Quote of the Week

We don't need an apprentice in the White House — we have one right now.
--Scott Walker, September 16, 2015

Quote of the Week

And that's the beauty of Obama. It might be a generational thing, because the difference between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson was that Jesse Jackson never actually ran for president. He ran to disrupt the presidency. If he actually ran for president, he probably could have been president. Jesse Jackson won a bunch of primaries in Southern states, but not for five seconds did he think he could be president, whereas Obama was like, "Yeah, I could be president," and nobody stopped him. Literally, nobody stopped him.
-- Chris Rock, "Chris Rock Pens Blistering Essay on Hollywood's Race Problem: 'It's a White Industry'", Hollywood Reporter, December 3, 2014

Quote of the Week

And I think experience tends to bear out, at least half the time, that famous people are not very pleasant people.
--William F. Buckley, as quoted by James Rosen in his essay "The Long, Hot Summer of '68," The National Review, September 7, 2015

My comment:

Heh. Irony.

Given the many unpleasant things that have been said about Mr. Buckley -- and the number of statements he had made during his life which weren't exactly politically correct -- it is hard to not see some unintended humor in this quote.

Even the essay this quote comes from hints at some unflattering aspects of Mr. Buckley's personality even though it was obviously meant to be a defense of his reputation.

And I must confess that I have reservations about Mr. Buckley myself. After all, he was not exactly a big fan of the Civil Rights Movement and his decision to side with the likes of President Ricard M. Nixon and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daly would not have made him too welcome in my late father's house back in the days when my father was still voting for people like George McGovern.

Then again just because my father voted for McGovern did not make him a typical liberal. Nor did it make him immune to conservative values. For that matter, my own mother went from being a Kennedy Democrat to a Reagan Democrat because she felt that the values she grew up with were being increasingly mocked by the type of people who supported the Democrats. And the more I learn about politics, the harder I find it to fault her for this. (Then again, I am a bit biased in her favor.)

I could write a whole book on the various differences I have with both liberals and conservatives. After all, I'm a contrarian by nature and the fact that my late father used to conduct Socratic dialogues with me and my three siblings while we were growing up did not exactly encourage me to downplay this aspect of my personality. But I'll save that discussion for another time.

Quote of the Week

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
--Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Quote of the Week

My Mexican-American father took bullets and shapnel from Nazis in France, whilst my Mexican/Mexican-American mother repaired fighter planes in Corpus Christi, Texas, during WW II so that this neo-fascist, money-worshiping, draft-dodging* blowhard would have the right to open up his demented piehole with his anti-Mexican bullshit.
--William Nericcio, "Donald Trump's Nativist, Neo-Fascist, Hate-filled Attack on Mexicans Ends Today #Mextasy," Mextasy.blogspot.com, July 12, 2015

Quote of the Week

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
--George F. Will

Quote of the Week

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
--Herman Melville

Quote of the Week

What do they know of America who only America know?
--Daniel J. Flynn, Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America

Quote of the Week

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows anybody.
--Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Quote of the Week

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.
--Dorothy Parker

Quote of the Week

The officers and I did not assume that the United States was going to decline like those ancient empires. That is not the lesson of classical history. Rather, it is that change is inescapable and the more gradual and hidden the change, the more decisive: the great shifts in fortune for ancient empires were usually not apparent to those living at the time.
--Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future

Quote of the Week

Nothing is permissible in the United States these days unless it somehow lifts up our children, who, in case you haven't been paying attention, are our future. (So how come millions of American children live in poverty, lack health insurance, and don't have enough to eat? Never mind.)
--Dan Savage, Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America

Quote of the Week

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died.

Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished.

What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?
--Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas

Quote of the Week

I write fantasies, but draw from the world I see. If that sometimes hurts, it’s because the truth usually does. John Steinbeck was accused of gratuitous ugliness when he wrote about the migration of the Okies to California in The Grapes of Wrath, even of trying to foment a domestic revolution, but most of his accusers -- like those who made similar accusations against Upton Sinclair when he wrote about the corrupt putrescence of the meat-packing industry in The Jungle -- were people who preferred fairy-tales and happily-ever-afters. Sometimes the truth of how we live is just ugly, that’s all. But to turn aside from these truths out of some perceived delicacy, or to give in to the idea that writing about violence causes violence, is to embrace hypocrisy. In Washington, hypocrisy breeds politicians. In the arts, it breeds pornography.
--Stephen King, speech at the 1999 Vermont Library Conference

Quote of the Week

The best thing art can do is make you think, make you re-evaluate the opinions you thought were yours.
--Simon Pegg, "Big Mouth Strikes Again", Peggster, May 19, 2015

Quote of the Week

But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough?
--Chris Rock, "Chris Rock Pens Blistering Essay on Hollywood's Race Problem: 'It's a White Industry'", Hollywood Reporter, December 3, 2014

Quote of the Week

Grasp the subject, words will follow.
--Cato the Elder

Quote of the Week

Can there be a social order that will wholly suit the writer and the artists? There are so many contradictions between what they want and what is good for their creative flow. The writer and the artist need something to worship and something to resist. They need praise and rewards, but they also need to be left alone to stew in their own juice.
--Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

Quote of the Week

I don't even know how to pronounce my own name.
--Liz Torres, interview, Later, March 12, 1997

Quote of the Week

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.
--Zeuxis