Quotations
Used in the 'WMail' Newsletter
and the Dateline Chamesa blog

Page Two

Edward, Duke of Windsor [1894-1972]
“The thing that impresses me most about America is the way [that] parents obey their children.”   {blog 2/2011}

John Edwards
“Let's get to work!” (campaign withdrawal speech, 30 January 2008)  {blog 2/2008}

Timothy Egan
“The clowns have finally taken over the circus ... [The Republican Party] is now overwhelmed by its own nonsense.” in The New York Times  {blog 11/2011}

Barbara Ehrenreich
“The social contract has been totally violated and shredded – at least the social contract as I understood it, which was 'Work hard. Hard work will get you ahead'. If that doesn't work, then what's the deal?”  {Issue #12}
(from "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America" [2001])

Paul R. Ehrlich
“In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb
on which it is perched.”  {Issue #46}

William S. Eidelman, MD
“[Marijuana] is safer than aspirin, which kills thousands every year.”  {blog 1/2008}

Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
Albert Einstein Quotations Page at Working Minds
Albert Einstein Page at Maison d'Être Philosophy Bookstore

Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]
34th President of the United States, 1953-61
• • “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out
of their way and let them have it.”  {Issue #62}
• • “Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges
of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation
more than its wealth.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “Every gun that is made ... signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, and those who are cold and are not clothed.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”  {blog 12/2009}
• • “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my Administration. We kept the peace.
People asked how it happened. By god, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that.”  {blog 10/2010}

Hanns Eisler [1898-1962]
“He who knows only music understands nothing about it.”  {Issue #67}

T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]
• • “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.”
{Issue #59 & blog 6/2008}
• • “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”   {blog 10/2009}
• • “Those who say [that] they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste
and end by debauching it.”  {blog 4/2011}

Duke Ellington [1899-1974]
“By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your
daughter to associate with.”   {blog 7/2008}

Larry Elliott, economics editor at The London Guardian
“It is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets [in America], given the
gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.”  {blog 10/2008}

author Harlan Ellison
“Here's the best truth [that] I know for certain: Never attribute to 'evil'
that which you can chalk up to ineptitude.”  {blog 3/2010}

writer Ralph Ellison [1914-94]
“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest.”  {blog 7/2010}

transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotations Page at Working Minds
Ralph Waldo Emerson Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

Friedrich Engels [1820-95]
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”  {Issue #25}

Epictetus [55?–135? C.E.], Stoic philosopher & crippled former slave
• • “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”  {Issue #50}
• • “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen
as they do happen, and your life will go well.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “Be careful to leave your sons well-instructed rather than rich, for the hopes
of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.”  {blog 4/2010}

Epicurus [341–270 B.C.E.]
“Sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it has not harmed him.”  {blog 11/2008}

Desiderius Erasmus [1466-1536]
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." [In regione caecorum rex est luscus.]  {blog 1/2011}

Werner Erhard
• • “I used to be different, now I'm the same.”  {Issue #34}
• • “Context is decisive.”  {Issue #42}
• • “At all times and under all circumstances, we have the power to
transform the quality of our lives.”  {Issue #45}
• • “Do it all, have it all, with joy.”  {Issue #49}
• • “We must have people capable of real heroism. Not the kind of heroism which ends up in glory,
but the kind of heroism which ends up in the truth, in what works, in what is honest and real
being brought out and made available to others.”  {Issue #54}
• • “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember your initial objective
was to drain the swamp.”  {Issue #63}
• • “Happiness is a function of accepting what is so.”  {Issue #63}
• • “Building a strategy to avoid the almost certain future binds you as much
to the almost certain future as committing to it.”  {Issue #63}
• • “Whatever competence I may have comes from my having trained myself to be out there with what I am
dealing with instead of being in here trying to deal with what is out there.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “Our age ... needs people capable of real heroism – not the kind of heroism which ends up in glory
– but the kind which ends up bringing out and making available the truth, what works, what is
honest and real.”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Understanding is the booby prize.”  {blog 3/2010}

Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times columnist
• • “In Los Angeles, all lanes are fast lanes.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Middle age is that point in life when you realize [that] patience is a weapon.”  {Issue #52}

Euripedes [circa 480 B.C.E. – 406 B.C.E.]
“Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”  {blog 11/2010}

Western author Tabor Evans {real name Harry Whittington} [1915–89]
“Is there no place safe from the white man?”  {blog 4/2011}

Edward Everett [1794-1865]
“Education is a better guard of liberty than a standing army.”  {blog 10/2008}

writer John Fante [1909-83]
“Don't be bitter.”  {Issue #39}

Michael Faraday [1791-1867]
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”  {Issue #42}

Alistair Farrugia
“Freedom is when the people speak. Democracy is when the government listens.”  {blog 11/2007}

Farnaz Fassahi, Wall Street Journal correspondent
“Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster ... a foreign policy failure bound
to haunt the United States for decades.” (in a personal email later made public by a recipient)  {Issue #47}

R.W. Fassbinder
“It is only when we realize that everything is pointless that we can act fearlessly.”  {Issue #36}

Wm. Faulkner [1897-1962]
Wm. Faulkner Quotations Page at Working Minds
Wm. Faulkner Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

Ron Faust
“Is living well the best revenge? No: revenge is the best revenge.”  {Issue #60}

Jeff Faux, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute
“[The World Trade Organization's] constitution of the world economy protects just one class
of global citizen – the corporate investor.”  {Issue #66}

William Feather
“Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.”  {blog 6/2008}

former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold [Dem-WI]
“It's time for Congress to go cold turkey and stop feeding at the lobbyist-funded trough.”   {blog 4/2010}

Michael Feldman
“Before Osama, [Dubya] let Sosa get away.” on What D'ya Know?" radio program  {Issue #55}

Federico Fellini [1920-93]
“Happiness consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.”
(line in "Fellini's 8½" [1963])  {Issue #70}

Edna Ferber [1885-1968]
• • “Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover
until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.”  {blog 5/2008 & 11/2008}

Geraldine Ferraro [1935-2011]
“Ask not what America can do for women, but ask what women can do for America.”  {blog 1/2012}

Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
• • “Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason
[that] we are doing it.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not
really there, but to comprehend those things which ARE there.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “A great deal more is known than has been proved.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”  {blog 9/2011}
• • “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” (in 1965)  {blog 9/2011}
• • “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.”  {blog 11/2011}

W.C. Fields [1879-1946]
“You can fool half of the people all of the time and that's
enough to make a good living.”  {Issue #26}

explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes
“There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”  {blog 12/2011}

John Finley
“Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty.”  {blog 4/2011}

Zane Fischer, Santa Fe Reporter columnist
“Nothing gets done in the United States because it's the right thing to do; it gets done because
it's the profitable thing to do.”  {blog 2/2011}

F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
• • “Either you think or else others have to think for you and take power from you,
pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”  {Issue #43}
• • “What we must decide is perhaps how we are valuable, rather than how valuable we are.”  {Issue #59}
• • “What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.” (in "The Last Tycoon")  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Every novelist is a failed poet.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but also in the ability to start over.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences.”  {blog 10/2010}

April Fitzsimmons
“All I want for Christmas is the truth.”  {Issue #66}

Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]
• • “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness
– though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”  {blog 8/2009}
• • “Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original
in your work.” (in 1876)  {blog 12/2009}

Ian L. Fleming [1908-64], creator of Agent 007 James Bond
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”  (in "Goldfinger")  {Issue #43}

activist Arthur A. Fletcher [1924-2005]
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”  {Issue #62}

Fernando Flores
• • “Every company of the future is going to be in the business of exquisite care.”  {Issue #31}
• • “The compassion of the strong is in waking people up to their blindness.
For that, you need to be a warrior.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Hope is the raw material of losers.”  {blog 1/2012}

actor Errol Flynn [1909-59]
“It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.”  {blog 6/2009}

Malcolm Forbes [1919-90]
• • “There's never enough time, unless you're serving it.”  {Issue #37}
• • “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.”  {blog 10/2011}

Henry Ford [1863-1947]
• • “History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only
history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history [that] we make today.” (in 1916)  {blog 10/2008}
• • “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Whether you think you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if
they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find [that] he can do
what he was afraid he couldn't do.”  {blog 7/2011}

Richard Ford
“Nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to f*ck up your whole life.”  {blog 12/2007}

Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-1969]
• • “Liberty is always dangerous, but the safest thing [that] we have.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities
in ordinary people.”  {blog 4/2010}

Caxton C. Foster
“A camel is a horse designed by a committee and an elephant is a mouse built to
military specifications.”  {blog 10/2009}

Michel Foucault [1926-84]
“Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is
the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”  {blog 2/2010}

Anatole France [1844-1924]
• • “We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we yearn for another that will be eternal.”  {Issue #26}
• • “The law in its wisdom allows both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridges over the Seine.”  {Issue #68}
• • “In Art, as in love, instinct is enough.”  {blog 9/2011}

Brendan Francis
“True, you can't take money with you; but then, that's not the place
where it comes in handy.”  {Issue #38}

mystery author Dick Francis [1920-2010]
“The only real hell is on earth, and usually undeserved.” (in "To The Hilt")  {blog 12/2007}

Thomas C. Frank
“The logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and the destruction of the weak, not 'choice'
or 'service' or universal affluence.” in ("One Market Under God")  {Issue #14 & blog 4/2009}

Viktor Frankl [1905-97]
• • “What is to give light must endure burning.”  {Issue #24}
• • “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”  {blog 7/2010}

Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
• • “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except for death and taxes.” (1789)  {Issue #37}
• • “They who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety.”  {Issue #43}
• • “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”  {Issue #48}
• • “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”  {Issue #51}
• • “Be civil to all; serviceable to many: familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.”
(in "Poor Richard's Almanack")  {blog 5/2008}
• • “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government,
there is tyranny.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “A long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough.” (as quoted by him)  {blog 12/2008}
• • “A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given
them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”  {blog 3/2011}

Steve Fraser
“Somehow, plutocracy has furtively triumphed over democracy.”  {blog 7/2008}

boxing champion Joe Frazier [1944-2011]
“Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.”  {blog 12/2011}

Frederick the Great [1740-86]
“The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in the world is to discover new truths;
and the next is to shake off old prejudices.”  {Issue #45}

Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]
• • “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men,
with a few exceptions, are worthless.”   {blog 11/2008}

poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]
• • “Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.”  {Issue #50}
• • “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “Home is the place where, when you go there / They have to take you in”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”  {blog 5/2009}
• • “In three words I can sum up everything about life: It goes on.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.”  {blog 1/2011}

Edward Fry of Laguna Beach, California
“The atrocity is not Haditha, it is the [Iraq] war.”  {Issue #62}

Mexican author Carlos Fuentes
“I would agree with Luis Buñuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.”  {blog 2/2010}

U.S. Senator  J. William Fulbright [1905-95]
“Gradually but unmistakably America is showing signs of that arrogance of power – the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission – which has affected, weakened and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past. In so doing, we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized example for the world; the measure of our falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty of dissent. And, in a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.”  {Issue #36}

visionary R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]
• • “The individual can take initiatives without anybody's permission.”  {Issue #1}
• • “Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics.”  {Issue #29}
• • “I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.”  {Issue #37}
• • “None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals
become thoroughly self-educated.”  {Issue #43 & blog 10/2007}
• • “For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful.” (1980)  {Issue #45}
• • “Reason is necessary for survival, and anti-Reason has led Mankind to the brink of extinction.”  {Issue #45}
• • “Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case,
the thought is staggering.”  {Issue #55}
• • “Man must learn to think for himself, rather than follow blindly what he has been taught.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem.
But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”  {blog 4/2011}

Thomas Fuller [1608-61]
“Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”  {blog 12/2008}