you now: it is still morning in America. It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding-hung-over-vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America. And it’s shaping up to be kind of a nasty day, but it’s still morning in America. -- Glenn Beck, “CPAC Keynote Address”, 20 February 2010
2/22: We humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. -- Orson Scott Card Ender's Shadow (1999)
2/15: If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? -- Will Rogers
2/8: Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we have to think. -- Winston Churchill
2/1: Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton The Woman's Bible (1898) (a memory glitch caused me to use this again on 12/13.)
1/25: And what chance did Hale and his men have? They were but people who had to live and eat and support their families. The Company had stood for a hundred years and would surely be standing a hundred years hence. It seemed to me that mortals did battle with gods. – David Liss, The Devil's Company (2009)
1/18: It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui. -- Helen Keller
1/11: This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice. -- attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
1/4: President Obama is trying to pretend that we are not at war. ... Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. -- former Vice President Dick Cheney, December 29, 2009
Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. -- President Barack Obama, “Inaugural Address”, January 20, 2009