Quote of the Week

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.)
--Terence, Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)

Quote of the Week

Catholicism made me a humanist before I knew the word. When people rail against “secular humanism,” I want to ask them if humanism itself would be okay with them if it wasn’t so secular. Then I want to ask, “Why do you think it is secular?” This would lead to my opinion that their beliefs were not humanist.
--Roger Ebert, Life Itself : A Memoir

Quote of the Week

I just want to write myself a world and go live in it.
--Amanda, Cyberunfamous, Date Unknown

Quote of the Week

You’re in America, act like a criollo, for chrissakes.
--Enrique Fernandez, “P.C. Rider,” The Village Voice, June 18, 1991, vol. 36, no 25

Quote of the Week

In each setting, toward the end of my stay and after much anxious forethought, I "came out" to a few chosen coworkers. The result was always stunningly anticlimatic, my favorite response being "Does this mean you're not going to be back on the evening shift next week?" I've wondered a lot about why there wasn't more astonishment or even indignation, and part of the answer probably lies in people's notion of "writing." Years ago, when I married my second husband, he proudly told his uncle, who was a valet parker at the time, that I was a writer. The uncle's response: "Who isn't?" Everyone literate "writes," and some of the low-wage workers I have known or met through this project write journals and poems -- even, in one case, a lengthy science fiction novel.
--Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Quote of the Week

It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.
--Anders Carlson-Wee, "How-To", The Nation, July 5, 2018

Quote of the Week

In a poem pamphlet by Sophie Mayer called TV GIRLS, full of poems about contemporary TV heroines, Mayer lists the weapons that Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses through the show's seven TV seasons to keep the vampires, demons and various forces of evil at bay. On her list, in among the stakes and swords and sunlight, is "library card".
--Ali Smith, "the ideal model of society"

Quote of the Week

I don't use drugs myself. I was too straight to try them in high school, and by the time I moved into a co-op in college where housemates displayed their bongs on their windowsills, I suffered delusions of running for political office someday. (That's the Clinton administration for you.) A cousin had also succumbed to addiction, and I'd seen the toll it had taken on her family. What truly turned me off drugs, however, was dating a Colombian whose parents paid hefty bribes to dissuade cartels from turning their coffee plantation into a coca farm. After traveling to southern Colombia with him and witnessing the destruction that U.S. drug use had wreaked on a more global scale, I became one of those vitriolic Chicanas who, if offered a joint, will snap, "Sorry, I don't smoke the ashes of my people."
--Stephanie Elizondo Griest, All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

Quote of the Week

So while good times last, let us be thankful. It was not always so, and yet during darker times they still found reason to give thanks.
--Stephen Browne, "Why Should We Be Thankful?", Rants and Raves, November 22, 2018

Quote of the Week

For only after they had reduced the real-life Spanish-speaking to the status of a foreign minority did the Yankees feel any deep compassion toward Spanish-American culture.
--Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890

Quote of the Week

The thing about a secular holiday is that religious Jewish kids could get excited about it. Christmas spirit left us cold, and Passover meant nothing to the world at large, but for the month of October we could get excited about the same thing the rest of the children were excited about. It sounds like a little thing, but it wasn’t- and still isn’t for me, to this day. And if someone wasn’t into Halloween, that was also culturally acceptable. You don’t see any big heartwarming family movies about forcing one family in the neighborhood who doesn’t like Halloween to get into the spirit of things, after all.
--Mira, "Judaism and Halloween," For the Gothic Heroine, October 31, 2015

Quote of the Week

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
--H. L. Mencken

Quote of the Week

Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.
--Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

Quote of the Week

I don’t care if every previous Pope is exposed. My allegiance is not to any man or institution, but only to Christ crucified and risen, who warned that it would be better to drown with a millstone around your neck than to cause his little ones to stumble.
--Patricia Heaton, Twitter, September 1, 2018

Quote of the Week

We must admit that people of color can be racist, and this racism is an idiotic mindless support of a system that beats us down. We have to commit to stop being racist against each other. Because by being racist against each other, we bring racism on ourselves.
--Steven De Castro, “Identity in Action: A Filipino American’s Perspective.” From the anthology, The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, edited by Karin Aguilar-San Juan

Quote of the Week

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
--H. L. Mencken

Quote of the Week

Protesting assumptions is futile in the borderlands. Appearance alone determines whether your citizenry is questioned and allegiances tested on a back road far from earshot. For much of my life, I wallowed in guilt over the privilege my light skin and blue eyes have granted me, but I've come to recognize the vanity of this emotion. Guilt does not free anyone from a detention center or equip a home with a septic tank. The only proper response to privilege is to grip it like a baseball bat and shatter injustice with all of your might.
--Stephanie Elizondo Griest, All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

Quote of the Week

After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.
--Irving Kristol, New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1971.

Quote of the Week

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about Basketball Diaries?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.
--Roger Ebert, Review of Elephant, November 7, 2003

Quote of the Week

Democrats are harder to make fun of, because you guys don't do anything.
--Michelle Wolf, White House Correspondents' Dinner, April 28, 2018