Quote Only Thread

[Jeff]

And to prevent your scrupulous objections, know this, that we must neither buy nor sell. Money must not any longer (after our work of the Earth's community is advanced) be the great god, that hedges in some and hedges out others. For Money is but part of the Earth. And surely, the Righteous Creator, who is King, did never ordain that unless some of mankind do bring that mineral (silver and gold) in their hands to others of their own kind, that they should neither be fed, nor be clothed. - Gerrard Winstanley, A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England, 1649

[Jeff]

"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing." - Meister Eckhart

[chiggerbit]

"These people draw near to Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men"

-Matthew 15:8-9

[brekin]

"They just walked out on the contract, and I just sat back and said, "Well, the courts will eventually go with me." They have to. Like if contracts get broken and I mean if they'll let people kill each other, then there would be no laws.

Phil Spector, 1969 Rolling Stone Interview

[mentalgongfu2]

" When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.

When I ask why the poor have no food, the call me a communist. "

-Dom Helder Camara

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

“La condition humaine ne serait-elle pas de telle sorte qu’il n’y ait pas de bonne solution?” - Merleau-Ponty

[kissing blarney]

Perception is often the stepchild of ignorance, especially when controlled by those with the most to gain.

William A. Cook

[ShinShinKid]

"...Those that say they hear Marxian echoes in my work are saying that I have trained myself well. That they do not intend this testifies to their own lack of proper education".

C. Wright Mills

[chiggerbit]

"Attn: Superdome Residents

I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared."



-Jonah Goldberg, giving advice to residents of New Orleans sheltering in the Superdome on how to deal with Hurricane Katrina

(Sorry, I have to add comment: I wonder if that's the same advice he's giving to CEO's with regards to the impending bank and corporate failures, or if he's calling out for heroic government rescue efforts on their behalf.)

[Jeff]

"We are living in a science-fiction world where Disney and Disney's science-fiction have won. This is the real world. Science-fiction has become the real world, whether we realize it or not." - Bob Dylan (2001)

[justdrew]

I believe to my shoe-tops that being an American means struggling on a day-to-day basis against the demon legions, the ones who would send us back to the Scopes Monkey Trial and the Palmer Raids and HUAC and ignorance. They are ever with us; they reach up out of their graves with moldering claws to infect each new generation.
~ Harlan Ellison

[Jeff]

"Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension."

- HP Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House

[jingofever]

"In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down."

--Horselover Fat

"My real trouble concerning drugs came when Harlan Ellison in his anthology Dangerous Visions said in an introduction to a story of mine that it was 'written under the influence of LSD,' which of course was not correct. After that I had a really dreadful reputation as a doper, thanks to Harlan's desire for publicity. Later on I was able to add a paragraph to the afterword of the story stating that Harlan had not told the truth, but the harm was done. The police began to become interested in me and in the people who visited me..."

--Philip K Dick

[justdrew]

VERTEX: You are known as one of the first authors to experiment with LSD. What effect has it had on your writing?

DICK: I don't know of any. It's always possible that it's had an effect I don't know about. Take my novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which deals with a tremendous bad acid trip, so to speak. I wrote that before I had ever seen LSD. I wrote that from just reading a description of the discovery of it and the kind of effect it had. So if that, which is my major novel of a hallucinogenic kind, came without my ever having taken LSD, then I would say even my work following LSD which had hallucinations in it could easily have been written without taking acid.

VERTEX: Isn't "Faith of Our Father's," from Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, supposed to have been inspired by or written under the influence of acid?

DICK: That really is not true. First of all, you can't write anything when you're on acid. I did one page once while on an acid trip, but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit, and there's not much market for that. The page does not fall in with my published work. The other book which suggests it might have been written with acid is Martian Time-slip. That too was written before I had taken any acid.

VERTEX: How much acid did you take anyway?

DICK: Not that much. I wasn't getting up in the morning and dropping acid. I'm amazed when I read the things I used to say about it on the blurbs of my books. I wrote this myself: "He has been experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs to find the unchanging reality beneath our delusions." And now I say, "Good Christ!" All I ever found out about acid was that I was where I wanted to get out of fast. It didn't seem more real than anything else; it just seemed more awful.

Vertex Interviews Philip K. Dick

[Jeff]

"A clown can get away with murder." - John Wayne Gacy