“When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruples. Take it and copy it.†— Mark Twain | “See, I think we have to ask ourselves--and this is corny in a way--what are we doing here. And I've become convinced, after a lifetime of asking that question, that we are here to enlarge our souls, light up our brains, and liberate our spirits.†— Tom Robbins | “In hard times, libraries are more important than ever. Human beings need what books give them better than any other medium. Since those ancient nights around prehistoric campfires, we have needed myth. And heroes. And moral tales. And information about the world beyond the nearest mountains or oceans. Today, with books and movies more expensive than ever, and television entertainment in free fall to the lowest levels of stupidity, freely circulating books are an absolute necessity. They are quite simply another kind of food. We imagine, and then we live.†— Pete Hamill | “In the staircase of life, Art is the only stair that doesn't creak.†— Tom Robbins
“I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.†— “The Matrix,†Larry and Andy Wachowski | "HIV/AIDS is not just a health and humanitarian issue... If left to rage, it tears the fabrics of societies, undermines governments and devastates economies… Unless we act, millions will die. No country is immune, all countries are vulnerable" — Colin Powell, 6.18.2003 | “The most violent element in society is ignorance.†— Emma Goldman
“People are practical. They want change but feel powerless, alone, do not want to be the blade of grass that sticks up above the others and is cut down. They wait for a sign from someone else who will make the first move, or the second. And at certain times in history, there are intrepid people who take the risk that if they make that first move others will follow quickly enough to prevent their being cut down. And if we understand this, we might make that first move.†— Howard Zinn | “To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.†— e.e. cummings | “Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of mankind.†— Albert Einstein | "Without deviation, progress is not possible." — Frank Zappa | "I think this is the worst government in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies, not only in foreign policy and economics, but also in social and environmental policy. This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for the American people to engage in civil disobedience. I think it's time to protest as much as possible." — George A. Akerlof, American 2001 Nobel Prize laureate for economics | "We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT ACT but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country-- like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT ACT. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged." — Gore Vidal, LA Weekly, Nov. 14-20, 2003 | "What a dull world this would be if we were all alike. What an evolutionary dead end! To be brothers, to live in peace, we do not have to be overly similar. We do not have to admire or even like one another's peculiarities. We need only respect those peculiarities -- and be grateful for them." — Tom Robbins
“If there were no music, then I would not get through. I don’t know why I know these things, but I do.†— Shawn Colvin | “Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love, love is not music, and music is the best — Frank Zappa | “Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.†— Angela Monet
"You see, this is my life. It always will be! There's nothing else—just us—and the cameras—and those wonderful people out there in the dark." | "Well, I think I'll have a large order of 'prognosis negative'." | "Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke… some snowy night in front of the fire." | "South Bend! It sounds like dancing, doesn't it?" | "War, war, war! This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream! " | "We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now." | "There's a word for you ladies, but it is seldom used in high society, outside of a kennel." | “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down... â€
“Imitation is the sincerest form of television.†— Fred Allen | “Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it.†— Terry Wogan | “Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.†— C.P. Scott
The exceptions:
"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty—and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.†— Doris Lessing | "So that's what books really are. They're agents of change. Their tactile, corporeal presence lays its hold on us. They let be us children again—beings of infinite potential once more." — John Lienhard | “What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.†— Thomas Carlyle | “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.†— Jorge Luis Borge | “Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades. I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them.†— Michael Moore | “Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage. 'It makes me feel as if something had hit me,' Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence. 'And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things quickly to keep from saying something ill-tempered.' " — Frances Hodgson Burnett | “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.†— Muriel Rukeyser | “He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.†— Robertson Davies | "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." — Groucho Marx
Howard Zinn, Martha Quest, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Bill Hicks, Virginia Woolf, Eva Cassidy, the crew of Serenity, Jane Eyre, Matt Groening, Willow Rosenburg, Jon Stewart, Charles Dickens, Leonard Cohen, Noam Chomsky, Robert Benchley, Stephen Colbert, George Cukor, Joel Hodgson, E. Nesbitt, Joss Whedon, Gore Vidal, Lord Peter Wimsey, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Michael Moore, Buffy Summers, Katharine Hepburn, Lamont Cranston