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Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: philadelphia, PA. USA.
Posts: 682
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Here are mine:
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"Real courage is risking something you have to keep living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking ones cliches."-Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
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"The Price of Self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain circumstances it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisly the unthinkable that must be thought."- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
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"Who can call a man dead whose words still hush us and whose sentiments move?"-Clive Barker, Weaveworld
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"It has always been difficult to serve the truth as an individual without the protection of a system of faith, of a church, of a community."- Herman Hesse, My Belief
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"A very popular error: having the courage of ones convictions; rather is is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions."- Nietzsche
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"It is easy to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."- Emerson
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"Genuine peace is the fruit of justice.
And true peace is not the dead kind of peace,
like the tenant's surrender to the landlord.
It is a living, dynamic one which can often
be accompanied by struggle and conflict."-
from Charles Avila's Peasant Theology
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"Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure."- Piero Feccuci
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"The Universe itself is an enormous practical joke by the general at the expense of the particular."- Robert Anton Wilson,
Masks of the Illuminati
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"In addition to a 'yes' and a 'no', the universe contains a 'maybe'."- Dr. David Finkelstein, Physicist. Lecture, VC-Monterey, March 31, 1979
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"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes."- Marcel Proust
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"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought."- Mastuo Basho (1644-1694, Japanese poet)
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"I find television very educational. Every time someone switchs it on i go into another room and read a good book."- Groucho Marx
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"One of the unpardonable sins in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabelled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control."- T.H.Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1893
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"All of my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone appears to have been born with: that I can be nobody but myself."- Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
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"The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one's family, friends, and lovers- to say nothing of one's children- to live according to the world's definitions: One must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that."- James Baldwin
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I use this one as my personal motto to keep my own head from swelling with self-importance:
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"Phantoms! Whenever I think I fully understand mankinds purpose on earth, just when I foolishly imagine that I have seized upon the meaning of life...suddenly I see phantoms dancing in the shadows, mysterious phantoms performing a gavotte that says, as pointedly as words, "What you know is nothing, little man, what you have yet to learn, immense!"- Charles Dickens
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"Those who take the most from the table
teach contentment
Those for whom the taxes are destined
demand sacrifice
those who eat their full speak to the hungry
of wonderful times to come
those who lead the country into the abyss
call ruling difficult
for ordinary folk"
-Bertolt Brecht
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"I have seen
the old gods go
and the new gods come
day by day
and year by year
the idols fall
and the idols rise
Today
i worship the hammer"
-Carl Sandburg, "The Hammer"(1910)
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"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."- Ray Bradbury
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"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me."- Simone de Beauvoir
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Some for the theists to ponder on from a fellow theist:
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"Bible fixation is one of the most depressing and sterile fixations of the religious mind."- Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit
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"If Christianity cannot be Christianity without pushing the claim to be the best of all possible religions, the world will breathe more freely when it dissolves."- Alan Watts, The Book
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"For which is more important- to be Christian or to be one with God? Must religion be Christian, Islamic or Hindu, or could it simply be religion? Certainly there must be the same variety of style in religion as there is in culture, but the concern to preserve, validate and propagate Christianity as such is a disatrous confusion of religious style with religion. Indeed, this sectarian fanaticism (shared alike by Judaism and Islam) is all of a pieve with the monarchical image and its necessary Imperialism"- Alan Watts, The Book
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This has been a favorite on mine since i 1st read it. I was never much of a fan of this mans work but this small construction of words remained with me due to the truth of them:
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"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish them- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out. But it's more important than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why it was so important you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, i think, when the secret stays locked within, not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear."- Stephen King
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"I can't understand why people are freightened of new ideas. I'm freightened by the old ones."- John Cage
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A reponse from Woody Allen to a question concerning what it would take for him to beleive in any form of religion which i have repeatedly utilized for myself for a similar end:
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"If God would give me a clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank."
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"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."- Adlai E. Stevenson
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Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable in order to break through tyranny, that people should be eccentric, Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportinal to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time."- John Stuart Mill
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"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity."-Robert Frost
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"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free."- Charles Evans Hughes
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"I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurptions of society, which dare not cower to human opinion, which feels itself accountable to a higher tribunal than man's, which respects itself too much to be a slave of the many or the few."- Channing
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"No loss by flood or lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed."- Helen Keller
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"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows."- Mark Twain
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"The Shepherd always tries to pusuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."- STENDHAL
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"We look back Through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime...we watch it draw near and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pusuing its relentless inconcievable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when, beings, beings who are now only latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this Earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out amidst the stars."- H.G.Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography
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The following are from one of the books i rank as essential to have read and to own:
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"Christian: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbors."
"IDIOT,n.A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling"
"Hypocrisy- prejudice with a halo."
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary
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Some points to keep in mind while people like John Ashcroft are in positions of power and the climate of the country is nervous:
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"Only in a police state is the job of the policeman easy."- Orson Wells
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"If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it."- Eric Fromm, Escape From Freedom
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"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."- George Santayana
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"Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment."- Alan Watts, The Book
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"Distrust all men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."- Nietzsche
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"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want rain without thunder and lightning."- Frederich Douglass
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Some choice bits from another book i personally found memorable:
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"Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."
"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
"The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciouness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctiveness; and both these ends are reached by imitation."
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
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"You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because there dogmas or goals are in doubt."- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,pg.146.
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"That which we call sin in others is experiment for us."- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing."-Albert Schweitzer
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"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."- Mark Twain
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"Rest is not idlness and to lie sometimes on the grass under the tress on a summer's day, listening to the mummer of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."- Sir J. Lubbak
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"The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see."- Huang Po
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"Reality is that which, when you stop beleiving in it, doesn't go away."- Philip K. Dick
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"Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and couregeously uses his intelligence."- Albert Einstein
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"We're all fucked. It helps to remember that."- George Carlin
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"All in all, i can't say i believe in God. If, in fact, i even find out that he does exist, i think i'll stay away from him, because if he's responsible for half of the things he gets credit for he's got to be one mean son of a bitch."- Peter Gether
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"Before curiosity kills it, the cat learns more of the world than a hundred uninquisitive dogs."
"Politics is where people pay somebody large sums of money to impose his or her will on them. Politics is sadomachism."
-Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
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"The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is to demand to abandon the conditions whcih require illusion."- Karl Marx
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"If noise means uncomfortable sound, then pop music is noise to me."Noise artist Masami Akita, MERZBOW
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"Isn't insanity just one trick pony away? I mean, all you get is that one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, well, the sky's the limit!"-the Tick
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I'll stop here. I have hundreds of qoutes i have collected from every book i have read in my 28 years of life. I am sure you do not care to read them all.
-theSaint
P.S.
Thanx for sharing all.
[ April 17, 2002: Message edited by: thefugitivesaint ]</p>
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04-16-2002, 10:27 AM
