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

Page Two

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

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}

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."

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}

transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
• • “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”  {Issue #12}
• • “Any time is a good time if you know what to do with it.”  {Issue #43}
• • “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny little matters
compared to what lies within us.”  {Issue #43}
• • “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the
terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” (in "The Conduct of Life")  {Issue #49}
• • “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path
and leave a trail.”  {Issue #54 & blog 5/2008}
• • “To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and
the affection of children; to find the best in others; to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived ... this is to have succeeded.”  {Issue #62}
• • “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”  {Issue #70}
• • “Write it in your heart that every day is the best day of the year.”  {blog 2/2008}
• • “Man was born to be rich or inevitably to grow rich through the use of his faculties.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “You can never do a kindness too soon, because you will never know how soon it will be too late.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “The sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility
which religion is powerless to bestow.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Every artist was first an amateur.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.” (in 1838)  {blog 12/2009}
• • “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “Common sense is genius with its work clothes on.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate,
to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”  {blog 3/2010}

Friedrich Engels
“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}

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}

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}

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]
• • “There's only one thing to write about: the human heart in conflict with itself.”  {Issue #46}
• • “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good.”  {Issue #69}
• • “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”  {Issue #71}
• • “It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours;
he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do
for eight hours is work.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them
the right to dream.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid
failure to do the impossible.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better
than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”  {blog 5/2009}
• • “If a story is in you, it has got to come out.”  {blog 12/2009}

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}

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 "8-1/2")  {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}
• • “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 11/2008}

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}

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}

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}

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}

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."

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

Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-69]
“Liberty is always dangerous, but the safest thing [that] we have.”  {blog 9/2008}

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}

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
“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.” ("One Market Under God")  {Issue #14 & blog 4/2009}

Viktor Frankl [1905-97]
“What is to give light must endure burning.”  {Issue #24}

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}

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

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}

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}

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

Roy Fultun
“Go ye forth and share.”  {Issue #55}

Authors G thru J

Clark Gable [1901-60]
“Hell, if I'd jumped on all the dames [that] I'm supposed to have jumped on,
I'd have had no time to go fishing.”  {blog 4/2008}

Dennis Gabor
“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”  {Issue #45}

Zsa Zsa Gabor
“A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.”  {blog 9/2008}

macro-economist James K. Galbraith
• • “It is a horror that taxes have fallen so much for the very wealthy
and risen so much for the working poor and the middle class.”  {Issue #47}
• • “Intelligent design cannot explain Darwinian evolution. Darwin's whole point is that variation
and change are random and without higher purpose. We cannot imagine that God designed
this disproof of His own existence.”  {Issue #57}
• • “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.”  {blog 5/2009}

economist John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]
• • “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous
and the unpalatable.”   {blog 9/2009}
• • “Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists”
• • “It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out
on the troubled sea of thought.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “I spent my youth worrying about corporate power. Now I worry about
corporate incompetence.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”  {blog 12/2009}

Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]
• • “We will laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the crowd.” (in 1610)  {Issue #62}
• • “To understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”  {Issue #62}
• • “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”  {blog 9/2008}

Dr. Arun Gandhi
“As long as we pursue this materialistic kind of lifestyle where we make money, and possessions [are]
the only ambition in life, we are going to go downhill and eventually destroy ourselves.”  {Issue #14}

Mahatma Gandhi  [1869-1948]
• • “Even if you are a minority of one, a truth is a truth.”  {Issue #46}
• • “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”  {Issue #50}
• • “There is no path to peace: peace is the way.”  {Issue #52}
• • “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”  {Issue #60}
• • “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  {Issue #62}
• • “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won.
There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible,
but in the end they always fall, always.”  {Issue #64}
• • “Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “What you do is of little significance; but it is very important that you do it.”  {blog 3/2008}

Jesus Garcia, Jr. of Lynwood, CA
“What kind of man am I if I do not help make this world better?”  {Issue #56}

mystery author Erle Stanley Gardner [1889-1970]
• • “All that really counts is a man's ability to live, to get the most out of it as he goes thru it,
and he gets the most kick out of it by playing a no-limit game.”  {Issue #33}
• • “Life, like money, is meant to be spent.”  {Issue #63}

playwright Herb Gardner [1935-2003]
“My ambition consists entirely of being able to [write] well enough
that they let me do it again – and to avoid public disgrace.”  {Issue #36}

William Lloyd Garrison [1805-79]
“With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but with tyrants I will
give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will be certainly be lost.”  {blog 8/2009}

William Campbell Gault [1910-95]
“Your mother has to be there when you are born, but nobody has to be there when you die.”   {blog 12/2009}

Henry George [1839-97]
“Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be,
the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.”  {Issue #43}

George Gershwin [1898-37]
“Rumors about highbrow music ridiculous. Am out to write hits.”
(telegram to his agent, circa 1935)  {blog 8/2008}

musician Stan Getz [1927-91]
“Music is my life at the expense of everything else in my life.”  {blog 1/2010}

William Gibson
“The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”  {blog 6/2009}

André Gide [1869-1951]
• • “People cannot discover new lands until they have the courage to
lose sight of the shore.”  {Issue #48}
• • “The color of truth is gray.”  {blog 12/2008}

Dave Gilson
“The entire United States [is] a giant debtors colony, one nation in the red,
subject to compound interest, indentured to Citibank.”  {Issue #68}

William Gladstone [1809-98]
“All the world over I'll back the masses against the classes.”  {blog 9/2009}

half-Jamaican author Malcolm Gladwell
“Somebody always has to be the n*gger.”  {blog 12/2009}

astronaut John Glenn
“Exploration and the pursuit of knowledge have always paid dividends in the long run.”
(testifying before Congress 26 February 1962)  {blog 2/2009}

Marc Gobé
“We live in a society where everybody feels guilty.”  {Issue #45}

cinema auteur Jean-Luc Godard of France
• • “I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema
because it has no ideas.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end ... but not necessarily in that order.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”  {blog 6/2009}

Goethe [1749-1832]
• • “What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has
genius, power and magic in it.”  {Issue #9}
• • “Nothing is more terrifying than ignorance in action.”  {Issue #26 & blog 8/2009}
• • “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe
that they are free.”  {Issue #43}
• • “Nothing is worth more than this day.”  {Issue #45}
• • “The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.”  {Issue #67 & blog 1/2008}
• • “First master the rules, then discard them.”  {Issue #68}
• • “Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “A useless life is an early death.”  {blog 5/2009}

anarchist Emma Goldman [1869-1940]
• • “If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.”  {Issue #63}
• • “The most violent element in society is ignorance.”  {Issue #67}

Richard Goldstein
“Sadism is the hallmark of conservative culture.”  {Issue #67}

movie producer Samuel Goldwyn [1879-1974]
“I was always an independent, even when I had partners.”  {blog 10/2008}

Jane Goodall
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
(Time Magazine, August 2002)  {Issue #29}

Charles Goodnight [1836-1929]
“Cowards never lasted long enough to become real cowboys.”  {blog 8/2008}

Archie Goodwin character, written by Rex Stout [1886-1975]
• • “I love to do a good job more than anything else [that] I can think of.”  {Issue #62}
• • “All's fair in love and business.”  {blog 11/2007}

Adam Gopnik
• • “There is a constant struggle between the spirit of free inquiry and the spirit
of fundamentalist dogma.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader
and condition: Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher In The Rye.”,
in "The New Yorker", February 2010  {blog 2/2010}

Al Gore, Jr.
• • “[The Bush] administration has taken a wrecking ball to the very foundations
of our democracy.” (August 2007)  {blog 10/2007}
• • “The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.
We have to ask ourselves 'What is going on here?'.”  {blog 12/2007}

Joe Gould
“Only the artist is free because he is of single purpose. He knows what he wants
and wants only that and that frightens people.”  {Issue #24}

David Graber
“The yawning chasm between the very rich and everybody else
is making [America] a plutocratic caricature of democracy.”  {Issue #67}

mystery author Sue Grafton
“Let's be optimistic. It doesn't cost anything.”  {Issue #42}

Bette Nesmith Graham, inventor of Liquid Paper™
“Anyone who is making progress faces fear. Overcoming fear is all there is to success.”  {Issue #36}

Grateful Dead band
“It's even worse than it appears / But ... that's all ri-i-ight.” (song lyric)  {Issue #53}

poet Robert Graves [1895-1985]
“There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money.”  {blog 11/2008}

Allan Mcleod Gray [1905-75]
“Whatever you do, you'll regret it.”  {blog 12/2007}

Kevin Alexander Gray
“If this is a recession in the general economy, then it is a depression
in the black community.” (2007)  {blog 2/2008}

Andrew M. Greeley
“Trivial people . . . lack an overriding hunger to do that which they do best.
Their ambitions are stylistic rather than substantial.”  {Issue #43}

Graham Greene [1904-91]
• • “One must take a stand. If one is to remain human.”  {Issue #48}
• • “Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.”  {blog 3/2008}

Stephen Greenleaf
“These days you don't run into all that many people who make use of a moral compass.”  {blog 12/2009}

Alan Greenspan
former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, 1987-2006
• • “Capital doesn't pay any taxes, only people pay taxes. What happens is, you impose taxes on
organizations which then deflect them elsewhere. But at the end of the day,
all taxes are paid by people.” (testimony before Congress 21 May 2003)  {Issues #42 & #54}
• • “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably
misunderstood what I've said.”  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way
of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights." (in 1966)  {blog 10/2009}

Wayne Gretzky
“You miss 100 percent of the shots [that] you don't take.”  {Issue #57}

Western author Zane Grey [1872-1939]
• • “Life ain't no fiesta.”  {Issue #23}
• • “It's a hell of a life, if you don't weaken.”  {Issue #33}
• • “Progress is great, but nature undespoiled is greater.”  {Issue #36}

David Ray Griffin
“We have each other and we have the truth.”  {blog 1/2010}

Lev Grossman
“Trashy books are as hard to write as good ones.”  {blog 7/2008}

A.B. Guthrie, Jr. [1901-91]
“If literature is to have any dignity, it must enlighten life.”  {Issue #34}

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
“The best relationship is one where your love for each other exceeds
your need for each other.”  {blog 6/2008}

Wayne H.
“The shortest distance between two points is usually under construction.”  {Issue #62}

G.O.P. Senator Chuck Hagel
“The President says [that] he is not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true.
You can impeach him.” (2007)  {Issue #71}

Merle Haggard
“Where's all the freedom / that we're fighting for?” (song lyric)  {Issue #68}

Edward Hale
“I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do
interfere with what I can do.”  {blog 4/2008}

Alexander Hamilton [1755?-1804]
“In the general course of human nature, a power over a man's subsistence amounts to
a power over his will."  (in 'Federalist Paper 79')  {blog 10/2009}

Dashiell Hammett [1894-1961]
“Nothing lasts. You can't count on anything but yourself.”  {Issue #36}

Judge Learned Hand [1872-1961]
“The only country which any man has a right to love is one where there is balanced judgment,
justice founded on wisdom, a free spirit, and a temperate mind.”  {blog 2/2008}

Micah S. Handler
“Education is only half the battle against poverty. The other half is opportunity.”  {Issue #48}

Austrian film director Michael Haneke
“If you look at the suffering around you, you can't be happy.”  {blog 12/2009}

Richard G. Harms of Issaquah, WA
“The basic problem in the world today is that there is too much religion
and not enough common sense.”  {Issue #46}

F.A. Harper
“The man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free.”  {Issue #25}

Sydney J. Harris
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for
the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”  {Issue #40}

Jamie Harrison
“Mental illness takes so many forms.”  {Issue #50}

William Henry Harrison [1773-1841]
9th President of the United States, March-April 1841
“I believe ... that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making
the rich richer and the poor poorer.”, on 10 October 1840  {blog 3/2010}

cartoonist Johnny Hart [1931-2007]
“It takes brains to understand a smart remark, but none to be offended by it.”  {Issue #71}

radio talk show host Thom Hartmann
• • “America is melting down.”  {Issue #70}
• • “Voluntary simplicity is a high value.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “John Edwards is the candidate that corporate America is most afraid of.”  {blog 12/2007}

Paul Harvey [1918-2009]
“In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these.”  {blog 10/2009}

Václav Havel
“Work unswervingly to do something [that] you want in your local sphere.”  {Issue #62}

Stephen W. Hawking
“There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time ... The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE ... What place, then, for a creator?”  {Issue #26}

S.I. Hayakawa
“If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be
so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.”  {Issue #36}

Rutherford B. Hayes [1822-93]
19th President of the United States, 1877–81
“This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer.
It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”  {blog 11/2009}

William Hazlitt [1778-1830]
• • “The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”  {Issue #43}
• • “It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.”  {blog 9/2008}

mystery author Jeremiah Healy
“Nobody’s civil to anybody anymore.”  {Issue #63}

radio commentator Gabriel Heatter [1890-1972]
“Life is never so bad at its worst that it is impossible to love;
life is never so good at its best that it is easy to live.”  {Issue #43}

Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]
• • “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that
we are still not thinking.”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Language is the house of the truth of Being.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “The possible ranks higher than the actual.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety
of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.”  {blog 12/2009}
• • “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact
language remains the master of Man.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries,
is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.”  {blog 3/2010}

Robert L. Heilbroner [1919-2005]
“The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise
above the interests of one class alone.”  {Issue #49}

Heinrich Heine [1797-1856]
“There are more fools in the world than there are people.”  {blog 9/2009}

Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]
• • “The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Love is a subjective condition in which the welfare and happiness of another person
are essential to one's own happiness.”  {Issue #51}
• • “The best things in history are accomplished by people who got tired of being shoved around.”   {Issue #59}
• • “The majority is never right.”  {Issue #64}
• • “Nothing gives life more zest than running for your life.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Paradoxes are verbal, they do not exist in the real world.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Vice has this defeat: It cannot be truly intelligent. It's very motives are its weakness.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Progress in physics is achieved by denying the obvious and accepting the impossible.”  {blog 1/2010}

author Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]
• • “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death. And he is no true storyteller
who would keep that from you.”  {Issue #46}
• • “Never mistake motion for action.”  {Issue #49}
• • “It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think [that]
you were born that way.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be
the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Courage is grace under pressure.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings
worse things than any that can ever happen in war.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is
known as The Artist's Reward.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, sh*t detector.
This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.”  {blog 12/2009}

David Hempy
“A firm grip on reality is not a critical component of happiness.”  {blog 6/2009}

rock legend Jimi Hendrix [1942-70]
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.”  {Issue #58}

Patrick Henry [1736-99]
“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force,
you are inevitably ruined.”  {blog 8/2009}

Anne Herbert
“Practice random acts of kindness, and senseless acts of beauty.”  {Issues #1 & #39}

Frank Herbert [1920-86]
“The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives
but have only one course of action.”  {blog 9/2008}

Jeff Herman
“To lay blame is an abdication of power.”  {blog 9/2008}

Mark Hertsgaard
“The battle to prevent global warming has been lost. Now the race to survive it has begun.”
(in The Nation Magazine)  {Issue #68}

Carl Hiaasen
• • “Somebody's got to be angry or nothing gets fixed.”  {Issue #29}
• • “The American penal system functions essentially as a social septic tank,
and ... nothing more lofty should be expected of it.”  {Issue #40}

George V. Higgins [1939-99]
“This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid.”  {blog 4/2009}

author Patricia Highsmith [1921-95]
“There is no moral to my life – I have none – except: 'Stand up and take it'.
The rest is sentiment.”  {Issue #36}

Napoleon Hill
“Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”  {Issue #46}

Burton Hills
“Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life.”  {blog 12/2007}

Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]
“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”  {blog 2/2009}

Adolf Hitler
“What luck for rulers that men do not think.”  {blog 2/2008}

counter-revolutionary philosopher Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679]
“Consequent to a time of War ... the life of Man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
(in 'Leviathan' 1651)  {blog 10/2007}

Tom Hodgkinson
“The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.”  {Issue #56}

Eric Hoffer [1902-83]
• • “It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.”  {Issue #36}
• • “It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise.”  {Issue #51}
• • “You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.”  {Issue #61}
• • “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.”  {Issue #61}
• • “The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst
over the heads of the majority in the middle.”   {Issue #61}
• • “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”  {Issue #61}
• • “Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self; the passionate state of mind is an expression
of inner dissatisfaction.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”  {blog 9/2008}

activist Abbie Hoffman [1936-89]
“Democracy is not something [that] you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something
[that] you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.”  {blog 12/2007}

Jackie Hoffman
“Everything in this world is an opportunity for pain and failure.”  {blog 12/2007}

Eric Holder
“Waterboarding is torture.” (testifying before Congress as U.S. Attorney General-designate
on 15 January 2009)  {blog 2/2009}

Max Holland
“The only thing more astounding than the [Bush] administration's staggering hubris
is the smugness of its ignorance.” (in The Washington Spectator)  {Issue #66}

U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings
“If {the U.S. Marines in Lebanon} have been put there to fight, there are far too few.
If they've been put there to be killed, there are far too many.” (1983)  {blog 2/2008}

Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]
“A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.”  {blog 12/2008}

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. [1841-1935]
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1902-1932
“Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension.”  {Issue #38}

Sherlock Holmes character, as written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1859-1930]
• • “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains,
no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”  {Issues #43 & #70}
• • “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed
into condoning your offences.”  {blog 9/2008}

J. Edgar Hoover [1895-1972]
“No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government
is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”  {Issue #69}

Grace Murray Hopper, U.S. Navy Captain
“A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.”  {Issue #59}

Lena Horne
“It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way [that] you carry it."

Robert E. Howard [1906-36], creator of Conan The Cimmerian
“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance.
And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”, in "Beyond The Black River"  {blog 3/2010}

Sidney Howard [1891-1939]
“Half of knowing what you want is knowing what you have to give up to get it.”
{not Calvin Coolidge}  {blog 9/2009}

Elbert Hubbard [1859-1915]
• • “We find what we expect to find, and we receive what we ask for.”  {Issue #46}
• • “This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books
than we do for chewing gum.”  {Issue #47}
• • “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”  {Issue #48}

French author Victor Hugo [1802-85]
• • “The best religion is tolerance.”  {Issue #27}
• • “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”  {Issue #46}
• • “He who opens a school door closes a prison.”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”  {blog 9/2009}

Harold S. Hulbert
“Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.”  {blog 3/2008}

Robert Hurley, of Stoddard Management
“Hedge funds are the sophisticated way to lose money, as opposed to the more mundane way[s].”
{blog 6/2008}

Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
• • “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”  {Issue #27}
• • “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”  {Issues #43 & #54}
• • “The world is illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far
as it goes, and [real] in those aspects of the reality which we are capable
of comprehending. Our business is to wake up.”  {blog 4/2009}

playwright Henrik Ibsen [1828-1906]
• • “The strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.”
(from the 1882 play ‘An Enemy of The People’)  {Issues #63 & #67}
• • “You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”
in "An Enemy of The People" (1888)  {blog 3/2010}

playwright William Ralph Inge [1860-1954]
“It is useless for sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism
while wolves remain of a different opinion.”  {Issue #45}

Robert G. Ingersoll
“In nature, there are no rewards or punishment, only consequences.”  {Issue #51}

Washington Irving [1783-1859]
“Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.”  {blog 5/2009}

columnist Molly Ivins [1944-2007]
“Don't let anyone ever tell you that it isn't enough just to tell the truth.”  {Issue #68}

Rev. Jesse Jackson
“Keep hope alive; let nothing break your spirit.”  {Issue #64}

Justice Robert H. Jackson [1892-1954]
“There is no such thing as an achieved liberty; like electricity, there can be no substantial storage
and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out.” (in 1953)  {blog 8/2009}

Henry James [1843-1916]
• • “The province of art is ... all experience.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “One has to buy [immortality] with the blood of one's heart.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Live all [that] you can; it is a mistake not to.”  {blog 9/2008}

P.D. James
• • “Most of us edge forward, painfully advancing, yard by yard;
[the truly creative] parachute behind enemy lines.”   {blog 9/2008}
• • “Knowledge always brings responsibility.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “A poet doesn't choose his subject, it chooses him.”  {blog 9/2008}

Randy James
“Modern conservatism has decayed from the positive, pragmatic force [that] its founders envisioned
into a bitter resistance movement that's given up on fresh ideas.” (in Time Magazine)  {blog 9/2009}

William James [1842-1910]
• • “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”  {Issue #68}
• • “What an absolute savage and pirate the passion of military conquest is.”  {Issue #68}
• • “A great many people think [that] they are thinking when thay are merely
rearranging their prejudices.”  {Issue #68}

mystery author J.A. Jance
“Each of us needs to get off our backside and go out into the streets
and do what we can to help.”  {Issue #64}

poet Robinson Jeffers [1887-1962]
“The poets lie too much.”  {blog 10/2007}

Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
third President of the United States, 1801-09
Thomas Jefferson Quotations Page at Working Minds
Thomas Jefferson Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

Jesus of Nazareth
• • “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter
into the kingdom of God.”  (Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25)  {Issue #24 & blog 6/2008}
• • “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me.”  (Matthew 25:40)  {blog 7/2008}

C.I.A. analyst Larry Johnson (a registered Republican)
“Right now there is no honor in the Republican Party.”  {Issue #53}

Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
• • “It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.”  {Issue #40}
• • “Sir, he who would earn his bread writing books must have the assurance of a duke,
the wit of a courtier, and the guts of a burglar.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated
than not to trust.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
{favorite quote of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005] }  {blog 7/2008}
• • “To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors
with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “If it rained knowledge I'd hold out my hand, but I would not give myself the trouble
to go in quest of it.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”   {blog 2/2009}

David Cay Johnston
“The average inflation-adjusted income of the bottom 90 percent of earners was lower in 2006
than it was back in 1973.”   {blog 2/2009}

Terry C. Johnston [1947-2001]
“Money's . . . only importance comes from how it keeps you going after your dream . . .
The only thing important is your dream.” (in "Dance On The Wind")  {Issue #26}

Erica Jong
“An artist must learn ... that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval.”  {blog 12/2008}

rock legend Janis Joplin [1943-1970]
“Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got.”  {Issue #43}

Joseph Joubert [1754-1824]
“Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard
by which to weigh them.”  {blog 1/2008}

author James Joyce [1882-1941]
• • “Chance furnishes me with what I need. I am like a man who stumbles along.
My foot strikes something, I bend over and it is exactly what I want.”  {Issue #54}
• • “Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed
in previous lives.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”  {blog 1/2010}

Walter H. Judd
“People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course,
that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote
– a very different thing.”   {blog 1/2008}