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

Page Three

Alphabetical by Author
A thru CD thru F

here on Page Three: GHIJ

K thru NO thru RS thru Z

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After WMail Issue #72 in October 2007, essays & quotations & news are being posted to the
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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}

Neal Gabler
“More often than not 'fair' and 'balanced' may be mutually exclusive.”
in Los Angeles Times op-ed  {blog 4/2010}

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}
• • “The United States has many problems at the moment: a high-and-stubborn unemployment rate,
a foreclosure catastrophe, a slowing economy that has not recovered and will not recover from the
Great Crisis, and the ongoing challenges of infrastructure, energy and climate change.”  {blog 8/2011}

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}

Rivka Galchen
“In quantum mechanics, the Universe, at its most elemental level, is random, an idea
that tends to upset people.”   {blog 4/2011}

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}
• • “Doubt is the father of invention.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “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.”  {blog 4/2011}

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}
• • “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “You may think your actions are meaningless and that they won't help, but that is no excuse,
you must still act.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Earth provides for every man's need, but not for every man's greed.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “If we are to reach real peace in this world, we shall have to begin with the children.”  {blog 12/2011}

Jesus Garcia, Jr. of Lynwood, California
“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}

John W. Gardner [1912-2002]
“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”  {blog 8/2011}

Steven R. Garman
“Physics is the universe's operating system.”  {blog 11/2010}

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 certainly be lost.”  {blog 8/2009}

Bill Gates
“640K ought to be enough {memory} for anybody.” (in 1981)  {blog 5/2010}

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}

Prof. Willard Gaylin
“Expressing anger is a form of public littering.”  {blog 1/2012}

Jean Genet [1910-86]
“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young
and never dreamed at all.”   {blog 1/2011}

Chief Dan George [1899-1981]
“If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you
will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.”  {blog 12/2010}

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}

Native American leader Geronimo [1829-1909]
“I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others,
this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust.”  {blog 10/2010}

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}

Kahlil Gibran [1883-1931]
“Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”  {blog 12/2010}

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}
• • “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening,
everything must be said again.”  {blog 3/2011}

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}

Joseph Goebbels [1897-1945], Nazi Propaganda Minister
• • “The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always
be essentially simple and repetitious.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne
in mind constantly . . . It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”  {blog 4/2011}

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}
• • “It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not enough to have wishes,
one must also accomplish.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.”  {blog 1/2011}

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}

Oliver Goldsmith [1728-74]
“Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.”  {blog 2/2011}

writer David Goldstein
“Yes, our regulatory agencies are incompetent. But they are incompetent by design.”   {blog 4/2010}

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}
• • “For [Adam] Smith, the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define,
and of the sovereign state to restore, fair play.”, in 2010  {blog 11/2010}
• • “The strongest argument for religion is not that it is in touch with God but that it puts us in touch
with one another.”  {blog 7/2011}

Nadine Gordimer
“Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”  {blog 4/2011}

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 [1924-1980], 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}
• • “It is impossible to go thru life without trust. That is to be imprisoned in
the worst cell of all, oneself.”  {blog 1/2012}

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

Ben Greenman
“Hopelessness springs eternal.”  {blog 5/2010}

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}

French writer Sacha Guitry [1885-1997]
“Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness.”  {blog 10/2010}

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, Washington
“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 [1917-86]
“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}

Thom Hartnett
“One person speaking up makes more noise than a thousand people who remain silent.”  {blog 12/2011}

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}

eco-activist Paul Hawken
“We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community ... Global themes
are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering.”  {blog 12/2011}

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}
• • “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”  {blog 6/2011}

Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]
“You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.”  {blog 1/2012}

S.I. Hayakawa [1906-92]
“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}

actress Helen Hayes [1900-93]
“We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.”  {blog 7/2011}

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}

Ben Hecht [1894-1964]
“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time
by watching the second hand of a clock.”  {blog 11/2011}

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}

economist Robert L. Heilbroner [1919-2005]
“The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government ... rise
above the interests of one class alone.”  {Issue #49 & blog 2/2011}

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}
• • “Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can't be ignored.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “Disturbing the ecological balance is the worst mistake [that] any government can make.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “As courage is bravery in the face of fear, virtue is right conduct in the face of temptation.”  {blog 12/2010}
• • “Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways
to do something.”  {blog 12/2011}

Congressman Martin Heinrich [Dem NM-01]
• • “The time has come for us to stand up for the American people and to hold
the insurance companies accountable.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “I will keep working until every [American] who wants to work has a job.” (on Labor Day 2011)  {blog 9/2011}

playwright Lillian Hellman [1905-84]
“It is best to act with confidence no matter how little right you have to it.”  {blog 6/2011}

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}
• • “Sometimes [writing] comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock
and then blasting it out with charges.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people not characters.
A character is a caricature.”  {blog 9/2011}

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}
• • “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”  {blog 4/2011 & 11/2011}

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}

Katharine Hepburn [1907-2003]
“If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.”  {blog 4/2011}

Anne Herbert
• • “Practice random acts of kindness, and senseless acts of beauty.”  {Issues #1 & #39}
• • “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through
times of no libraries.”  {blog 1/2011}

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}

Oliver Herford [1863-1935]
“Jehovah has always seemed to me the most fascinating character in all fiction.”  {blog 2/2011}

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

Don Herold [1889-1966]
• • “Be kind to dumb people.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Man is the only animal that plays poker.”  {blog 9/2011}

Mark Hertsgaard
“The battle to prevent global warming has been lost. Now the race to survive it has begun.”
(in The Nation Magazine, in 2006)  {Issue #68}

French patriot Stéphane Hessel [b. 1917]
• • “The worst possible outlook is indifference . . . Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials
of being human: the capacity and the freedom to be outraged.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “To create is to resist. To resist is to create.”  {blog 4/2011}

adventurer Thor Heyerdahl [1914-2002]
“Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.”  {blog 11/2011}

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}

W.F. Hightower, father of progressive activist Jim Hightower
“Everyone does better when everyone does better.”  {blog 7/2011}

Napoleon Hill [1883-1970]
• • “Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”  {Issue #46}
• • “The man who does more than he is paid [for] will soon be paid for more than he does.”  {blog 12/2011}

mystery author Tony Hillerman [1925-2008]
“It takes a million dollars to beat the system, to pay your own ransom, to buy back your own life.”
in "Blessing Way", 1970  {blog 7/2010}

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

movie director Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]
• • “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders.”  {blog 1/2011}
• • “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.”  {blog 12/2011}

Adolf Hitler [1889-1945]
• • “What luck for rulers that men do not think.”  {blog 2/2008}
• • “If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, then you must tell them the crudest
and most stupid things.” (in "Mein Kampf", 1925-26)  {blog 4/2011}

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}

longshoreman-philosopher 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}
• • “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”   {blog 11/2010}
• • “The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land
than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves.
Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of
secondary importance.”   {blog 11/2010}

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}

John Andrew Holmes
“It is well remembered that the entire universe, with one trifling exception,
is composed of others.” circa 1927  {blog 6/2010}

Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]
• • “A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.”  {blog 12/2008}
• • “Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make
critics of the chips that were left.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “Pretty much all the honest truthtelling there is in the world is done by children.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exception.”  {blog 3/2011}

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}
• • “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.”  {blog 7/2010}

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}

Victoria Holt {real name Eleanor Hibbert} [1906-93]
“Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.”  {blog 10/2010}

Lou Holtz
“Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care; and the other twenty percent
are glad you have them.”  {blog 5/2010}

President Herbert Hoover [1874-1964]
“Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”  {blog 11/2011}

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 [1906-92]
“A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.”  {Issue #59}

Lena Horne [1917-2010]
“It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way [that] you carry it."

economist George Horwich
“The true engines of economic growth [are] human ingenuity and productivity.”  {blog 4/2011}

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}

Ed Howdershelt
“There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo.
Use in that order.”  {blog 5/2010}

William Dean Howells [1837-1920]
“What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.”  {blog 9/2011}

Chinese author & lecturer Tehyi Hsieh [1884-1972]
• • “The key to success isn't much good until one discovers the right lock to insert it [into].”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “Action will remove the doubts that theory cannot solve.”  {blog 12/2011}

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}
• • “One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work
of one extraordinary man.”  {blog 5/2010}

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}
• • “Enthusiasm is the fever of reason.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”  {blog 8/2011}

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

David Hume [1711-76]
“Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken.”  {blog 8/2011}

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}

Robert Maynard Hutchins [1899-1977]
“Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.”  {blog 2/2011}

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}
• • “The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain
other sets of people are human.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself
as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.”  {blog 4/2011}

character Iago, as written by William Shakespeare [1564-1616]
“Pleasure and action make the hours seem shorter.”  {blog 10/2010}

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" (1882)  {blog 3/2010}
• • “It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments
on journalists and politicians.”  {blog 2/2011}

Gary Indiana
[Jean-Paul] Sartre preferred reading serie noir crime novels to Marleau-Ponty,
and who could blame him?” (in Los Angeles Times Times Book Review)  {blog 4/2010}

theologian Wm. 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}
• • “A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common
hatred of its neighbors.”   {blog 6/2011}
• • “The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before he is born.”  {blog 10/2011}

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}

journalist & biographer Walter Isaacson
• • “The free flow of information is the oxygen of democracy.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “[Steve Jobs] revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music,
phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.”   {blog 10/2011}

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

Andrew Jackson [1767–1845]
seventh President of The United States, 1829-37
“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways
to spell any word.” (in 1833)  {blog 6/2010}

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

Robert H. Jackson [1892-1954]
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1941-54
• • “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}
• • “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”  {blog 4/2011}

Dresden James
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations,
[then] the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”   {blog 4/2010}

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}


• • “Life is, in fact, a battle . . . Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small numbers, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”  {blog 9/2008}

• • “An aristocracy is bad manners organized.”  {blog 12/2010}

mystery author 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}
• • “The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice
and propagators of corruption.”  {blog 4/2011}

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}
• • “The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe.”   {blog 8/2011}
• • “I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money [is] a wedge in the world.
But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing,
the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.”  {blog 8/2011}

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}

Steve Jobs [1955-2011] of Apple, Inc.
“It's our job to know what people want before they do.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.” (in 2005)  {blog 10/2011}

Dave Johnson, Campaign For America's Future blogger
“[The United States is] a dysfunctional plutocracy serving the biggest corporations
and the billionaires behind them.”  {blog 11/2011}

former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, trailing presidential candidate
“The only problem with country music is that it kills plants.”  {blog 8/2011}

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}
• • “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar
and familiar things new.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “It is better to live rich than to die rich.”  {blog 12/2011}

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", 1995  {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}

Carl G. Jung [1875-1961]
• • “No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps.
A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense.” in "Man and His Symbols", 1964  {blog 6/2010}


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