"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of

another."
~ Ambrose Bierce*

"criminal, n.: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital
to form a corporation."
~ Howard Scott

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

~ Groucho Marx

"That's my opinion and if you don't like it, well, I have others."
~ Groucho Marx

"Outside of a dog, a book is a Man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark
to read."
~ Groucho Marx

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they
went."
~ Will Rogers

"If the postman kicked every dog that barked at him, he wouldn't get the mail
delivered."
-- Phog Allen

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you;
that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
~ Mark Twain

"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot."

~ Mark Twain

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress ...
But I repeat myself."
~ Mark Twain

“…..if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind,
someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who
cares about the welfare of the people - their health,
their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if
that is what they mean by a "liberal" then I am proud to be a liberal. “
~ John F. Kennedy
 "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived
and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
~ John F. Kennedy

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will
they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material
abundance without character is the path to destruction."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether
man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led,
like sheep to the slaughter."
-- George Washington

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
-- Benjamin Franklin

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are
to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt

"It is through disobedience that progress has been made,

through disobedience and through rebellion."
-- Oscar Wilde, 1891

"The liberty of a Democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of
private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their Democratic
State itself. That, in its' essence, is Fascism-ownership of Government power
by an individual, by a group or by any controlling power."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear
to shut his mind and close his mouth - then all Americans are in peril."
-- Harry S. Truman

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating
any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of
his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all
totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-- Sir Winston Churchill - (1874-1965) Prime Minister of England - November
21, 1943

"We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the

idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government
by the wealthy.”
-- Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion.

Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they
consider god-fearing and pious."
-- Aristotle

“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders
have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not
the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”
~ Wendell Berry (b. 1934) Farmer, Conservationist, Essayest, Teacher, Poet
and Novelist

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is
tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any
country."
- Herman Göring at the Nuremburg trials

"Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched."

-- Guy de Maupassant

"Patriotism is the belief your country is superior to all other countries because
you were born in it."
-- George Bernard Shaw

"One of the great attractions to patriotism, it fulfills our worst wishes. In the
person of a nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat while feeling
we're profoundly virtuous."
~ Aldous Huxley

"Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone and as

irrational as a headless hen."
~ Ambrose Bierce

"Patriotism is a menace to liberty."

~ Emma Goldman

"Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism. One would expect
the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be self-evident to everyone. But
the surprising fact is that cultured and learned [socially conditioned and
indoctrinated] people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of
patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest obstinacy and
passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to praise it as beneficent
and elevating."
-- Leo Tolstoy

"Blind patriotism has been kept intact by rewriting history to provide people
with moral consolation and a psychological basis for denial."
-- William H. Boyer

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own
people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a
fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its
people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies
theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used
to destroy the humanity of man."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins Of Totalitarianism p.227

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It’s the measles of humanity.”

~ Albert Einstein

''The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain
other sets of people are human."
-- Aldous Huxley

"Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not
intellectually competent.
More than anything the United States needs effective citizens competent to
do their own thinking."
~ William Mather Lewis - President , George Washington University 1923
-1927

"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the
poor have no food, they call you a communist."
-- Archbishop Helder Camara

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority
keen to set brush fires in people’s minds."
~ Samuel Adams

"There are moments in life when true invective is called for, when it becomes
an absolute necessity, out of a deep sense of justice, to denounce, mock,
vituperate, lash out, in the strongest possible language."
-- Charles Simic

"He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with
it."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and

consciencious stupidity."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Convictions are greater enemies to the Truth than Lies." -- Nietsche

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking."

-- H.L. Mencken

"A successful lie is doubly a lie; an error which has to be corrected is a

heavier burden than the truth."
-- Dag Hammarskjold

"Half-truths can be more pernicious than outright falsehoods."

-- Wendy Lesser, "Who's Afraid of Arnold Bennett?" New York Times,
September 28, 1997

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

-- Oscar Wilde

"The folks who know the truth aren't talking.

The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up."
-- Tom Waits

"The future will be better tomorrow." -- Dan Quayle

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
-- James Thurber

EINSTEIN
"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not
sure about the former."
~ Albert Einstein

"Any fool can know. The point is to understand."

~ Albert Einstein

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when
we created them."
~ Albert Einstein

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

~ Albert Einstein
"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."
~ Albert Einstein

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
~ Albert Einstein

"Strange is our situation here on Earth."

~ Albert Einstein

"I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace.
Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war."
~Albert Einstein

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy,

education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed
be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of
reward after death."
~ Albert Einstein

"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it
seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear
of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after
rational knowledge."
~ Albert Einstein

"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of
human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive
legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter
how subtle can (for me) change this."
...
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most
childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and
with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me
than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than
other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by
a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

* Einstein penned the letter which contains these statements on January 3

1954, to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, who had sent him a copy of his
[Gutkind's] book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt.
The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands
ever since. Einstein, who was Jewish, declined an offer to be the state of
Israel's second president. [James Randerson, science correspondent, The
Guardian, Tuesday May 13 2008]
"Man is nothing but evolution become conscious of itself."
~ Julian Huxley

"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether
submarines can swim"
-- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra 1930-2002

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and
catastrophe."
-- H.G. Wells

"If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?"

-- Vince Lombardi

"Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people."
-- David Sarnoff

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~

-- Points to Ponder --

I wonder, therefore I might be.

Symbolic power is showing your fist. Real power is offering your hand.

War doesn't determine who's right but who's left.

A word to the wise is unnecessary.

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

No one is listening until you make a mistake.

The world is full of apathy, but nobody seems to care.

An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist

fears this is true.

Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it
goes.

Where there is a will, there is an inheritance tax.

If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

Are part-time bandleaders semi-conductors?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, do the other trees
make fun of it?

Berra's Law: You can observe a lot just by watching.

Particle physics gives me a hadron

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~

QUOTABLE ONE-LINERS
Advice for the day: If you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do
what it says on the aspirin bottle:
"Take two aspirin" and "Keep away from children."
--Author Unknown
"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for
that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar."
--Drew Carey

"The problem with the designated driver program, it's not a desirable job, but
if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night,
drop them off at the wrong house."
--Jeff Foxworthy

"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's
life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there
is a man on base."
--Dave Barry

"Relationships are hard. It's like a full time job, and we should treat it like
one. If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you, they should give you
two weeks' notice. There should be severance pay, the day before they leave
you, they should have to find you a temp."
--Bob Ettinger

"My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the
lake and threw her off the boat. I said,'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you
how to swim.'
--Paula Poundstone

"A study in the Washington Post says that women have better verbal skills
than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: "Duh."
--Conan O'Brien

"Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant?? I'm halfway through my
fish burger and I realize, Oh my God.... I could be eating a slow learner."
--Lynda Montgomery

"I think that's how Chicago got started. Bunch of people in New York said,
'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough.
Let's go west.'"
--Richard Jeni

"If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be
dead."
--Johnny Carson

"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography."

--Paul Rodriguez

"My parents didn't want to move to Florida , but they turned sixty and that's
the law."
--Jerry Seinfeld

"Remember in elementary school, you were told that in case of fire you have
to line up quietly in a single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic
in that? What, do tall people burn slower?"
--Warren Hutcherson

"Bigamy is having one wife/husband too many. Monogamy is the same."

--Oscar Wilde

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress..
But I repeat myself."
--Mark Twain

"Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they
can find Afghanistan ."
--A. Whitney Brown

"You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that
says, 'My God, you're right! I never would've thought of that!'"
--Dave Barry

"Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer."

- W. C. Fields

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

-- Groucho Marx

"Women should be obscene and not heard."

-- Groucho Marx

"I used to be Snow White -- but I drifted."

-- Mae West

"I've been on a calendar, but never on time."

-- Marilyn Monroe

"Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as meaningless

experiences go, it's pretty damned good."
-- Woody Allen

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."

-- Jack Nicholson
"My girlfriend always laughs during sex ---no matter what she's reading"
-- Steve Jobs

"You know that look women get when they want sex? ... Me neither."
-- Drew Carey

"Women like silent men. They think they're listening."

-- Marcel Achard, French playwright, _Quote_, 1956

"On the one hand, we'll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we
can open all our own jars."
-- Jeff Green

"A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank
her."
- W. C. Fields

"Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people."
-- W. C. Fields

"If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a
damn fool about it."
-- W. C. Fields

If, at first, you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment.

-- Los Angeles Times

"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
-- Mark Twain

"If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten."

-- George Carlin

"If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me."
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

"Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money."

-- Arthur Miller
"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask
for it back when it begins to rain."
-- Robert Frost

"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego
ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the
pleasures of others."
~ Bertrand Russell

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent
are full of doubt." ~Bertrand Russell

"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you
and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy
thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love."

~ Butch Hancock of the band Flatlanders

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

~ Jonathan Swift

"There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two
kinds of people in the world and those who don't."

-- Robert Benchley

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer
and die."
-- Mel Brooks

"The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn."
-- David Russell
"There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to
apply."
-- Josh Billings, His Works Complete

"Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad
judgment."
-- Will Rogers

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson
afterward."
-- Vernon Law

"To stumble twice against the same stone is a proverbial disgrace."

-- Cicero

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
-- Will Rogers

The road to ruin is always kept in good repair.

-- Anonymous

"The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he
becomes by it."
-- John Ruskin

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now."
-- Steven Wright

"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."
~ Josh Billings

"I like work: it fascinates me, I can sit and look at it for hours."
-- Jerome K. Jerome

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."

-- Sir Winston Churchill
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the
opportunity in every difficulty."
-- Sir Winston Churchill

"Optimism: The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what

is ugly."
-- Ambrose Bierce *

"Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is
an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the
reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony."
-- Noam Chomsky

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it

incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."
-- Groucho Marx

"Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking,
honest Americans.
It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we
elected them."
-- Lily Tomlin

"What this country needs is more unemployed politicians."

-- Edward Langley

"If you took all the crooks, idiots, and bigots out of the legislature, it would
cease to be a representative body."
~ Molly Ivins

"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it."

-- Cicero

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

-- Confucius
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
-- Mahatma Gandhi

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your

temper or your
self-confidence."
-- Robert Frost

"Education is the best provision for old age."

-- Aristotle

"We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop
playing."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen
the more
and talk the less."
-- Zeno of Citium, Greek philosopher, 3rd century

"Wisdom begins in wonder."

-- Socrates (470 BC - 399 BC)

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

-- Immanuel Kant

"Have the courage to follow your own reason."

-- Immanuel Kant

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in
your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
-- Rene Descartes

"Believe nothing because someone says it is so, even if I say it.

Believe only what you yourself can test and judge to be true."
~ Buddha *
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with
sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-- Galileo Galilei

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one,
He must approve the homage of Reason rather than that of blindfolded Fear."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people

maintaining a free civil government."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every
noble enterprise."
-- James Madison, April 1, 1774

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these
shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for
centuries."
-- James Madison

"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
-- John Adams

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

- Benjamin Franklin

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

- Benjamin Franklin

"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."

-- Thomas Paine

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman
church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church,
nor by any church that I know of.
My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether
Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions,
set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

"I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it"
-- Abraham Lincoln

"My religion is simple. My religion is kindness."

~ The Dalai Lama
"I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear.
Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion
or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the
very motion of our life is towards happiness."
-- Dalai Lama

"While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my

creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The
place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so."
-- Robert Green Ingersoll The Great Agnostic 1833-1899

"Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense."

-- Robert G. Ingersoll

My Belief
"I do not believe that any man can be justly punished or rewarded on account
of his belief.

But I do believe in the nobility of human nature; I believe in love and home,
and kindness and humanity; I believe in good fellowship and cheerfulness, in
making wife and children happy.

I believe in good nature, in giving to others all the rights that you claim for
yourself.

I believe in free thought, in reason, observation and experience. I believe in

self-reliance and in expressing your honest thought. I have hope for the
whole human race. What will happen to one, will, I hope, happen to all, and
that, I hope, will be good.

Above all, I believe in Liberty."

-- Robert G. Ingersoll

"There are ... some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my
disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry -- the most sinister
and tyrannical rulers on earth."
~ Emma Goldman, speaking from a Detroit pulpit in 1898

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot

prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of
Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses
is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable
knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
~ Bertrand Russell

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"
~ Epicurus, Greek philosopher (c. 341 bc – 270 bc)

"Fluency in theology -- the exhaustive study of that which is wholly

imaginary -- is not required to deny the veracity of invented
supernatural claims."
~ Paul Fidalgo

“As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit

atrocities.”
-- Voltaire

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from

religious convictions.”
-- Blaise Pascal

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can
do evil. But for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”
-- Steven Weinberg

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith.
I consider the capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"Morality is doing what's right, regardless of what you're told.

Religion is doing what you're told, regardless of what's right."
- unknown

"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love
one another."
-- Jonathan Swift

"Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history it may have been
a necessary evil but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people
in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?"
~ Arthur C. Clarke

"What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as

what language he shall speak."
~ George Santayana (1863-1952)

"RELIGION, n.: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the

nature of the Unknowable."
~ Ambrose Bierce *

"FAITH, n.: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without
knowledge, of things without parallel.
~ Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)*

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the
last priest."
~ Denis Didero

"The individual human mind is holy to me. In a child's power to master the
multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted amens and
holy-holies and hosannas. An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral
and the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks
turned to snakes and the parting of the waters."
-- Henry Drummond, character based on Clarence Darrow, in "Inherit the
Wind"

"That upsets some folks when I tell them I'm an atheist. But don't worry, we
atheists have no imperative to convert. You'll never open your door to an
atheist saying; 'I am here to tell you there is no word and please accept this
complimentary blank book.'"
-- Paula Poundstone

"An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame - Southern Methodist

University game and doesn't care who wins."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed
in.
Some of us just go one god further."
-- Richard Dawkins

"We must accept the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the
extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children
smart."
-- H.L. Mencken

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the
first duty of intelligent men"
~ George Orwell

"It is not too much to say that every indication of Design in the Kosmos is so
much evidence against the Omnipotence of the Designer"
~ J. S. Mills

"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to
say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so
obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any
gentleman will deny it."
~ J. S. Mills

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in

moral philosophy: that is the
search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has
never learned to walk forward."
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939

"I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican

friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop
telling the truth about them."
-- Adlai Stevenson

"Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all

that befalls him."
-- Romain Gary
"Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I
don't care."
-- William Safire

"I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I
do strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still
going."
-- Lord Birkett

"If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either
write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty
nor safety. "
-- Benjamin Franklin

"In my own private concerns with mankind, I have observed that to kick a
little when under imposition has a good effect. A little sturdiness when
superiors are much in the wrong sometimes occasions consideration."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have
to catch it yourself."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"The world is run by the people who show up."

-- Benjamin Franklin

Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of

1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin,
"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if
you can keep it."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) US Founding Father 1787
Source:
as recorded by Constitution signer James McHenry in a diary entry.

"For in a Republic, who is 'the country'? Is it the Government which is

for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a
servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative
to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who
is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
~ Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new
master once in a term of years."
-- Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source:
The Constitution of No Authority (Boston: 1870), p. 28.

* "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do
not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do
not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many
generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,
then accept it and live up to it."

~ Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), 563-483 B.C.E.

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink.

When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel
all day."
-- Frank Sinatra

"I spill more than most people drink."

-- Dean Martin

* - text excerpts from "The Devil's Dictionary" (1911)

"Write a wise saying and your name will live forever." ~

anonymous