                                
%%
"There has been much complaint of late years, of the growth, both in the
world of trade and in that of intellect, of quackery, and especially of
puffing: but nobody seems to have remarked, that these are the inevitable
outgrowth of immense competition; of a state of society where any voice, not
pitched in an exaggerated key, is lost in the hubbub.  Success, in so
crowded a field, depends not upon what a person is, but upon what he seems:
mere marketable qualities become the object instead of substantial ones, and
a man's labour and capital are expended less in DOING anything than in
persuading other people that he has done it.  Our own age has seen this evil
brought to its consummation."  -- J.S. Mill in "Civilization"
%%
Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who
can't talk for people that can't read.
  --Frank Zappa
%%
  "If civilization owes a debt of gratitude to the self-sacrificing
sportsmen who have cleared the Adirondack region of Catamounts and
savage trout, what shall be said of the army which has so nobly
relieved them of the terror of the deer?"

  From "A-Hunting of the Deer" by Charles Dudley Warner
%%
"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be
drawn and quoted."
     -Fred Allen
%%
"Superhero stories could best be described as entertainment that
externalizes childhood power fantasies."
    -- Timothy Fay on rec.arts.comics
%%
  "...let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which
error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat
it".
  - Thomas Jefferson (referring to 'seditionists'
    in his first inaugural address, March 4, 1801).
%%
"A cult is a religion with no political power."  -Tom Wolfe
%%
Well, maybe, if the Salvadorans are lucky, when Bush and Gorbachev meet in
Malta, Gorbachev will give Bush some pointers on how to get the hard-line
governments of client-states to leave their people alone.

-david mankins (dm@think.com)
%%
"Yes, well, that's just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance
I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage." --Monty Python
%%
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should
they be considered patriots.  This is one nation under God." -- George
Bush in FREE INQUIRY magazine, Fall 1988
%%
"I will never apologize for the United States of America!  I don't care
what the facts are!"
  -George Bush
%%
Nothing is life is to be feared.  It is only to be understood.
%%
   "Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that
he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the
evidence of his senses only to justify his logic."
 
Dostoyevsky, Notes From The Underground, 1864
%%
Punning is the worst vice, and there's no vice versa!
%%
"Free computerized National Police!  / Everybody got identity cards?  At
ease!  / Freedom for Big Business to eat up the sea / Freedom for Exxon
to examine your pee!"  -Allen Ginsberg, "Industrial Waves" 
%%
"Please watch out for each other and love and forgive
everybody.  It's a good life, enjoy it."  -Jim Henson
%%
To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for
rags -- that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal (Mark Twain).
%%
The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion.  I could
never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian
dogma."
  -Abraham Lincoln
%%
"Pray to God, yes, but row away from the rocks."  -Hindu Proverb
%%
   90May22 6:03 pm from Drox @Free Lunch [MN]:
   "...Tho' it sounds strange at first, concentrated poison is
preferable [to straight poison]."
%%
"It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg."  -Anatole France
%%
"Now, only the lowest form of scum would burn the American flag; but
in America, there's no law against being the lowest form of scum.... 
You know, it's bad enough that there's a federal law against burning
money; and the poorest people get around that by putting it in
Savings & Loans.  But *one* guy burned a flag four years ago, and the
President wants to amend the Constitution over it.  Now I know, a lot
of people have died for the flag; but a lot of people have died for a
lot of different flags, and I bet you some of them wish they hadn't."
            
           --A. Whitney Brown
%%
   "I spent 33 years in active service as a member of our country's
most agile military force - the Marine Corps.  I served in all the
commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to major general.  And durning
that period I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for
big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.  In short, I was a
racketeer for capitalism.
   "I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914.  I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank.  I helped
in the raping of half a dozen Central American countries for the benefit
of Wall Street."
  
      -Major General Smedley Butler,
       United States Marine Corps, 1935
%%
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty.  He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses
in return for protection of his own...they have perverted the purest
religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible
to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose." 
 
-Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814. 
%% 
"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized
learning...And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a
Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The
blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most
yahooist brutality, is patently endured, countenanced, propagated, and
applauded.  But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a
sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you
have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and
hand, and fly into your face and eyes."
 
-John Adams, in a letter to John Taylor, from "The Life and Works of John
Adams" (1851) 
%% 
"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall
govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it
by fictitious miracles?" 
 
-John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815.  
%% 
"...this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no
religion in it."
 
-John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1816. 
%% 
"...The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and
conscience of every man; it is the right of every man to exercise it as
these may dictate." 
 
-James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance (1784).  
%% 
Niccolo Machiavelli:
 
"These principles seem to me to have made men feeble...an easy prey to
evil-minded men, who can control them more securely, seeing that the great
body of men, for the sake of gaining Paradise, are more disposed to endure
injuries than to avenge them." 
 
-Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (1513-1517), Bk. II,
Ch. 2.
%%
    
 Life is complex -- it has real and imaginary parts.
    
%%
  It is the absolute right of the state to 
  supervise the formation of public opinion.
  
  -- Paul Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
     (b. 1897, committed suicide 1945)
%%
"What are politicians going to tell people when the
Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?"
     -- William Simpson, A.C.L.U.
%%
 ``[Japan] has declined to sign 15 of 22 UN human-rights conventions,
including those against racial discrimination, genocide, and
slavery.''
   -- KYODO NEWS SERVICE of Tokyo and WORLD PRESS REVIEW
%%
A NEW WORLD ORDER:
   MOSCOW (AP) 20 Sep 1990 - ...KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov told
the visiting Associated Press board of directors and executives in an
interview [that the KGB is]...willing to work with U.S. intelligence
in fighting...narcotics trafficking."
%%
"Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security
deserve neither security nor liberty".
  --Benjamin Franklin
%%
In the first place, God made idiots; this was for practice; then He
made school boards.  -- Mark Twain
%%
  Ain't Gonna Die For the Price Of Gas
  Yo, Uncle Sam -- Kiss My Ass!

  -- graffitti, downtown Boston, 11/90
%%
   "Arms are instruments of ill omen. ...
 When one is compelled to use them, it is
 best to do so without relish. There is no
 glory in victory, and to glorify it despite
 this is to exult in the killing of men. ...
 When great numbers of people are killed,
 one should weep over them with sorrow.
 When victorious in war, one should observe
 mourning rites."

 Lao-tzu (ca. 500 B.C.)
%%
Goodbye!      
