"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin
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"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance" --Thomas Jefferson
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"Without beer, prohibition just doesn't work." - Homer J. Simpson
> **********************
"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." --- Frank Vincent Zappa-
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----Never accuse a man of being lazy. There is no such thing as laziness. If a man does not go about his work with enthusiasm, it means that he has not yet found the work he likes. Every mortal is a busy bee when he comes to the task that destiny has set aside for him. George Ade (b. 1866-d. May 16, 1944) American Writer
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"One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain"
Bob Marley
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"The perfect gift for somebody who has everything, is of course, nothing." - Kurt Vonnegut
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"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams" Willy Wonka
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God is perfect Man is not Man made beer But God made pot
-unknown
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"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, and life to everything." -- Plato
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"Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind..." Romans 12:2
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"The prestige of the government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition laws. Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced." -- Albert Einstein, physicist, philosopher, Nobel Laureate. 1879-1955.
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If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to repeat it, true, but if we do not change our future, we shall be compelled to endure it, and that could be worse." - A. Toffler
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"Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around." - Stephen King
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Those who do not remember the past, said George Santayana, are condemned to repeat it. At the same time, however, those who do not repeat the past are condemned to forget it. Those who repeat the past and forget it are simply smoking too much pot. - Chris Wright (Writer for the Boston Phoenix)
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"I call Architecture frozen Music." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749-1832)
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24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? --Stephen Wright
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You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. --George Carlin
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"If there is anyone here I have not offended, I apologize." -- Johannes Brahms upon exiting a party
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"give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach him to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day" -t-shirt
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"I used to be high on life until I found out life was cut with idiots." - unknown
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Life flashing before my eyes the entire story being told to me
-jj
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"In a closed society where everybody's a guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity" -Hunter S. Thompson _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_
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"Come with me - count to 3" -Willy Wonka
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"I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" -Thomas Jefferson
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"Acid is placid." -Timothy Leary
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You are sinking, I am diving -unknown
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"Those who speak do not know; those who know do not speak" -Lao Tse
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"A man must destroy himself before others can destroy him" -unknown
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If you over esteem great men, people become powerless If you overvalue possessions, people begin to steal
The Master leads by emptying peoples minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think they know. Practice not doing and everything will fall into place.
-Lao Tse - Tao Te Ching #3
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Giving birth and nourishing having without possessing acting with no expectations leading and not trying to control; this is the supreme virtue
-Lao Tse - Tao Te Ching #10
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"People who don't have power understand how power works." -Professor Chu
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Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
-Robert Frost - 1936
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"Are they equal, those who know and those who know not?" -Quran XXXIX.9
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"You want everything to be perfect - and before the evening even begins - its ruined" -Song in M. Butterfly by David Hwang
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"Let Justice be done over heaven's fall" -William Garrison
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"...to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be one of the people." -Machiavelli - _The Prince_
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"...for the end of the people is more decent than that of the great since the great want to oppress and the people want not to be oppressed." -Machiavelli - _The Prince_ IX
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"The eye with which I see God is the same as that which he sees me." -Meister Eckhart
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"Your Self is a copy made in the image of God. Seek in yourself all that you desire to know." -Sufi mystic Jalaud-din Rumi
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Man should essential be; For, when this world is gone All accident is past The essence still lives on.
-Angelus Silesius (1624-77)
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Change is inevitable Growth is optional
-unknown
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"Many are called, but few are chosen" -Jesus
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A frog in a well would say there is no dragon's den; How could a quail in a cage know there is a phoenix nest?"
-Chang Po-tuan - _Understanding Reality_ I:VI
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I have drunk Soma, I have become immortal.
**********************
I have passed beyond sky and earth in my glory, have I been drinking Soma? I will lift up the earth and put it here or there, have I been drinking Soma?
**********************
"Twas that alcoholic biographer, W.E. Woodward, said, 'There's nothing to life but just the living of it' - But O God I'm bored! But is Hozomeen bored? And I'm sick of words and explanations. Is Hozomeen?"
-Kerouac _Desolation Angels_
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"In about twenty seconds comes this understanding to my mind and heard: 'When a baby is born he falls asleep and dreams the dream of life, when he dies and is buried in his grave he wakes up again to the Eternal Ecstacy' - And when all is said and done, it doesn't matter."
-Kerouac _Desolation Angels_ #19
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"The simplest truth in the world is beyond our reach because of its complete simplicity, ie, its pure nothingness - There are no awakeness and no meanings - Even if suddenly 400 naked negros came solemn tromping over the ridge here and say to me 'We have been told the Buddha was to be found on this mountaintop - we have walked many countries, many years to get here - are you alone here?' and all 400 of em prostrate and adore and I sit suddenly perfectly in diamond silence - even then, and I wouldn't be surprised (why be surprised?) even then I would realize that there are, there is no Buddha, no awakeness, and there is no Meaning, no Dharma, and it is only the wile of Maya."
-Kerouac _Desolation Angels_ #36
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The sound of silence is all the instruction You'll get
-Kerouac _Desolation Angels_ #42
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"Because all these serious faces'll only drive you mad the only truth is music - the only meaning is without meaning - Music blends with the heartbeat universe and we forget the brain beat."
-Kerouac _Desolation Angels_ #74
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"...'I just thought now, I'm a fish - I go swimming through the trackless sea - just water, no ways, no directions and avenues - by flapping my tail however, I might move right along - but my head seems to have nothing to do with my tail - s'long as I can' (he squats down to demonstrate) 'flap these backfins, aimless like, I can just go on ahead without worrying - It's all in my tail and my heads just thoughts - my heads floundering in thoughts but my tail's wigglin me right along.'"
-Kerouac _Desolation Angels_ #90
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"At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood along like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards."
-Herman Hesse - _Sidhartha_
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"Now, he thought, that all these transitory things have slipped away from me again, I stand once more beneath the sun, as I once stood as a small child. Nothing is mine, I know nothing, I possess nothing, I have learned nothing. How strange it is! Now, when I am no longer young, when my hair is fast growing grey, when strength begins to diminish, now I am beginning again like a child. He had to smile again. Yes, his destiny was strange! He was going backwards, and now he stood empty and naked and ignorant in the world. But he did not grieve about it; no, he even felt a great desire to laugh, to laugh at himself, to laugh at this strange foolish world!"
-Herman Hesse - _Sidhartha_ p.77
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"...he was overwhelmed with a feeling of the present and contemporary existence. In this hour he felt more acutely the indestructibleness of every life, the eternity of every moment."
-Herman Hesse - _Sidhartha_ p.93
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"Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest."
-Herman Hesse - _Sidhartha_ p98
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"But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why the other shop? If lewdies are good thats because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do."
-Anthony Burgess _A Clockwork Orange_
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"A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man."
-Anthony Burgess _A Clockwork Orange_
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"I am not troubled by the wagging of heads, for everything is already known to everyone, and everything hidden will be made manifest; I regard it not with disdain, but with humility. Let it be! Let it be! Behold the man!"
-Dostoevsky _Crime and Punishment_ p15
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"Words are not yet deeds."
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"Man in unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that. Thats all, that's all! If anyone finds out he'll become happy at once, that minute...Its all good. I discovered it all of a sudden."
"And if anyone dies of hunger," [asks Stavrogin], "and if anyone insults and outrages this little girl, is that good?"
"Yes! And if anyone blows his brains out for the baby, thats good too. And if anyone doesn't, thats good too. It's all good, all. It's good for those who know its all good. If they knew that it was all good for them, it would be good for them, but as long as they don't know it's good for them, it will be bad for them. Thats the whole idea, the whole of it!....They're bad because they don't know their good. When they find out, they won't outrage a little girl. They'll find out that their good and they all become good, everyone of them."
- Dosoevsky _The Possessed_
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"In fact, the vital force of the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous 'outsiders' who by virtue of the extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can embrace."
-Hermann Hesse _Steppenwolf_ p.53
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"If God is driven from the earth, we'll meet him underground!"
-Dostoevsky _Brothers K_ p592
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"Not for nothing are we a poet, not for nothing have we been our life like a candle at both ends."
-Dostoevsky _Brothers K_ p716
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"You hear a lot said about your education, yet some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our heads, that alone may serve some day for our salvation."
-Dostoevsky _Brothers K_ p.774
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"The whole thing is so much bigger than I am, and I can't understand it, so I just trust myself to it; and forget about it."
-Edwin Hubble
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"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."
-- Mark Twain
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'The tree of liberty must be watered with rebellion'
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A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and \ there's more conversation.
-- William Blake
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Beer is proof that God loves us.
-- Ben Franklin
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Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.
-- Henry Lawson
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.
-- Tom Waits
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Beauty lies in the hands of the beerholder.
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I always trusted what happened on acid. Everything that happens to you on acid is real. Everything you see is real, everything you experience is real, everything you think about is real. The thing about it is, that a lot of the stuff you see is not stuff you see when you're straight, because when you're straight you're limited. The acid removes the "filters" and lets the noise through. That "noise" is as real a part of the universe as the other part that you do allow to pass through, it just hasn't been important for you. That's a survival issue, we discard a lot of sensory information to make our daily lives simpler. When you open those floodgates and let it all pass, you let in a lot of stuff that's as real, and often more interesting than the stuff you usually let through. The patterns that you see when stoned, for instance, are an artifact of the way the nerves in your eyes are arranged and mapped into the brain. Beautiful noise!
- Stanley "Bear" Owsley
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"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then they lose."
--Mahatma Ghandi
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I don't do drugs. I am drugs.
- Salvador Dali
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"We hang petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
-Aesop
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"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-Aristotle
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"To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."
-Woody Allen
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"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
-Voltaire
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"A true friend stabs you in the front." -Oscar Wilde
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"The cruelest lies are often told in silence." -Robert Louis Stevenson
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"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular" -Adlai Stevenson
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"Showing off is the idiot's version of being interesting" -Steve Martin
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"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." -Winston Churchill
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"Life is what happens when you're too busy making plans."
- John Lennon
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"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."
- Dan Quayle
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"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."
- H.L. Mencken
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"...he went to a wall-cupboard where he kept a bottle of good brandy, while he filled a glass and drank it down to make up for his breakfast, and then drank a second to give him courage, the last one only as a precaution, for the improbably contingency that it might be needed"
- Franz Kafka _The Trial_ p. 9
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Some folk come
to stir it up
and when it's stirred
they split - simple as that.
robert hunter 11-10-01 on the death of kesey
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Only the weak are sent out on paths without perils."
- Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 81
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"Truth is lived, not taught."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 83
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"There is, after all, always something wonderful and touchingly beautiful about a young man, for the first time released from the bonds of schooling, making his ventures toward the infinite horizons of the mind. At this point he has not yet seen any of his illusions dissipated, or doubted either his own capacity for endless dedication or the boundlessness of the world of thought."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 110
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"Out of this process there evolved a new conception, more akin to a symbol than a dream, more insight that this meaningful and meaningless cycle of master and pupil, this courtship of wisdom by youth, of youth by wisdom, this endless, oscillating game was the symbol of Castalia. In fact it was the game of life in general, divided into old and young, day and night, yang and yin, and pouring on without end. Having arrived at this in his meditation, Joseph Knecht found his way from a world of images to tranquility, and after long absorption returned strengthened and serenely cheerful."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 221
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"In the course of this he made two discoveries. The first was the pleasure it gives to transplant the achievements of the mind into other minds and see them being transformed into entirely new shapes and emanations - in other words, the joy of teaching. The second was grappling with the personalities of the students, the attainment and practice of authority and leadership - in other words, the joy of educating. He never separated the two, and during his magistry he not only trained a large number of good and some superb Glass Bead Game players, but also by example, by admonition, by his austere sort of patience, and by the force of his personality and character, elicited from a great many of his students the very best they were capable of."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 239
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"And at that moment he laid his hand on my arm - it was light as a butterfly - looked penetratingly into my eyes, and smiled. At that moment I was conquered. Something of his cheerful silence, something of his patience and calm, passed into me; and suddenly I understood the old man and the direction his nature had taken, away from people and toward silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity. I understand what I was privileged to see here, and now for the first time grasped the meaning of this smile, this radiance. A saint, one who had attained perfection, had permitted me to dwell in his radiance for an hour; and blunderer that I am, I had tried to entertain him, to question him, to seduce him into conversation. Thank God the light had not dawned on me too late. He might have sent me away and thus rejected me forever. And I would have been deprived of the most remarkable and wonderful experience I have ever had."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 257
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"Look", he said. "This landscape of clouds and sky. At first glance you might think that the depths are there where it is darkest; but then you realize that the darkness and softness are only the clouds and that the depths of the universe begins only at the fringes and fjords of this mountain range of clouds - solemn and supreme symbols of the clarity and orderliness. The depths and the mysteries of the universe lie not where the clouds and blackness are; the depths are to be found in the spaces of clarity and serenity. Please, just before going to sleep look up for a while at these bays and straits again, with all their stars, and don't reject the ideas or dreams that come to you from them."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 314
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"His was a life of devotion and work, but free of obstructions, free of ambition, and full of music. It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he had done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music - his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts of organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming - so that he was not only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 261
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"…for after all music is nothing but an act of courage, a serene, smiling, striding forward and dancing through the terrors and flames of the world, the festive offering of a sacrifice."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 317
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"My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present."
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 397
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Fear was the permanent pressure upon the lives of these people, and without this high pressure their life would have lacked stress, of course, but also lacked intensity. A man who had been able to ennoble his fear by transforming part of it into awe had gained a great deal.
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 462
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To the eyes of this yogi Dasa's life, all men's lives, everything was Maya, was a kind of childishness, a spectacle, theater, an illusion, emptiness in bright wrappings, a soap bubble - something one could laugh at and at the same time despise, but by no means take seriously.
Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_ p 537
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"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
- Joseph Heller _Catch-22_ p. 135
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Nately was instantly up in arms again. "There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for you country!" he declared.
"Isn't there?" asked the old man. "What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."
"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for."
"And anything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for."
- Joseph Heller _Catch-22_ p. 257
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…the chaplain was ready now to capitulate to despair entirely but was restrained by the memory of his wife, whom he loved and missed so pathetically with some sensual and exalted ardor, and by the lifelong trust he had placed in the wisdom and justice of an immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, humane, universal, anthropomorphic, English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, pro-American God, which had begun to waver. So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were the Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome, and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it indeed seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil /was/ heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There was no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt; and the chaplain, who had conscience and character, would have yielded to reason and relinquished his belief in the God of his fathers - would truly have resigned both his calling and his commission and taken his changes as a private in the infantry or field artillery, or even, perhaps, as corporal in the paratroopers - had it not been for such successive mystic phenomena as the naked man in the tree at that poor sergeant's funeral weeks before and the crytpical, haunting, encouraging promise of the prophet Flume in the forest only that afternoon: Tell them I'll be back when winter comes.
- Joseph Heller _Catch-22_ p. 295
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"Now that Yossarian had made up his mind to be brave, he was deathly afraid."
-Joseph Heller _Catch-22_ p. 316
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"Where were you born?"
…"On a battlefield," he answered.
"No, no. In what state were you born?"
"In a state of innocence."
- Joseph Heller _Catch-22_ p. 441
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"Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind"
-Marston Bates
**********************
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
-Albert Einstein
**********************
"Research serves to make building stones out of stumbling blocks"
-Arthur D. Little
**********************
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
-Sir Isaac Newton
**********************
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
- Woody Guthrie
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"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
- Thomas Jefferson
**********************
"For the more there are who say 'Ours,'-not 'Mine'- by that much is each richer ."
- Dante on the joys of sharing (Purgatorio, XV)
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"I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."
- Charles De Gaulle
**********************
"Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly."
- Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung)
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"I do not advocate the use of dangerous drugs, wild amounts of alcohol and violence and weirdness -- but they've always worked for me."
- Hunter S. Thompson in a speech at Stanford
**********************
"Live as if to die tomorrow.
Learn as if to live forever.
- Gandhi
**********************
"I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved."
Carl Friedrich Gauss
**********************
"But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like the fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
- Jack Kerouac _On The Road_ p8
**********************
"It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever."
- Jack Kerouac _On The Road_ p129
**********************
"Old Big Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algeirs ferry as a deckhand; this made me think of Mississippi Gene too; and as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One."
-Jack Kerouac _On The Road_ p147
**********************
"I looked out the window. He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness - everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being."
Jack Kerouac _On The Road_ p195
**********************
"Dean was happy again. All he needed was the wheel in his hand and four on the road."
Jack Kerouac _On The Road_ p210
**********************
"Strange crossroad towns on top of the world rolled by, with shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos. Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way. Out broken Ford, old thirties upgoing American Ford, rattled through them and vanished in dust."
- Jack Kerouac _On The Road_ p199
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"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
- Paul Erdos
**********************
“Hm-m,” he said. “Lookie, Ma. I been all day an’ all night hidin’ alone. Guess who I been thinkin’ about? Casy! He talked a lot. Use’ ta bother me. But now I been thinkin’ what he said, an’ I can remember-all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’t have no soul that was has’n. Says he found’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ‘cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less itw as with the rest, an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’ think I was even listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone.”
-Steinbeck _The Grapes of Wrath_ p.535
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“It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honest, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
“Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?” said Richard Frost.
Steinbeck _Cannery Row_ p.143
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"Is freedom inversely related to the efficiency of the available means of surveillance? If so, we have much to fear."
-Boyle
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"Some things never change about governing the Web. Most prominent is its innate ability to resist governance in almost any form."
-Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, "Of Governance and Technology," Inter@ctive WeekOnline, Oct 2, 1998
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"Every peak will have two valleys" - common's pops
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“What is the function of the artist?” Amanda demanded of the talented trespasser.
“The function of the artist,” the Navajo answered, “is to provide what life does not.”
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.4
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Note: the inbreath is willed, the outbreath is automatic.
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.122
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“You may refer to me as a romantic or a mystic as often as you find it helpful,” said Amanda, “but please remember that the labels are your own.” That is all she said and she said it amiably, but to herself she thought, “This darling Marvelous has eaten at many tables and has not been nourished.”
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.158
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“There are three mental states and interest me,’ said Amanda, turning the lizard doorknob. “These are: one, amnesia; two euphoria; three ecstasy.”
She reached into the cabinet and removed a small green bottle of water-lily pollen. “Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.”
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.167
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For those of you who may have come to these pages in the course of a scholastic assignment and are impatient for information to relay to your professor (who, unless he is a total dolt, has it simmering in his brainpan already), the author suggests that you turn immediately to the end of the book and roust out the facts which seem necessary to your cause. Of course, should you do so, you will grow up half-educated and will likely suffer spiritual deprivations. But it is your decision.
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.171
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Archimedes, who discovered the principle of the lever, once said, “Give me a place to stand on and I could move the world.” Archimedes could have stood on Marx’s lower lip.
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.211
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“What’s this horse crap about a ‘stable society’? You’ve gotta be kidding. Nature isn’t stable. Life isn’t stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can’t have both. Take your choice. As for me, I’ll choose a free organic society over a rigid artificial society any day. If people are so weak that they have to have the Heaven crutch to keep ‘em from fear and death, well, maybe fear and death is what they need. And if they’re so unethical that it takes the Jesus lie to keep ‘em from going crazy in the streets robbing each other and doing each other in, well then fuck ‘em, man; let ‘em go crazy because crime and insanity may be what they deserve.”
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.289
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His voice was like a steel dog barking bricks.
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.311
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He quoted some lines from his friend Sund the poet to the effect that “it’s surprising how many people are laughing once you get away from universities and stop reading newspapers.” Then he laughed himself.
- Tom Robbins _Another Roadside Attraction_ p.313
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Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there was some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Chance places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?
- George Orwell _Down and Out in Paris and London_ p.120
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He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
- George Orwell _Down and Out in Paris and London_ p.167
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"He took the bait like a rapist in a nudist colony for the blind."
- Iceberg Slim _Pimp_ p.35
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"The pimp game is like the watchmaker's art, it's tough. 'Party' went through his life struggling to make a watch while wearing boxing gloves."
- Iceberg Slim _Pimp_ p.41
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He would say, "Always remember whether you be sucker or hustler in the world out there, you've got that vital edge if you can iron-clad your feelings. I picture the human mind as a movie screen. If you're a dopey sucker, you'll just sit and watch all kinds of mind-wrecking, damn fool movies on that screen."
He said, "Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether you are pimp or priest."
- Iceberg Slim _Pimp_ p.75
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I often wondered in the cell how, if he existed, he could let the Dummy destroy Oscar who loved him. I told myself at the time, maybe he's got complicated long-range plans. Maybe even he's got divine reasons for letting the white folks butcher black people down South.
Maybe some morning about dawn, all the black folks will sing Hallelujah! God's white board of directors will untie the red tape. God will roll up his sleeves. He'll smash down the invisible stockades. He'll kill all the rats in the black ghettos. Fill all the black bellys and con all the white folks that Niggers are his children, too.
Now I couldn't wait. If he were up there or not I had to go with the odds. I stared into the sky. It was the first time I'd prayed since Steve, the tramp. I know now it was more fearful alibi than anything else.
I said, "Lord, if you're up there, you know I'm black and you know my thoughts. Lord, if the Bible is really your divine book then I know it's a sin to pimp. If you're up there and listening you know I'm not trying to con you.
"Lord, I'm not asking you to bless my pimping. I ain't that stupid. Lord, I know you ain't black. Surely you know, if you're up there, what it's like to be black down here. These white folks are doing all the fine living and sucking up all the gravy. I gotta have some of that living and some of that gravy.
"I don't wanta be a stickup man or a dope peddler. I sure as hell won't be a porter or a dishwasher. I just wanta pimp that's all. It's not too bad, because whores are rotten. Besides I ain't going to croak them or drive them crazy. I'm just going to pim some real white-type living out of them.
"So Lord, if you're up there listening, do one thing for me. Please don't let me croak before I live some and get to be somebody down here in the white man's world. I don't care what happens after that."
- Iceberg Slim _Pimp_ p.164
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He said, "Slim, a pretty Nigger bitch and a white whore are just alike. They both will get in a stable to wreck it. They'll leave the pimp on his ass with no whore. YOu gotta make 'em hump hard and fast. Stick 'em for long scratch quick. Slim, pimping ain't no game of love. Prat 'em and keep your swipe outta 'em. Any sucker who believes a whore loves him shouldn't a fell outta his mammy's ass."
- Iceberg Slim _Pimp_ p.215
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"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?"
- Albert Einstein
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"I am a product of all that I have met."
- Tennyson
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"We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time."
- Anti-segregationist advertisement, Atlanta Constitution, March 8 1960 (_Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn_ p253)
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"...non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression."
MLK (_Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn_ p336)
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"Jesus died at 33, Joan of Arc at 19, Byron and Burns at 36, Keats and Marlowe at 29 and Shelly at 30, Dunbar before 35, John Fitzgerald Kennedy at 46, William Rainey Harper at 49 and Martin Luther King, Jr. at 39. It isn't how long but how well."
- Benjamin Mays @ MLK eulogy (_Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn_ p363)
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"The attempted assassination has started, but they will discover it's easier to kill a man than to kill his reputation."
- Massell (_Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn_ p391)
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Maynard Jr. labored over his inaugural address. He was a perfectionist in all things, but especially his oratory. He fashioned himself in the same cloud-of-dustoratorical style of the Grand: "Start low, Go slow; Strike fire, Move higher, and then Sit Down in a Storm."
(_Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn_ p424)
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"I knew but did not fully appreciate the extent to which relationships made the difference. I really still, naively, thought that issues would carry the day, that if you were right, and that I, the lawyer, could bring forth the case or the point, that that would carry it. I now understand, in my more mature years, that the reverse is the case: the first things that must be established is the relationship. People cannot hear the facts if they do not trust you. Trust is something that develops because they get to know you and to see that you don't have horns."
- Maynard Jackson Jr. (_Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn_ p439)
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