“The American flag is an abstraction, an idea expressed in a certain arrangement of colors and shapes. Any particular flag is merely a representation of that idea; and the idea of the flag, in turn, is a symbol of something else. That something else is certainly not the government of the day; nor is it, at bottom, the land or the nation, or even the people. It is, again, an idea--the idea of liberty, made real by institutional arrangements that protect the freedom of citizens to think and speak as they will. Liberty, which is a big idea, protects itself by protecting the expression (though not, of course, guaranteeing the triumph) of other, smaller ideas, good and bad. And the idea of liberty is embodied in the Constitution....If the proposed amendment is adopted, it will be the first time that the First Amendment, which is the Constitution’s crowning glory, has itself been amended--and to constrict it, not expand it. 

The flag itself is not a piece of cloth, any more than the Constitution is a piece of paper; and the flag’s sacredness is not damaged when a piece of cloth representing it is burned or trampled or used as an autograph book, any more than the Constitution can be damaged by the destruction of a printed copy. But the Constitution can and would be damaged, to the nation’s shame, by the addition of something as inimical to its spirit as the  flag-desecration amendment.”

Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker, July 3, 2006, p. 24. 

“I guess my take on some of the last experiences we’ve had. . . is that a small group of men with a very particular ideology found their way into power and pressed themselves on an immature president. They were able literally to get what they wanted: They got their tax cuts, they got their war, they got their money going to the places they wanted it to go. I don’t think that’s being cynical. That’s just what happened.”

Bruce Springsteen, quoted in “Springsteen Hears Voices”, article by Neil Strauss, Rolling Stone, May 4, 2006, p. 53.

“Yes, but we don’t have any interest in that (segregation in New Orleans). We have more interest in who won the last football game, and who won the last basketball game, and who’s on TV, and who’s in Hollywood. It’s a fundamental problem of this country today, the lack of critical thinking and judgement on the part of the American citizens.”

John Hope Franklin, “Awash in Inequity”, interview in New York Times Magazine, September 18, 2005, page 23.

“A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm’s reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm’s reach, so that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standarised man who lives next door.”

Hundertwasser, January 1990, printed in KunstHausWien, p. 17

* * *

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”

George Bernard Shaw (still working on the exact source)

* * *

"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such and such a place,' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection."

William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4, scene 1

* * *

"It is said sometimes that the great teachers and mentors, the rabbis and gurus, achieve their ends by inducting the disciple into a kind of secret circle of knowledge and belief, make of the charisma a kind of gift. The more I think about it, though, the more I suspect that the best teachers - and, for that matter, the truly long-term winning coaches, the Walshes, and Woodens and Weavers - do something else. They don't mystify the work and offer themselves as a model of rabbinical authority, a practice that nearly always lapses into a history of acolytes and excommunications. The real teachers and coaches may offer a charismatic model - they probably have to - but then they insist that all magic they have to offer is commitment to repetition and perseverance. The great oracles may enthrall, but the really great teachers demystify. They make particle physics into a series of diagrams that anyone can follow, football into a series of steps that anyone can master, and art into a series of slides that anyone can see. A guru gives us himself and then his system; a teacher gives us his subject, and then ourselves."

from an absolutely terrific essay, “The Last of the Metrozoids”, Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 10th, 2004

* * *

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson

* * *

Bono, on his use of a particular gerund starting with F at the Golden Globe awards on TV:

“If you’re Irish, you love language, and if you do, you’re going to fall on the occasional expletive; it’s the percussive side of language. For me, it is preposterous to have good, conservative people whom I like and respect taking on an expletive while the right to pack heavy ammo goes by. It says something eloquent, if not pretty, about where we are.”

Bono, quoted in International Herald Tribune, article by Frank Rich, March 20-21, 2004 p. 12

* * *

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Attributed to Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

* * *

We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative can, under changed conditions, be performed with better results by common effort.

Teddy Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, speech at the Sorbonne, April 23, 1910

* * *

There is another thing that this house does in the deep of the night. I have heard it before and now I wait for it to happen. The house releases the day’s footsteps. All day we press down minutely on the wide old floorboards, moving around on regular errands, from room to room. It takes hours for the boards to readjust, to squeak back up the nails, for the old fibres of the pinewood to recover their give. As they do so, the reproduce the sound of the footsteps. In the night our maze of pathways is audibly retraced. I am used to it, as is Mother, but sometimes a wakeful guest is frightened. I can understand this. For now, as I rise and stand in half-darkness in the doorway of my bedroom, I hear the distinct creak of footsteps proceeding toward me, then past me, over to my bed. I feel the breath of my own passage, as though my dead self and my living self had briefly met in that doorway to sleep.

Louise Erdrich, “The Painted Drum”, The New Yorker, March 3, 2003, p. 81

      * * *

The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,                              The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d either,             They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print.

Walt Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth”

      * * *

Description of the literary style of Warren Gamaliel Harding:

I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reports, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered.  It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. 

H.L. Mencken, The Evening Sun, March 7, 1921, reprinted in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2002, page 140. 

      * * *

Everybody dies. Every day we are surrounded by death: Newspapers are filled with stories of cruelty and barbarism, murder and rape and torture and famine and disease. Obituary pages are filled with  accounts of lives cut short for no good reason. Hospitals are filled with people groaning under the burden of pain that will be relieved only by the end.

If human beings were as terrorists imagine them, the weight of these things would be unbearable. It is unbearable for some of us, and it weighs heavily on all of us to at least some degree. The human narrative, as we write it in novels and poems and stories, is a tale of never getting over the shock of life.

The murder of more than 6,000 people on a perfect summer day adds a great deal to that shock, but in the end it only says to us: You know this already.

The real human response to the horrors of life is to put them out of the mind--by focusing on the glories or the duties of life. For this reason terror campaigns provide their own antidote. They provide the people who are supposed to be terrorized with a powerful new duty--to save themselves, to destroy those who would destroy them. This is where we are headed now.

Michael Kelly, Atlantic Monthly, November 2001, p. 8

      * * *

A signal trait of the Information Age is that data endlessly proliferates, occupying ever more obscure niches. (Advertising on urinal deodorant cakes comes to mind.)

Wayne Curtis, "No Room at the Inn", Atlantic Monthly, November 2001, p. 34

      * * *

"I mean in the cinema I think that when you go to see a movie - if we see it in the proper place which is in the movie theatre, and not the TV- we enter in a kind of a special light. There is this amniotic darkness, and we are going all together to dream the same dream. And this is the great thing of cinema; it is something that happens in a community, we are all together."

Bernardo Bertolucci, quoted in a BBC series The Art and Craft of Movie Making, September 1989

      * * *

"Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

Jhumpa Lahiri, "The Third and Final Continent", Interpreter of Maladies, 1999, p. 198

      * * *

"Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He's left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less."

a lyrical passage from Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1992, p. 15

      * * *

"When the rate of change in the marketplace exceeds the rate of change in the organization, the end is in sight.

Jack Welch, exact source unkinown, quoted at IBM e-business University

      * * *

"When you sell technical issues to strategic buyers, it's like dogs watching TV. They nod, but they're not really getting it."

Solutions Integrator , November 1, 1998 , p. 2

      * * *

"A group of more than five people could not decide when to eat lunch, let alone set an effective course of action."

Michael Flynn, Firestar , 1996, p. 359

      * * *

"And as I thought about all this on the tarmac of Kigali airport, I said to myself: 'Well, my freshman Republican friends, come to Africa. It's a freshman Republican's paradise.' Yes sir, nobody in Liberia pays taxes. There's no gun control in Angola. There's no welfare as we know it in Burundi and no big government to interfere with the market in Rwanda. But a lot of their people sure wish there were."

Thomas L Friedman, "A Manifesto for the Fast World", The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999, p. 42

      * * *

"Take the mantra 'Information wants to be free.' Horsehockey. Information doesn't want anything. People want information to be free.

The fact is our current system entitles us to some free information, and it requires us to purchase or license other information. You may not like the fact that some information must be licensed, but that's how it is. Those who want information to be free as a matter of principle should create some information and make it free.

But what they shouldn't do is license or buy existing information that is not free and then cut it loose without permission. That's just plain wrong, and it demonstrates that what they are interested in is not free speech at all but getting stuff without paying for it."

Nicholas Petreley, Infoworld, September 4, 2000, p.. 68.

      * * *

"Hunting occupies an elemental chamber within the consciousness of rural Americans, for whom the semantic schism between pig and pork and deer and venison is harder to justify. More to the point, deer are the stupidest terrestrial mammals the planet has so far known. They are essentially locusts with hoofs. When not eating or breeding, they like to launch themselves into traffic. If hunting in Upper Michigan were abolished, thousands of deer would starve during its brutal winter, and its highways would be a living obstacle course."

Tom Bissell, "Escanaba's Magic Hour", Harper's, September 2000, p. 45.