User:Max rspct/archive of quotes

Quotes of the month archive
The worst quote of all - [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category_talk:Living_people&diff=35889948&oldid=35889825 Voting is evil. We do not have votes at Wikipedia. We sometimes have polls, but the purpose of a poll is solely to explore community consensus.--Jimbo Wales 01:13, 20 January 2006 (UTC)]

Dec 2004

 * "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions...In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." - The late Susan Sontag on the 9/11 attacks

New Year 2005

 * "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
 * Albert Einstein talking about nuclear weaponry

February 2005

 * If a benevolent fairy could only reveal to our eyes all the crimes that are committed every day, every minute, in a civilized society under cover of the unknown, or the protection of law itself,—society would shudder at that terrible state of affairs. -Peter Kropotkin from - Anarchism:its philosophy and ideal

March 2005

 * "All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the supression of the Internet is really aimed at supressing knowledge of the radical political alternatives that are now available." - Tony Benn ...although this is coming from the guy who, as Postmaster General in a Labour government happily terminated Pirate Radio Stations


 * A few from Aristotle-
 * Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.
 * If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
 * One swallow does not make a spring


 * Landowners either got their land by murder or theft... And thereby man was brought into bondage, and became a greater slave than the beasts of the field were to him. - Gerrard Winstanley


 * Water, water, every where,
 * And all the boards did shrink;
 * Water, water, every where,
 * Nor any drop to drink - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

April 2005

 * "Hey! Get back to work before I give you a beating!" (from "Pico's Mexican Hairpiece") - Pico of the Jerky Boys
 * A new elite emerged and monopolised power and till today, everything evolves around writing although half of the world population does not know how to read and write. - African general on globalisation and The Idea >>
 * "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." —Margaret Mead (scary)

May 2005

 * "When're you gonna come round and put the tag on? I've just come out of prison yesterday: I'm meant to be tagged.'" - client of Blighty's National Probation Service and capitalist profiteers who make lolly out of electronic tagging


 * "In fact, very few of us here are actually mentally ill. I'm not saying you're not mentally ill, for all I know you're crazy as a loon. But that's not why you're here.  Why you're here is because of the system, because of the economy.." - The character Jeffrey in the film Twelve Monkeys

June 2005
-Star Wars (1976)
 * '"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"''
 * "TK-421, do you copy?"
 * "Take over, we've got a bad transmitter. I'll see what I can do."


 * "Harry Roberts - He's our man! - He shoots policemen BANG BANG BANG!!" (chanted at British football matches)


 * "Truly God commands you to give back trusts to those to whom they are due, and when you judge between people, to judge with justice..." - (Quran, 4:58)


 * "My God, anybody who thinks of that is mad!" . Mountbatten on a Cold War nuke 'em first plan vaunted by JFK and Robert McNamara-

July 2005

 * Frenzy hath seized thy dearest son,
 * Who from thy shores in glory came
 * The first in valor and in fame;
 * Thy deeds that he hath done
 * Seem hostile all to hostile eyes...
 * Better to die, and sleep
 * The never waking sleep, than linger on,
 * And dare to live, when the soul's life is gone.
 * extract from Sophocles' tragedy Ajax


 * "The German political murder of the past four years is schematically and tightly organised. (...)  Everything is certain from the outset: incentives from anonymous financial backers, the deed (always backwards), sloppy investigation, lazy excuses, a few phrases, pitiful skiving, lenient punishments, suspension of sentences, privileges - "Carry on!" (...)  That is not bad justice.  That is not poor justice.  That is not justice at all.  (...) Even the Balkans and South America will refuse to be compared with this Germany." Kurt Tucholsky ("Prozeß Harden" ("Harden Trial") in Die Weltbühne; December 21, 1922; p. 638)

August 2005

 * "Tell me I'm beautiful, it's nothing. Tell me I'm intellectual, I know it. Tell me I'm funny and it's the greatest compliment in the world anyone could give me." -- Julie Newmar, New York Times interview


 * "They killed him because they had to show off. If they were so afraid of a bomb why did they let him get on the bus?" -- the cousin of Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot by the The Met on the The Tube

September 2005

 * "It shows the government has lost the argument on solidarity action and on the right way to respond to the Gate Gourmet dispute....Ministers will now have to listen and accept that the present state of employment laws is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Labour Party and the movement." - TGWU general secretary Tony Woodley on victory for workers at Gate Gourmet


 * "Oh, pay her whatever is necessary, put it down in the housekeeping book. (Impatiently) What on earth will she want with money? She'll have her food and her clothes. She'll only drink if you give her money." - The treatment of the flowergirl by Higgins in the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw


 * "To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity." - Ataturk

October 2005

 * "The people of Birmingham have a real opportunity to prove they can live peacefully - Mr policeman Superintendent Tom Coughlan, operations manager for Lozells area mouths off at Birmingham


 * "People have been disenchanted with customer relationship management . It’s not better-targeted harassment, though that’s what’s in companies’ hearts." - A slip of the tongue? From an online business magazine >

November 2005

 * "I do not envy Britain" - Jacques Chirac on child poverty in UK


 * "Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide." - Barbara Deming


 * "I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self." - Aristotle


 * “These guys exceeded even the emergency dive speed,” “It's off the chart.” - Boeing spokesperson on the last moments of United Airlines Flight 175 >


 * "Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly."
 * "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it." - Both Ward Churchill - Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, September 12, 2001


 * "I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters."..."It (Phoenix) became a sterile depersonalized murder program... Equal to Nazi atrocities, the horrors of "Phoenix" must be studied to be believed." – Former Phoenix Program officer Bart Osborne, testifying before Congress in 1971

December 2005

 * Unless comfortable North American and European Mennonites and Brethren in Christ are prepared to risk injury and death in nonviolent opposition to the injustice our societies foster and assist in Central America, the Philippines, and South Africa, we dare never whisper another word about pacifism to our sisters and brothers in those desperate lands...Unless we are prepared to pay the cost of peacemaking, we have no right to claim the label or preach the message. - Ron Sider founder of Christian Peacemaker Teams


 * All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. ~ Leo Tolstoy

January 2006

 * "those who speak of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth." - Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life


 * Speak not of revolution until you are willing to eat rats to survive, come the Revolution - The Last Poets

February 2006

 * "There are no human rights in the world, except for the Americans" - Jamal Ahmed Badawi, recent militant escapee.


 * "Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American." - Malcolm X


 * "The Bombing of Ethics" - a riposte delivered by Stafford Cripps after hearing a lecture by Bomber Command on the Ethics of Bombing during WWII

"Going with the program renders you Eichmann, Going with the program voids your humanity, Going with the program makes you not just complicit, but a participant in the process of genocide!" -- Ward Churchill

March 2006
"O that history should take should take such a rough route, causing us this bitterness and pain on the way, is a room full of fact you can't walk out; -- Linton Kwesi Johnson, Doun De Road from Dread Beat Blood ISBN 0904521060

"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of one?" -- Bertolt Brecht. This kind of thing? >, ,

"A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable." - Carl Sagan, from Billions and Billions: Thoughts of Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1998)

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time."-John Lubbock

April 2006
"Let the brethren serve each other so that no one be excused from the work in the kitchen, except on account of sickness or more necessary work, because greater merit and more charity is thereby acquired" -- On the weekly workers in the kitchen from the Rule of St Benedict

"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't know what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." — Jean-Claude Juncker, PM of Luxembourg describing the way the European Union works ("Der Spiegel", 52/1999, S. 136)

"Why don't they teach proper maffs in schools? Why teach in kilos and grams when you should deal in ounces, quarters and eighths?" -- Ali G

May 2006
"I don't get no respect!!!" ; "It's been a rough day. I got up this morning, put on a shirt and a button fell off. I picked up my briefcase, and the handle came off. I'm afraid to go to the bathroom..." Rodney Dangerfield

"I stuffed their mouths with gold!" -- Aneurin Bevan explaining how he persuaded doctors to accept the National Health Service

“... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.” General Tommy Franks on the US reaction to a chemical or nuclear attack.

"Capital . . . in the political field is analogous to government . . . The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them . . . What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its reason."'' Pierre-Joseph Proudhon quoted by Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, pp. 43-44

June 2006
"The long-term effect of US culture as it spreads to every nook and cranny in every desert and every mountain valley will be the end of mankind. Our extraordinary greed for material possessions, the ways we go about nurturing that greed, the lack of balance in our lives, and our cultural arrogance will kill us off within a century unless we learn to stop and think. It may be too late." ~ Wilfred Thesiger

On friends:


 * "Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant." ~ Socrates


 * "A true friend stabs you in the front." ~ Oscar Wilde

On lovers:


 * "E eu que era triste (And I who was sad)


 * Descrente deste mundo (Having lost faith in this world)


 * Ao encontra voce eu conheci (I found you and then I knew)


 * o que é felicidade, meu amor (what happiness is, my love )" ~ Astrud Gilberto, [Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars]


 * "Journeys end in lovers meeting, Every wise man's son doth know". ~ William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night (II, iii, 44-45)

July/August 2006
“Today a new sun rises for me; everything lives, everything is animated, everything seems to speak to me of my passion, everything invites me to cherish it” ~ Ninon de Lenclos

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection” ~ Anais Nin

September/Oct 2006

 * " The principal adversaries in the battle for Stalingrad marked a sharp departure in tradition for European armies. Up to and including World War I, high ranking officers in both the German and Russian military had been drawn from the ranks of the nobility. Now the son of a Hessian book-keeper and a Russian peasant would square off against one another in the largest clash of arms the world has ever seen." -


 * "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." - Timothy Leary (attributed)