Quote of the Day

[PogMoThoin]

I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved, winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs. When I was on drugs, I couldn’t even find my bike.
Willie Nelson

[Strangely Brown]

My son bought me a book of Iggy Pop Lyrics for my Birthday last week. the quote on the back cover:
"These are the words that came to me. No matter how they got here, they did the fecking job."

[Uncle Frank]

The first time I see a jogger smiling, I'll consider it.
Joan Rivers

[765489]

“I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out.” - Frank Zappa

[Wibbs]

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.

John Lennon. Strawberry Fields Forever.

[765489]

If you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you'd likely end up with a smartphone. - Catherine Price.

[isha]

A difficult one to achieve.

“Do not allow yourself to be infected by the mood or spirit of those who abuse you; do not step onto their path.”—Marcus Aurelis

One that often sums up the modern world for me, though I am not a RAW groupie otherwise -

“In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.” - Robert Anton Wilson

[Windex]

[Séimhe]

Beatha teanga í a labhairt

(The life of a language is to speak it)

[Uncle Frank]

The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.
Saint Augustine

[765489]

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. - Robert Louis Stevenson

[isha]

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous.

For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.

In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom.

Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."

Aldous Huxley. Brave New World Revisited.

[knownunknown]

I was going to post this quote from Joseph Stalin:

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything,"

I decided to fact check it first, regularly quotes are misattributed to people. I came across these claims from euroUSA today and Politifact declaring this statement to be utterly false and no mention of Stalin having ever uttered those words.

Scrolling to the the end of the politifact article it ADMITS "But Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War studies program at Harvard University, pointed us to something close. In memoirs written after his retirement, Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s former personal secretary, claimed that Stalin said: "Я считаю, что совершенно неважно, кто и как будет в партии голосовать; но вот что чрезвычайно важно, это кто и как будет считать голоса." It translates to:

"I regard it as completely unimportant who in the party will vote and how, but it is extremely important who will count the votes and how."

This can be found in the Oxford Essential Quotations (5 ed.) Edited by Susan Ratcliffe, said in 1923; Boris Bazhanov The Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary (1992).

We certainly have entered this Brave New World where 'fact-checkers' will distract anyone into believing anything.
Fact check rant about politifact.

[Uncle Frank]

Television is where you watch people in your living room that you would not want near your house.
Groucho Marx

[765489]

I Fuckin love music, melody to me is like being a child in a giant candy warehouse with every taste, colour and combination imaginable... there's just so many different flavours and not enough fuckin time to eat it all - NCDJD2.

[Uncle Frank]

Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.
Adlai E. Stevenson

[765489]

"If you're gonna be two faced sweetie, then at least make one of them pretty" - Daffy Duck.

[765489]

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” —Tom Clancy

[Uncle Frank]

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
George Orwell

[Séimhe]

"People Cry, not because they're Weak. It's because they've been Strong for too Long."
- Johnny Depp.

[CelticRambler]

"Any machine can be a smoke machine, if you operate it wrong enough"
- Anonymous

(shamelessly pinched from a post on the Other Site)

[isha]

Am feeling a bit glum so my Quotes of the Day are encouraging and cheerful.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. - Plato


Short version.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. - CS Lewis

Long version of above goes on to say...

It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

[isha]

Norm McDonald. Rest in peace.

[Uncle Frank]

Norm McDonald. Rest in peace.

[Uncle Frank]

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
George W. Bush