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

Page Four

Alphabetical by Author
A thru C • D thru F • G thru J

here on page Four: K • L • M • N

O thru R • S thru Z

Proverbs & Anonymous • Laws of Life

Books of Quotations Page

Working Minds Homepage
free monthly 'WMail' Philosophy Newsletter [2000-2007]
Index of All Issues

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

Authors K thru N

Daniel Kadlec, Time Magazine
“Over the long haul, a [weak U.S.] dollar could lead to inflation, higher interest
rates and a recession likely to spill around the planet.”  {Issue #49}

Franz Kafka [1883-1924]
• • “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside of us.”  {Issue #19}
• • “Real hell is there in the office.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “The meaning of life is that it stops.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”  {blog 12/2011}

Rob Kall, founder of OpEdNews
“America's mainstream media have died. They were infected and killed by corporatism.”  {blog 11/2007}

Henry J. Kaiser [1882-1967]
• • “The Six Magic Words To Riches: Find a need and fill it.”  {Issue #36}
• • “When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.”  {blog 12/2011}

mystery author Stuart M. Kaminsky [1934-2009]
“We're all dying . . . Best we can do is go out with dignity – or having fun. I haven't made up my mind
which one I want. I don't think [that] you can have both.”  {blog 8/2008}

Garson Kanin [1912-99]
• • “Amateurs hope. Professionals work.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “The trouble with the motion picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and
the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic
contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise.”  {blog 6/2009}

Esther Kaplan
“During the [George W.] Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about
what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse.”  {blog 7/2010}

Justin Kaplan
“Humor is tragically underrated. People tend not to take it seriously.”  {Issue #45}

Aaron Karo
“The best diet is having to pay for your own groceries.”  {blog 12/2011}

Mary Karr
“The definition of a Republican is: Someone who can't enjoy a meal unless they know [that] someone
else is starving.” quoting her father in the great memoir "The Liar's Club" [1995]  {blog 11/2010}

stage & film director Elia Kazan [1909-2003]
“Wonder is our need today, not information.”  {blog 12/2010}

English poet John Keats [1795-1821]
• • “Art takes its goodness from the ardor of the artist.”  {Issue #36}
• • “[Poetry] is not so fine a thing as philosophy – for the same reason that an eagle
is not so fine a thing as a truth.”  {blog 11/2008}

American humorist Garrison Keillor
• • “There's a lot of human nature in everyone.”
G.E. Nordell: “... to which I say: 'A little human nature goes a long way'.”  {Issue #36}
• • “WalMart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo.”  {Issue #49}
• • “Going to church no more makes you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car.”  {Issue #65}

Garret Keizer
• • “A progressive believes that society can be made better, that it can be made better by informed people
acting in concert, and that it can be called 'better' only when it is better for everyone.”  {Issue #62 & blog 1/2011}
• • “By far the greatest threat to private life is the obscene disproportion of private wealth.”  {blog 2/2009}

Helen Keller [1880-1968]
• • “True happiness is not attained through self-gratification,
but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”  {Issue #34}
• • “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched –
they must be felt with the heart.”  {Issue #70}
• • “Long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men
as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”  {blog 8/2008}
• • “More than Any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand, my limitations fall
from me, my spirit is free.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “College isn't the place to go for ideas.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or
opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we loved deeply
becomes part of us.”  {blog 1/2012}

Thomas à Kempis [1380-1471]
“First bring peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.”  {Issue #70}

John F. Kennedy [1917-63]
U.S. Congressman [Dem-MA] 1947-53, U.S. Senator [Dem-MA] 1953-60
35th President of the United States, 1961-63
• • “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden,
meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival
and the success of Liberty.”  (Inaugural Address 20 January 1961)  {Issue #17 & blog 1/2011}
• • “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”  {Issue #64}
• • “Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”  {Issue #68}
• • “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to fish
and a time to cut bait.” (improvising from Ecclesiastes)  {blog 10/2008}
• • “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only six percent of the world's population, that we cannot impose our will on the other 94 percent of mankind, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every problem.” (in 1961)  {blog 2/2009}
• • “There can be no progress if people have no faith in tomorrow.”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”  {blog 2/2011}

Kevin Kennedy
“Racecar spelled backwards is racecar.”  {blog 10/2011}

Robert F. Kennedy [1925-68]
• • “In your hand . . . is the future of your world and the fulfillment of the best
qualities of your own spirit.”  {Issue #32}
• • “I now fully realize that only the powers of the Presidency will reveal the secrets
of my brother's death.”  (3 June 1968 - 2 days before his own death)  {Issue #53}
• • “As long as men are not free – in their lives and their opinions, their speech and knowledge – that long
will the American Revolution not be finished.” at Queens College in New York City (15 June 1965)  {blog 2/2008}
• • “Why not?” (1968 campaign slogan)  {blog 10/2008}

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
• • “George W. Bush is the worst environmental president in American history.” {Issue #47}
• • “63% of U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes [in 2006].”  {blog 10/2007}

Jack Kerouac [1922-69]
• • “Fame is like an old newspaper blowing down Bleecker Street.”  {Issue #30}
• • “Walking on water wasn't built in a day.”  {Issue #56}
• • “Happiness consists in realizing [that] it is all a great strange dream.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.”  {blog 9/2011}

American author Jean Kerr [1922-2003]
• • “Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “The real menace in dealing with a 5-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound
like a 5-year-old.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough.
What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”  {blog 12/2011}

U.S. Senator John Kerry
• • “We cannot make . . . progress without raising the wrath
of the guardians of the status quo.”  {Issue #40}
• • “How do you ask a [soldier] to be the last man to die for a mistake?” (in 1971)  {Issue #41}
• • “The thought 'power to the people' is not revolutionary: Our country was founded
on the concept.” (1971)  {Issue #43}

Ken Kesey [1935-2001]
• • “You can't blame the president for the state of the country.
It's always the poets' fault.”  {Issue #18}
• • “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek
the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking . . . The need for mystery
is greater than the need for an answer.”  {blog 4/2009}

Charles Kettering [1876-1958]
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”  {Issue #46}

John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946]
• • “The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces
of time and ignorance, which envelop our future.”  {Issue #22}
• • “The world has been slow to realize that we are in the shadow of one of the greatest
economic catastrophes of modern history.” (quoted by James K. Galbraith
in written testimony to Congress, February 2009)  {blog 5/2009}
• • “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” (in 1919)  {blog 1/2011}

Genghis Khan [1162-1227]
“Violence never settles anything.”  {Issue #45}

Callie Khouri
“You get what you settle for.” (in her 1991 screenplay for "Thelma & Louise")  {Issue #70}

Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
• • “Twaddle, rubbish and gossip is what people want, not action . . . The secret of life is to chatter freely
about all [that] one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented – and then do nothing.”  {Issue #70}
• • “Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.”  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Life can only be understood backwards. It must be lived forwards,”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “If you marry, you will regret it; if you don't marry, you will also regret it.”  {blog 12/2008}

Kimani
“Endeleya mbele!”  {blog 12/2008}

Alan King [1927-2004]
“Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.”  {blog 1/2011}

Billie Jean King
“No one changes the world who isn't obsessed.”  {blog 1/2012}

Sir David King, the British government's chief scientific adviser
“The threat from global warming is greater than that posed by international terrorism . . .
London, New York and New Orleans are seriously threatened by melting ice caps.” (in 2004)  {Issue #55}

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotations Page at Working Minds

Stephen King
“It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.”  {blog 3/2010}

Baron Neil Gordon Kinnock
“You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.”  {blog 4/2011}

Michael Kinsley, Time Magazine writer
• • “[George W.] Bush is a remarkably successful liar.”  {Issue #36}
• • “The T.E.A. Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration
of what ails America ... because of the movement's self-indulgent premise that none
of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.”  {blog 10/2010}

Rudyard Kipling [1865-1936]
“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”  {blog 12/2008}

actress Lisa Kirk [1925-90]
“A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who talks to you about himself,
and a brilliant conversationalist is someone who talks to you about yourself.”   {blog 4/2009}

Russell Kirk [1918-94]
“The struggle for freedom is never lost, because it is never won.”  {Issue #57}

Lane Joseph Kirkland, president AFL-CIO, 1980-95
“If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all
to themselves.”  {Issue #36}

Henry Kissinger
• • “Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.” {Issue #41}
• • “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.”  {blog 6/2011}

Stuart Klawans, film critic at The Nation Magazine
• • “Cultural change doesn't require a majority, only an invigorated critical mass.”  {Issue #66}
• • “Film has stopped being central to American life.”, in April 2011  {blog 7/2011}

Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist
“Barack Obama was elected President because the governing philosophy of the last 30 years,
arrant Reaganism, proved itself bankrupt.”  {blog 4/2009}

Donald Knuth
“Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer.
Art is everything else.”  {blog 5/2010}

David Korten
“Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.”   {blog 4/2010}

Ernie Kovacs [1919-62]
“Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.”  {Issue #36}

octogenarian Russian activist Sergei Kovalyov
“Law is not an instrument of politics but the other way around.”  {blog 1/2012}

Hilton Kramer
“The past can be neither repeated nor repealed.”  {Issue #36}

Charles Krauthammer, Time Magazine columnist
“To teach faith as science . . . to impose it on the teaching of evolution
is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.”  {Issue #55}

Chris Kruger
“In the final analysis, all issues are economic issues.”  {Issue #71}

Nobel-winner Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist
• • “The Bush administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in history.”  {Issue #47}
• • “The policy elite ... are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage
in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “If there’s one piece of economic wisdom [that] I hope people will grasp this year, it’s this: Even though we
may finally have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole.” in January 2011  {blog 1/2011}
• • “Paul Ryan's ['Path To Prosperity'] plan is both ridiculous and cruel.”  {blog 7/2011}

cinema master Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
“One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film.”  {blog 4/2009}

Maggie Kuhn [1905-95], founder of the Gray Panthers
“Old age is not a disease, it is a triumph.”  {blog 12/2011}

Corby Kummer, senior editor at Atlantic Monthly
“To my mind, pretty much everything besides bread is a dietary supplement.”  {blog 10/2008}

Milan Kundera
“The only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can formulate.”  {blog 1/2012}

Akira Kurosawa [1910-98]
“The person who has never seen movies by Satyajit Ray is like a person who has
never seen the moon and the sky.”  {blog 12/2010}

U.S. Senator Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette [1855-1925]
• • “Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce
and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.”  {Issue #65}
• • “The solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy.”  {Issue #69}
• • “The usurpation on the part of the Executive of the conduct of foreign relations, which results in Congress
blindly and ignorantly following the course dictated by the President, instead of itself declaring the war
policy, is fundamentally the cause of our being in this war.” (in June 1917)  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy.
It seeks to dominate absolutely.”  {blog 11/2007}

Western author Louis L'Amour [1908-88]
• • “To be a man is to be responsible; it is as simple as that.”  {Issue #28}
• • “Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground,
and later, win a little more.”  {Issue #62}
• • “What good is a newspaper unless it tells the truth and fights for the rights of the people?”  {Issue #64}
• • “The only thing that makes a man able to get along in this world is his brain. A man doesn't have the claws of a bear, nor the strength of a bull. He doesn't have the nose of a wolf, nor the wings of a hawk, but he has a brain. You're going to get along in this world as long as you use it.” (in 'Down The Long Hills')  {blog 1/2008}

John Laesch, 2008 candidate for Congress in Illinois
“The task of my generation is a separation of corporation and state.”  {blog 10/2007}

John Lahr
“If Jesus is a Jew, why does he have a Mexican name?”  {blog 7/2011}

actress & inventor Hedy Lamarr [1913-2000]
“Any girl can look glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”  {blog 1/2012}

Cody Lambert
“You've got to get the job done, whatever it takes – that's the cowboy way.”  {blog 8/2008}

Sioux shaman John Fire Lame Deer [1903?-76]
“What you see with your eyes shut is what counts.”  {blog 12/2010}

Richard Lamm
“All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail
over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.”  {blog 6/2010}

Ned Lamont, 2006 U.S. Senate candidate in Connecticut
“There are 63 lobbyists in Washington, DC for every Congressman.”  {Issue #61}

Anne Lamott
• • “Believing in George Bush is so ludicrous that believing in God seems almost rational.”  {Issue #52}
• • “You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that
God hates all the same people you do.”  {blog 3/2008}

Leslie Lamport
“A distributed system is one that stops you from getting any work done when a machine
[that] you've never even heard of crashes.”  {blog 6/2010}

Ann Landers {Eppie Lederer 1918-2002}
“Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs.”   {blog 12/2011}

critic Anthony Lane
“Cinema deals more fatuously with religion than with any other human enterprise.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “What, O Lord, was the point?”  {blog 6/2011}

Dorothea Lange [1895-1965]
“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?”  {Issue #68}

Edward Langley
“What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.”  {Issue #43}

Bert Lantz
“If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”  {Issue #36}

Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu [IVth Century B.C.E.]
• • “To lead the people, walk behind them.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Because of deep love, one is courageous.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.” (in the "Tao Te Ching")  {Issue #43}
• • “To see things in the seed, that is genius.”  {Issue #69}
• • “A good traveller has no fixed plans.”  {blog 8/2009}
• • “He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”  {blog 2/2011}

Lewis Lapham
“George Bush is a servant of the American oligarchy.”  {Issue #60}

Claude Lapierre
“Real journalism is about presenting the public with facts, not arguments.”   {Issue #67}

Gene LaRoque, Admiral U.S. Navy [Ret.]
“War has become a spectator sport.”  {Issue #66}

C. Larson
“We must know what we are, before we can know and use what we inherently possess.”  {blog 6/2009}

columnist Doug Larson
“A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself.”  {blog 8/2011}

mystery author {pseudonym} Emma Lathen
“Fate is a notorious prankster.”  {Issue #36}

D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]
• • “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”  {Issue #19}
• • “I am so tired of being told that I want mankind to go back to the condition of savages. As if modern city people weren't the crudest, rawest, most crassly savage monkeys that ever existed, when it comes to the relation of man and woman. All I see in our vaunted civilization is men and women smashing each other emotionally and physically to bits, and all I ask is that they should pause and consider.”  {blog 11/2008}

Edward Lazarus
“Subverting democratic governance requires neither an army nor particular genius,
but simply the concentration of power into the hands of too many true believers.”  {Issue #50}

British author John le Carré
• • “How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden
to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations tricks in history.”  {Issue #47}
• • “Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.”  {blog 12/2011}

Fran Lebowitz
• • “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people
talk about wine.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Food is an important part of a balanced diet.”  {blog 12/2011}

Robert E. Lee [1807-1870]
“Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot
do more. You should never do less.”  {blog 12/2007}

filmmaker Spike Lee
“I ain't Martin Luther King. I don't need a dream. I have a plan.”  {blog 3/2010}

actor John Leguizamo
“Great acting is being able to create a character. Great character is being able to be yourself.”  {Issue #67}

Dennis Lehane
“The American Way ... is finding someone to blame.”  {Issue #31}

John Lehman, former U.S. Navy Secretary
“Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.”  {blog 7/2008}

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [1646-1716]
“The present is pregnant with the future.”  {blog 9/2008}

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin [1870-1924]
• • “Fascism is capitalism in decay.”  {Issue #69}
• • “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”  {Issue #69}

John Lennon [1940-80]
• • “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”  {blog 4/2011}

Elmore Leonard
“Face the realities of life with neither fear nor loathing
and you'll come out ahead.”  {Issue #28}

Doris Lessing
“Small things amuse small minds.”  {blog 9/2008}

Claude Lévi-Strauss [1908-2009]
“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.”  {blog 1/2010}

Emmanuel Levinas [1906-95]
“Politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself.”  {Issue #62}

Arthur Levitt
Chairman of the American Stock Exchange, 1978-89
Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission, 1993-2001
“The American economy is the eighth wonder of the world; the ninth
is the economic ignorance of the American people.”  {Issue #24}

C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]
• • “Can modern man survive the moral collapse of his culture?”  {Issue #8}
• • “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”  {blog 8/2009}

Sinclair Lewis [1885-1951]
• • “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”  {Issue #56}
• • “It is impossible to discourage the real writers; they don't give a damn what you say,
they're going to write.”  {blog 8/2008}

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg [1742-99]
• • “Question everything.”  {Issue #4}
• • “Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.”  {blog 4/2011}

U.S. Senator Joseph 'Traitor Joe' Lieberman of Connecticut
“Republicans think [that] the best way to feed the birds is to give more oats
to the horses: doo-doo economics.”  {Issue #36}

A.J. Liebling [1904-63]
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”  {Issue #46}

Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
16th President of the United States, 1861-65
Abraham Lincoln Quotations Page at Working Minds
Spirit of America / Presidents / Abraham Lincoln

aviator Charles A. Lindbergh [1902-74]
“Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown,
the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.” (in "Autobiography of Values", 1978)  {blog 11/2011}

poet & critic Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931]
“Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing.” (in 1915)  {blog 9/2009}

Walter Lippmann [1889-1974]
• • “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The health of society depends upon the quality of the information [that] it receives.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be
presented perfectly and instantly in any one account.”  {blog 12/2008}
• • “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”  {blog 4/2011}

Robert Lipsyte
“Becoming the champion is often the luck of the draw, but being a contender, a somebody
with promise, is about hard work and character.”  {blog 5/2010}

Ken Livingston, Mayor of the City of London, U.K.
“I actually think [George W.] Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet.”  {Issue #39}

John Locke [1632-1704]
“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”  {blog 9/2011}

Raymond Loewy [1893-1986]
“Simplicity is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation.”  {Issue #39}

Vince Lombardi [1913-70]
• • “Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”  {Issue #7}
• • “We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”  {blog 4/2011}

Airman Hal London, circa 1968
“My life is an ashtray.”  {blog 7/2011}

Jack London [1876-1916]
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”  {blog 9/2011}

Huey Pierce Long, Jr. [1893-1935]
(When asked if fascism could come to America) “Yeah, but it’ll come calling itself anti-fascist.”   {blog 4/2011}

Janet Long
“Part of being sane is being a little bit crazy.”  {blog 5/2010}

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-82]
• • “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.”  {blog 4/2011}

Barry Lopez
“The response to tyranny . . . must always be this: Dismantle it.”  {Issue #47}

Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times columnist
• • “Mumia Abu-Jamal is guiltier than O.J.”  {Issue #20}
• • “If 95% of the readers of the Wall Street Journal support a war [against Iraq],
then it's GOT to be a bad idea.”  {Issue #29}
• • “It's about time we admit [that] the Mexican border is now
somewhere near Oregon.”  {Issue #40}
• • “Faith, as defined in the year 2004 in America, is freedom from doubt, freedom
from science, freedom from reality.”  {Issue #50}

Audre Lorde [1934-92]
“Your silence will not protect you.”  {blog 12/2011}

U.S. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi
“We can support the troops without supporting the President.” (in 1998)  {Issue #62}

boxer Joe Louis [1914-81]
“You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.”  {blog 6/2008}

H.P. Lovecraft [1890-1937]
“To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing
revelations of truth.”   {blog 4/2011}

Edward Verrall Lucas [1868-1938]
“I am a believer in punctuality, though it makes me very lonely.”  {blog 4/2011}

Peter Lynch, Wall Street tycoon
“Never invest in any idea [that] you can't illustrate with a crayon.”  {blog 10/2008}

Peter Maass
“Like gravity, [the petroleum industry] influences everything that we do.”
(in "Crude World", 2009)  {blog 2/2010}

Thomas Macaulay [1800-1859]
“[The Jesuits] appear to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried
without risk of intellectual emancipation.”  {blog 12/2008}

mystery author John D. MacDonald [1916-86]
• • “There is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “The worst crimes ... are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come
to realize this [only] after they are in the nursing home.”  {blog 9/2008}

mystery author Ross Macdonald [1915-83]
• • “Sex and television are the opium of the people.” in "The Barbarous Coast", 1956 novel  {blog 6/2011}
• • “There is justice in the truth because they are the same thing.” in "The Three Roads", 1948  {blog 7/2011}
• • “It is really rather pathetic how simple the big things like love and war seem until you start
to go into detail.” in "The Three Roads", 1948  {blog 7/2011}

Niccolò Machiavelli [1469-1527]
“Virtue and riches seldom settle on one man.”  {blog 6/2010}

Harvey Mackay
“Someone once said life is hard. I say, compared to what?”  {blog 5/2010}

Norman Maclean [1902-90]
“All good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art
and art does not come easy.”  {blog 5/2009}

James A. Madison [1751-1836]
fourth President of The United States, 1809-17
• • “Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”
{in 'Letter to Edward Livingston', 10 July 1822}  {Issue #58}
• • “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”  {Issue #59}
• • “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” (in 1822)  {blog 8/2009}
• • “History shows that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain control over governments by controlling the money and the issuance of it.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “The growing wealth aquired by [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses.”  {blog 4/2010}

Maurice Maeterlinck [1862-1949]
“The discovery of a sign of true intellect outside ourselves procures us something of the emotion [that]
Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his island.”  {blog 10/2008}

Mr. Edward Magorium character, as written by Zach Helm
“37 seconds well used is a lifetime!”  {blog 11/2008}

Norman Mailer [1923-2007]
“I think it’s bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act.
It discharges the tension.”  {blog 8/2011}

Janet Maker of Los Angeles, California
“True believers are always wrong, whether they are Christians, Muslims or Jews.”  {blog 9/2008}

radio talk show host Mike Malloy
• • “Taking no action at all is itself an immoral act.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Anyone who has Republican parents should run away from home.”  {blog 4/2010}

Heinrich Mann [1871-1950]
“A house without books is like a room without windows.”  {blog 6/2011}

Horace Mann [1796-1859]
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”  {Issue #38}

Thomas Mann [1875-1955]
• • “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”  {blog 10/2011}

Sándor Márai [1900-89]
“There are only two divine medicaments to help us bear the poison of reality and prevent it
from killing us prematurely and these are intelligence and indifference.”  {Issue #57}

Harry Margolis
“You've got to give up being a little son of a bitch.”  {blog 5/2008}

Jacques Maritain [1882-1973]
“Never take stupidity too much in earnest.” (a 'Chinese proverb' that he invented)  {blog 12/2008}

Christopher Marlowe [1564-93]
“Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.”  {Issue #71}

Don Marquis [1878-1937]
“An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.”  {blog 3/2008}

Dame Ngaio Marsh [1895-1982]
“No art should be fashionable.”  {Issue #43}

Thomas R. Marshall [1854-1925]
“What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”  {blog 2/2009}

Trevor Marshall
“It's not ... how you play the game, but how you design the playing field.” (in 1988)  {blog 10/2009}

Al Martinez, Los Angeles Times columnist
• • “There's a people's war brewing against greed and excess, against the disparity between
the haves and the have nots, and we'd better start taking it seriously.” (Oct 2003)   {Issue #36}
• • “The Republican Party [parades] God thru town like a circus elephant,
shouting loudly that it is for Him that they are attempting to unite America
in a great crusade for family values.” (2004)  {Issue #41}
• • “We are a culture in freefall.”  {Issue #43}
• • “Our vice president, Dick Cheney ... is a man without either
wisdom or conscience.”  {Issue #47}
• • “There is no better way to make a bad thing worse than
to call out a government agency.”  {Issue #48}
• • “Love, by its very nature, is the sum of all emotions, from joy to despair.”  {Issue #48}

author Steve Martini
• • “Throughout history, truth has withered and died of loneliness.”  {Issue #33}
• • “Politicians in [California] don't accept reasoned argument, and they don't
take American Express.”  {Issue #36}
• • “... corporate management getting rich while their companies go broke is just part of the normal
business cycle... A lot of money in America is still made the old-fashioned way – by stealing it.”  {Issue #49}

Groucho Marx [1890-1977]
• • “I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on,
I go to the library and read a good book.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then applying
the wrong remedies.”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; and inside a dog, it's too dark to read.”  {blog 9/2009}

Karl Marx [1818-83]
• • “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point, however,
is to change it.”  {Issue #49}
• • “Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, [and] you ruin
a wonderful business opportunity.”  {blog 3/2010}

Alj Mary of Phoenix, Arizona
“There are times when you just have to p*ss off everybody in order to get something
constructive done.”  {blog 11/2007}

Abraham Maslow [1908-70]
“When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail.”  {blog 6/2010}

don Juan Matus (as documented by Carlos Castañeda [1925-98])
• • “The purpose of life is to learn.”  {Issue #6}
• • “Death is always just over your left shoulder.”  {Issue #42}
• • “Nothing in the world is a gift. Whatever there is to learn
has to be learned the hard way.”  {Issue #48}

W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]
• • “Luck is a talent.”  {Issue #36}
• • “If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom.”  {Issue #47}
• • “It's a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best,
you very often get it.”  {Issue #49}
• • “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character. Happiness does that sometimes;
but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.”  {blog 7/2011}

André Maurois [1885-1967]
• • “Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “The value of the average conversation could be enormously improved by the constant
use of four simple words: 'I do not know'.”  {blog 5/2010}

U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona
“Global warming has to become a campaign issue, and it never has, either in congressional campaigns
or senatorial campaigns or presidential campaigns.”  {Issue #60}

G.O.P. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
“I wish we had been able to obstruct more.” (in August 2010)  {blog 10/2010}

Johnston McCulley [1883-1958], creator of 'El Zorro'
“Existence is a tough proposition, and a man has to possess fortitude to endure it.”  {Issue #46}

Brooke McEldowney
“The thing that truly sets people apart from other animals is not their thought process,
but their ability to congratulate themselves for having one.”  {Issue #51}

Congressman Louis Thomas McFadden [1876-1936]
“The Federal Reserve [Banks] are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen.
There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run
by the International Bankers.” (circa 1933)  {blog 11/2009}

syndicated cartoonist Aaron McGruder
“Oppression reigns unchecked throughout most of the world.”  {Issue #24}

basketball announcer Al McGuire [1928-2001]
“The world is run by C students.”  {blog 12/2008}

Peter T. McIntyre
“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”  {blog 2/2009}

poet-songwriter Rod McKuen
“It doesn't matter who you love, or how you love, but that you love.”  {Issue #43}

journalist Mignon McLaughlin [1913-83]
• • “No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.”  {blog 12/2011}

Marshall McLuhan [1911-80]
• • “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate
than by the content of the communication.”  {Issue #36}
• • “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”  {blog 4/2011}

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
“You have zero privacy... Get over it.” (in 1999)  {blog 7/2010}

actress Butterfly McQueen [1911-95]
“Beautiful young people are random acts of nature, but beautiful old people are
deliberate works of art.”  {blog 4/2009}

Margaret Mead [1901-78]
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”  {Issue #24}

Muffy Mead-Ferro of Salt Lake City, Utah
“We're dangerously close to becoming an entire nation of Howard Hugheses.”  {Issue #52}

George Meany [1894-1980], president AFL-CIO 1955-79
“You don't own it until it costs you something.”  {Issue #36}

Golda Meir [1898-1978]
“There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others
to kill. It's exactly the same thing.”  {blog 2/2008}

physicist Lise Meitner [1878-1968]
“Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty.”  {blog 6/2010}

economist Allan H. Meltzer
“Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn't work.”  {blog 11/2009 & 1/2012}

H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
H.L. Mencken Quotations Page at Working Minds
H.L. Mencken Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

mystery author D.R. Meredith
• • “The road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but with self-justification.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Nothing in this life happens without a before and after.”  {blog 4/2009}

Thomas Merton [1915-68]
• • “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “You are made in the image of what you desire.”  {blog 10/2011}

French outlaw Jacques Mesrine [1936-79]
“Death is nothing to someone who knew how to live.”  {blog 1/2011}

Harold Meyerson
• • “When it comes to losing jobs and failing to balance a budget, George W. Bush is
the club champion; indeed, his stewardship of the American economy is beginning to rival
Herbert Hoover's for sheer perverse, long-term ineptitude.”  (Sept 2003)  {Issue #36}
• • “[George W.] Bush combines at the highest levels the qualities of plutocrat and philistine.”  {Issue #40}
• • “The president is only a liar; the vice president is a lunatic.” (2004)  {Issue #47}

pioneer Afro-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux [1884-1951]
“One of the greatest tasks of my life has been to teach that the colored man can be anything.”   {blog 1/2010}

Michelangelo [1475-1564]
“The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low
and we reach it.”  {blog 4/2011}

author James A. Michener [1907-97]
• • “If our major parties do not know where the boundaries of decency
and acceptance are, then we are already lost.”  {Issue #47}
• • “I consider [work in politics] one of the most fruitful exercises of the human mind.”  {Issue #51}
• • “An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”  {blog 12/2009}
• • “Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country
that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat
of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.”  {blog 6/2010}

John Stuart Mill [1806-73]
• • “Over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign.”
(in 'On Liberty' 1859, "Introductory")  {Issue #25}
• • “Those only are happy who have their mind fixed on some object other than their own happiness.”  {blog 6/2011}

Edna St. Vincent Millay [1892-1950]
“There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going.”  {Issue #67}

playwright Arthur Miller [1915-2005]
• • “Tragedy arises when you are in the presence of a man who has missed
accomplishing his joy.” (in 1950)  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.”  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge
of embarrassing him, always.”  {blog 8/2008}
• • “The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater,
or the play – but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.”  {blog 11/2010}

Dennis Miller
“Politics is a game of 'last man standing'.”  {Issue #48}

Henry Miller [1891-1980]
• • “How different war would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.”  {Issue #66}
• • “The real leader has no need to lead, he is content to point the way.”  {blog 11/2007}

Henry Miller of San Fernando Valley Mensa
“Religions are merely the explanations of primitives for phenomena beyond their ability to comprehend,
codified and passed on thru generations, and defended as ordained absolutes of behavior.”  {Issue #51}

Jason Lee Miller
“The problem with the human condition is that it involves humans.”  {Issue #70}

Mark Crispin Miller
“The true cause of the enormous ills that now dismay so many Americans – the universal sleaze and 'dumbing down', the floodtide of corporate propaganda, the terminal insanity of United States politics – has risen not from any grand decline in the national character ... but from the inevitable toxic influence of those few corporations that have monopolized our culture.”  {Issue #23}

C. Wright Mills [1916-1962]
• • “The political calling of the intellectual [lies in] the unmasking of lies which sustain
irresponsible power.”  {Issue #9}
• • “In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of humankind, the image [that] we have
of our limits and possibilities. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits
of what it means to be human.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning
than the man who inherited his father's store or farm.”  {blog 11/2009}

Irving Mills [1894-1985]
“It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.”  {blog 7/2010}

A.A. Milne [1882-1956]
“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy
when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”  {blog 3/2011}

John Milton [1608-74]
“Let [truth] and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the
worse in a free and open encounter?”  {Issue #47}

jazz musician Charles Mingus [1922-79]
“Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”  {Issue #39}

movie director Vincente Minnelli [1903-86]
“[A movie] that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that
the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.”  {blog 3/2011}

Newton Minow
“When television is bad, nothing is worse. You will observe a vast wasteland.”  {Issue #46}

silent movie cowboy star Tom Mix [1880-1940]
“The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it's a state of mind.
It's whatever you want it to be.”  {blog 8/2008}

playwright Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]
• • “The most pitiful human ailment is a birdseed heart.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.”  {blog 6/2011}

Molière {real name Jean-Baptiste Poquelin} [1622-73]
• • “To honor all men is to honor none.”  (in "The Misanthrope")  {Issue #36}
• • “It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.”  {blog 4/2010}

jazz musician Thelonius Monk [1917-82]
“It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.”  {Issue #71}

Marilyn Monroe [1926-62]
• • “I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.”  {blog 6/2008}
• • “I've been on a calendar, but never on time.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you $50,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul.”  {blog 11/2011}

Thomas S. Monson
“Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything
that would damage his self-respect.”  {blog 4/2009}

(Michel Eyquem de) Montaigne [1533-92]
• • “The clearest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.”  {Issue #62}
• • “He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “The art of dining well is no slight art, nor the pleasure slight.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”  {blog 8/2011}

(Charles de Secondat, baron de) Montesquieu [1689-1755]
• • “Republics end thru luxury, monarchies thru poverty.”  {Issue #43}
• • “The deterioration of a government begins almost always by a decay of its principles.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them.”  {blog 4/2011}

gadfly filmmaker Michael Moore
• • “Democracy is not a spectator sport, and being a citizen should imply
that [you're] active and caring.”  {Issue #43}
• • “Do something!” {the ending of his 2004 documentary film 'Fahrenheit 9/11'}  {Issue #45}
• • “More people voted for Kerry than for Reagan.”  {Issue #48}
• • “A better day is coming.”  {blog 10/2007}

• • “[The U.S.A.] is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the über-rich. Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people . . . now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined.”
March 2011 speech in Madison, Wisconsin  {blog 4/2011}

Edmund S. Morgan
“Patriotism is so often a disguise that the genuine article is always surprising.”  {Issue #51}

broadcast journalist Edward P. Morgan [1910-93]
“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an
explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s
mind can get both provocation and privacy.”  {blog 6/2011}

Robert Morley [1906-92]
“No man is lonely while eating spaghetti.”  {blog 9/2008}

William Morris
“Have nothing ... that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”  {blog 11/2008}

Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times columnist
“When the little guy wants help, he asks the government to write a check. When the big guy
wants help, he asks the government to write a law.”  {Issue #43}

author-activist Walter Mosley
• • “The only way to be free is to free yourself.”  {Issue #62}
• • “It is not the questing after wealth and prosperity that made [America] great
but the belief in the rights of all human beings.”  {Issue #66}

Dow Mossman
“Sometimes words are the longest things there are.”  {Issue #39}

TV journalist Bill Moyers
• • “Congress belongs to the highest bidder.” (2006)  {Issue #58}
• • “Democracy works when people claim it as their own.”  {Issue #68}
• • “The promise of America leaves no one out.”  {Issue #69}
• • “This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and
low social mobility at the bottom ... Millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a
plutocracy, where they are disposable. [In an earlier era] the remedy was a popular insurgency that
ignited the spark of democracy ... Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “Unlimited corporate funding of candidates is a dagger directed at the heart of our democracy.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “Secrecy is the freedom [that] tyrants dream of.”  {blog 3/2011}

Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]
• • “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”   {blog 11/2010}
• • “No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.”   {blog 11/2010}

John Muir [1838-1914]
• • “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in ... where nature may heal
and give strength to body and soul alike.”  {Issue #36}
• • “The clearest way into the universe is thru a forest wilderness.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”  {blog 11/2007}

Michael Mukasey, figurehead U.S Attorney General [2008]
“Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”  {blog 9/2008}

Martin Mull
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”  {blog 11/2010}

Iris Murdoch [1919-99]
“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”  {blog 8/2011}

Ty Murray
“The great cowboys are the ones with the biggest hearts.”  {blog 8/2008}

Varda Murrell
“Don't quit before the miracle.”  {Issue #32}

journalist Edward R. Murrow [1908-65]
Edward R. Murrow Quotations Page at Working Minds
Edward R. Murrow Page at Magic Lantern Video & Book Store

Bess Myerson
“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.”  {blog 10/2011}

Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977]
• • “Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”  {Issue #71}
• • “Why not make the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Parody is a game; satire is a lesson.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than
in the ooze of the past.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.”  {blog 12/2011}

V.S. Naipaul
“Intellect and will, intellect and will.”  {Issue #28}

novelist R.K. Narayan [1906-2001]
“You become a writer by writing. It is a yoga.”  {blog 2/2009}

Ogden Nash [1902-71]
“Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”  {blog 12/2007}

George Jean Nathan [1882-1958]
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”  {blog 3/2011}

neon art piece by Bruce Nauman
“The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”  {blog 4/2010}

New York Daily News reporter Lars-Erik Nelson [1941-2000]
“[The internet] is a vanity press for the demented, the conspiratorial, or the merely self-important.”  {blog 1/2012}

musician Willie Nelson
• • “Fortunately, we're not in control.”  {Issue #48}
• • “I like myself better when I'm writing regularly.”  {blog 6/2009}

Pablo Neruda [1904-73]
“Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.”  {blog 2/2009}

Charles B. Newcomb
“Let us move on, and step out boldly, though it be into the night,
and we can scarcely see the way.”  {Issue #51}

John Newhouse
“The [Bush] administration is trying to create reality, not deal with it.”  {Issue #40}

Karol Newlin
“It often shows an excellent command of language to say nothing.”  {Issue #22}

John Henry Newman [1801-90]
“Growth is the only evidence of life.”  {blog 7/2010}

Haing S. Ngor [1940-96]
“If you are unhappy before fame, you will probably be unhappy during fame.”  {blog 5/2009}

Gene Nichol
“Why should we believe [that] the private sector will take care of poverty? It never has
in our history.”  {blog 11/2011}

Pastor Martin Niemöller [1892-1984]
“When they came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”  {Issue #57}

Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
Friedrich Nietzsche Quotations Page at Working Minds
Friedrich Nietzsche Page at Maison d'Être Philosophy Bookstore

Anaïs Nin [1903-77]
• • “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”  {Issues #49 & #56}
• • “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”  {blog 7/2011}

Richard M. Nixon [1913-94]
37th President of the United States, 1969-74
• • “A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits.”  {Issue #64}
• • “I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably, or even usually, dirty business.”  {blog 10/2008}

Mary G. Nocella of Wayne, New Jersey
“The torture of prisoners has stained the American character, and the naming of [Alberto] Gonzales
as Attorney General has made that stain indelible.” (in Letters Dept. of Time Magazine, Feb 2005]   {Issue #50}

columnist Peggy Noonan
“Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”, in The Wall Street Journal (in 2004)  {blog 7/2010}

author, philosopher & revolutionary G.E. Nordell
G.E. Nordell Quotations Page at Working Minds
G.E. Nordell's main website

Richard Nordell
“Always get it in writing. If they say don't worry, then I do.”  {Issue #53}

Frank Norris [1870-1902]
“The people have a right to the truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.”  {blog 1/2012}

Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe [1865-1922]
“News is what someone, somewhere, doesn't want you to know. Everything else is advertising.”  {blog 5/2009}

historian Doyce B. Nunis, Jr.
“Los Angeles is fast-paced. We kind of live in the future. We tear things down quickly.”  {Issue #52}

J.M.K. Nyks
“Nothing is so detrimental to quality as success.”  {blog 9/2008}

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