Quotes and Jokes
“I’m tired of egotists. They’re more interested in themselves than in me.”
(My favorite joke lately.)
I’ve been keeping a file of quotes and jokes for years. Here it is for your viewing pleasure.
(My apologies to readers because all the formatting to attribute authors switched from the right edge of the page to the left. Usually, the author’s name follows the quote. Darn Blue Host’s skimpy tools!
Also discovered, two versions of my autobiography, one completed in 2012, found under Home/About the Founder, and the other in 2024, located under Writings/Earthly Religion/Autobiography of the Founder of God’s Goods. Darn BlueHost again, for the function of linking to each is suddenly absent. I’ll have to fix it later. There are better photos in the older one but more up-to-date info in the latter. My apologies to readers for this confusion on my end. )
If you find some favorites of yours or have more to add, please contribute to the comments.
(If interested, see also an update to my bio, posted elsewhere here on earthlyreligion.)
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Quotes and Jokes
When you’re dead you don’t know you’re dead.
The same thing happens when you’re stupid.
If you’re paying $3 for a bottle of Smart Water,
it isn’t working.
You never appreciate what you have till it’s gone.
Toilet paper is a good example.
“We have been so drunk on the pleasures of the material world, so sold on an amoral view of economics and social policy, and so worshipful of the false god of short-term profit. Our entire economic system has been based not on loving one another but on exploiting one another, and not on stewarding the Earth but on raping it, all for the most rapacious goal of extracting whatever money we could. And there, in our collective iniquity, lies the root of our problems, as well as the beginning of their solution, should we have the courage to face it.”
Marianne Williamson
“To get a sense of how unhinged our economy is from the real world, consider the fact that pollinators, earthworms, rainforests, clean air, parenting, friendship, sleep and solidarity are considered to be literally valueless according to our dominant metric of economic success.” Jason Hickel
“Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it.
He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.”
E.F. Schumacher
“A murder adds about $1 million to GDP. Murder is good for the economy. So is environmental destruction.”
Clive Hamilton
“For too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
Robert Kennedy, 1968
Wellbeing = health, in the broadest sense
Connection: A sense of belonging and institutions that serve the common good
Participation: Citizens are actively engaged in their communities and locally rooted economies
Dignity: Everyone has enough to live in comfort, safety and happiness
Fairness: Justice in all its dimensions at the heart of economic systems, and the gap between the richest and poorest greatly reduced
Nature: A restored and safe natural world for all life
Wellbeing Economy Alliance
“It is significant that the word wealth comes from the anglo-saxon word ‘wela’ meaning wellbeing, which is the condition of being contented and healthy”
Gordon Mair
“The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Oscar Wilde
From Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks – Time
From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult… There you were, planning to live on forever… but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.
Yet, on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given — as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.
Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin
The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear. Only boldness can deliver us from fear, and if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated.
Carl Jung as remembered by James Hollis
“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.” -Socrates
“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.”
Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness — an act of trust in the unknown.
To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are — as now practiced — like exhausted mines: very hard to dig.”
Alan Watts
The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent.
Martha Nussbaum
May the joy of what we love become the beauty of what we do.
Rumi
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the ‘conservative’ American people.” H.L. Mencken
“There is cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Issac Asimov
There’s something in us that always knows what’s best for us.
James Hollis
Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. One is the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung
An average adult produces about a pound (or half a kilo) of poo a day. That means that New York City, with its official census population of more than 8 million, pumps out more than 8 million lbs (or 4 million kg/4,000 tonnes) of excrement a day. Tokyo surpasses that slightly with 8.3 million lbs daily. China’s capital Beijing, a huge urban conglomerate of 21.3 million dwellers, beats NYC and Tokyo combined. Now imagine the mind-boggling piles of excrement that the planet’s 7 billion people generate in just 24 hours. Multiply it by 365 days a year, and it will likely make you gasp: Holy crap!
From Aeon Magazine, April 22, 22
We don’t have thoughts – we have “thinking processes” associated with higher cognitive functions in the brain, but people would look at us in a funny way if we went around saying “The working memory processes of my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex just produced a conscious word-associated perception on how to solve my problem.” It’s neuroscientifically accurate but it’s easier to say “I just had an amazing thought!”
Mark Waldman on Thoughts
“… deliberately waiting for the thrill of being offended.”
John Cleese on Being Woke
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods.
There is rapture on the lonely shore.
There is society where none intrudes.
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less,
But Nature more.
Lord Byron
Sent by Katheryn Rigell
“I can control my intentions but not your interpretations.”
Stephen Colbert on creating comedy on touchy topics
(Applies to essays, sermons, etc.)
Quotes
“To base a whole world economy on unlimited expansion in a finite space
fueled by mindless consumption at the expense of other living things
including our children’s future is our collective planetary curse.”
DM
Gradually, though no one remembers exactly how
it happened the unthinkable becomes tolerable.
And then acceptable.
And then legal. And then applaudable.
Anon
The above from Larry Morningstar
We need a new restoration story… to guide us out of the mess we’re in, which tells us why we’re in the mess and tells us how to get out of that mess… Without a restoration story that can tell us where we need to go, nothing is going to change, but with such a restoration story, almost everything can change… And that story… will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum. It should resonate with deep needs and simple and intelligible, and it should be grounded in reality.
George Mandibot, TED, 2019
Ecosystem breakdown is the tragically contradictory consequence of seeking [well-being] through incessant growth and consumption. We are killing ourselves trying to feel better.”
Mainteny, 2019
Jesus didn’t come to bless the dropping of iron fragmentation bombs across the Middle East or bless the white race above other race or hold up America.
Chris Hedges on Democracy Now, 10-01-19
Bucky Fuller on Progress
“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. The challenge is to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time, with spontaneous cooperation and without ecological damage or disadvantage of anyone. How can we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone? “– Bucky Fuller
“Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.”
-Carl Sagan
(Similarly, that dangerous chemical potentially leading to hydrogen and oxygen igniting, found in almost all rivers, which has been the cause of death to many – DHMO (DiHydroMonOxide), otherwise known as H2O.)
My own memory of an exercise at SOU
‘Eternity’
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
William Blake
“Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.” – Lincoln
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”
Lincoln
“We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty.”
— Mussolini
As the world around us seems to collapse into ignorance and insanity, we should be aware that rational, sane, intelligent, hardworking people are continuing to apply the principles of the Enlightenment in an attempt to understand our world and make our lives better. This is one precious facet of our civilization that we must not lose.
By ?
Forgiveness is letting go of the hope for a better past.
“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks in a thousand voices: he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.” Carl Gustav Jung
“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”
― Hubert Reeves
“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”
― E.B. White
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch
“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe
….
“And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only an appearance. It is, really, only the mechanism of re-assumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.”
D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“And now we are beginning to recognize how many men and women survive wars apparently intact, but inside they are bruised and never recover. Millions of them everywhere.”
Doris Lessing in her introduction to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on war’s PTSD.
(I would add, it is a description of the amygdala’s typical hurting hold.) BBC
great poem, composed in language of being — as any life of passion and purpose ultimately becomes.
“Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.”
Early Astronomer Maria Mitchell
“If people are grass before God, they are as nothing before their machines.”
A corporation is, “a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.” “The limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person… it can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”
Wendell Berry
Marriage: a state of mutual help
Wendell Berry
O to share the great, sunny, joyous life of the earth! to be as happy as the birds are! as contented as the cattle on the hills! as the leaves of the trees that dance and rustle in the wind! as the waters that murmur and sparkle to the sea! To be able to see that the sin and sorrow and suffering of the world are a necessary part of the natural course of things, a phase of the law of growth and development that runs through the universe, bitter in its personal application, but illuminating when we look upon life as a whole!
..
Without death and decay, how could life go on? Without what we call sin (which is another name for imperfection) and the struggle consequent upon it, how could our development proceed?
..
Our good fortune is not that there are or may be special providences and dispensations, as our [ancestors] believed, by which we may escape this or that evil, but our good fortune is that we have our part and lot in the total scheme of things, that we share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe, that we have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune. There is nothing accidental or exceptional about it. It is not by the favor or disfavor of some of some god that things go well or ill with us, but it is by the authority of the whole universe, by the consent and cooperation of every force above us and beneath us.
John Burroughs
Don’t Worry – Be happy
“There are very few things in the mind which eat up as much energy as worry. It is one of the most difficult things not to worry about anything. Worry is experienced when things go wrong, but in relation to past happenings it is idle merely to wish that they might have been otherwise. The frozen past is what it is, and no amount of worrying is going to make it other than what it has been. But the limited ego-mind identifies itself with its past, gets entangled with it and keeps alive the pangs of frustrated desires. Thus worry continues to grow into the mental life of man until the ego-mind is burdened by the past. Worry is also experienced in relation to the future when this future is expected to be disagreeable in some way. In this case it seeks to justify itself as a necessary part of the attempt to prepare for coping with the anticipated situations. But, things can never be helped merely by worrying. Besides, many of the things which are anticipated never turn up, or if they do occur, they turn out to be much more acceptable than they were expected to be. Worry is the product of feverish imagination working under the stimulus of desires. It is a living through of sufferings which are mostly our own creation. Worry has never done anyone any good, and it is very much worse than mere dissipation of psychic energy, for it substantially curtails the joy and fullness of life.”
Meher Baba
Many consider it blasphemy for one to say he is God, but in truth, it would be blasphemous for me to say I am not God.”
“Things that are real are always given and received in Silence.”
“Not as man to man, but as God to God, I bow down to you so as to save you the trouble of bowing down to me.”
“… give up all forms of parrotry. Start practicing what you truly feel to be true and justly to be just.”
Baba emphasized that God could not be found by “running away from life” but rather by “establishing unity with the One in the many”. 6 This can only be done when we start practicing — in every situation — “the art of right adjustment to others … (which) means self-forgetfulness and love”.
“Love is essentially self-communicative: those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. Those who receive love from others cannot be its recipients without giving a response which, in itself, is the nature of love.
“… attempts by the ego to secure its own extinction may be compared with the attempt of a man to stand on his own shoulders
God, according to Meher Baba, wants nothing more than love and honesty. Hypocrisy — especially in the form of posing as a spiritual authority — is the one thing God cannot forgive. For Baba, the highest spiritual achievement is not in being demonstrative but in the ability to be ‘perfectly’ human, for: “Spirituality must make a man more human.”
Meher Baba
When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.
Isaac Asimov
from “THE MORE LOVING ONE”
by W.H. Auden
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Aldo Leopold
Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso
Yes, this kind of drawing has its own light; created, not imitated.
Pablo Picasso
“There is no saint without a past — no sinner without a future. – Saint Augustine
“There are no great things, only small things with great love.” – Mother Teresa
“Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.”
– Thomas Merton
“Religion is about ritual, about morals, about systems of thought, all of them good but all of them incomplete. Spirituality is about coming to consciousness of the sacred.”
– Joan Chittister, OSB
For death is not an adventure for those who stand face to face with it.
Erich Maria Remarqu
A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.
M. C. Escher
“everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives” on this “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Carl Sagan, from his book Pale Blue Dot,
which inspired Maya Angelou’s poem A Brave and Startling Truth
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de St-Exupery
“the world is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects”
eco-theologian Thomas Berry
‘… then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.’
Keats
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.
Dostoevsky
Why I’m an Atheist: Because God sending Himself to Sacrifice Himself to Himself to save us from Himself is a bit much for any logical person.
By ?
God can be love but not thought.
Augustine
I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.
Al Franken
Numbers numb, jargon jars, and nobody ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart. Stories, by their very nature, tend to get stored in our brains. So, if you can change the story inside someone’s head, you’ve taken the first step to changing the world.
Andy Goodman, The Goodman Center
“Meditation is a sure way of losing your own life, losing your own consciousness of yourself as an autonomously separate, separated entity. In losing it you find yourself at one with God and at one with all creation because you are now at last one with yourself. Your consciousness is no longer divided, no longer confused. It is simplified. It is one in God.”
John Main, Benedictine monk and Roman Catholic priest
(The Way of Unknowing)
If you live by the cosmos, you look in the cosmos for your clue. If you live by a personal god, you pray to him. If you are rational, you think things over. But it all amounts to the same thing in the end
All real living hurts as well as fulfills. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake.
D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing.
Anais Nin on D. H. Lawrence
“One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”
Picasso
If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.
I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it.
Henry Miller
Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity
… faith is much better translated as foundational confidence or trust . . . God refuses to be known intellectually. God can only be loved and known in the act of love; God can only be experienced in communion.
Richard Rohr
“We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne”.
Marcus Aurelius
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Picasso?
Keep on winning within yourself every day.
Yogananda
2. …The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
Umberto Eco on Ur-Fascism (which could apply to the UUA)
From bebop to do-wop to hip-hop to Tik Tok – you gotta go to know.
Quincy Jones
I often say that we need to shift from power, profit and patriarchy to people, planet and prosperity.
Sandrine Dixson-Declève
CO-PRESIDENT OF THE CLUB OF ROME
U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy once said a country’s GDP measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Critics of GDP, which represents the total value of goods and services over a specific time period, argue that the indicator is misleading because it measures “the good, the bad and the ugly” of economic activity and calls it all good.
From Wellbeing Economy on world’s polycrisis
This refers to an economic system that is based on the reuse and repair of materials to extend the life cycle of products for as long as possible and moves away from the world’s current “take, make, throw away” model.
As promoted by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
Frederick Buechner wrote about the Bible: In short, one way
to describe the Bible, written by many different people over a
period of three thousand years and more, would be to say that it
is a disorderly collection of sixty-odd books, which are often
tedious, barbaric, obscure, and teem with contradictions and
inconsistencies. It is a swarming compost of a book, an Irish stew
of poetry and propaganda, law and legalism, myth and murk,
history and hysteria. Over the centuries it has become hopelessly
associated with tub-thumping evangelism and dreary piety, with
superannuated superstition and blue-nosed moralizing, with
ecclesiastical authoritarianism and crippling literalism. Let them
who try to start out at Genesis and work their way conscientiously
to Revelation beware.
Found in Pastor Murray (1st Presbyterian, Medford) “Four Questions on the Bible”
ee cummings
When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god
A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny
Herman Hesse
It is hard to learn to suffer. Women succeed more often and more nobly than men. Learn from them!
Simone Weil
“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone,”
– Dorothy Parker
“Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.”
Albert Camus
I am called, right now, in this and every moment, to be and do the best I can.
We want a human community in which all take responsibility for the wellbeing of all, including the natural world.
John Cobb, following A.N. Whitehead
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.
Republican Barry Goldwater
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner … on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
Carl Sagan, as reported by Steve Hanley
“From contentment and benevolence of consciousness comes supreme happiness.”
Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali -BKS Iyengar
If you suffer it is because of you. If you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible – only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too.
Osho (Rajneesh)
There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow, so today is the right day to love, believe, do, and mostly live.
Dali Lama
In art and in life, anything is possible as long as there is love.
Marc Chagall
How dismal it is to see present-day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
Christopher Hitchens
When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.
Turkish Proverb
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
Charles Bukowski, from a tweet by Mary W
Note: This is the opening stanza of Ogden Nash’s poem on Senator Reed Smoot of Utah whose anti-porn stance led to a newspaper headline “Smoot Smites Smut”.
“Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)
Is planning a ban on smut.
Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut.
And his reverend occiput.
Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut.,
Grit your molars and do your dut.,
Gird up your l–ns,
Smite h-p and th-gh,
We’ll all be Kansas
By and by.
Ogden Nash; Invocation; 1931.
All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.
I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.
In this country … if you’re an artist, you’re guilty of a crime: not that you’re aware, which is bad enough, but that you see things other people don’t admit are there.
James Baldwin
In ‘Aubade’ (1977), perhaps the finest poem of the many written on the subject, Philip Larkin noted that, when it comes to death, there is ‘nothing more terrible, nothing more true’. He goes on:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die …
Let’s face it: soul-belief is liable to persist about as long as souls themselves are purported to endure. . . We’re not stuck with souls, but most people are likely stuck with believing in them.
David P. Barash in Aeon
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,”
“Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin on Writing
Why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away.
We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.
Henry David Thoreau, as reported by Marie Popova in Aeon
What you don’t know won’t hurt you near as much as what you do know that ain’t true.
Mark Twain
Robert F. Kennedy on The Gross National Product:
Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
In every religion there is love yet love has no religion.
Rumi
Elias Madrigal, commenting on Chris Hedges on Genocide 10-14-23
“Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.” Dr. Zeus 🥸
———————–
“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
–Buddha
If you can laugh together, you can live together. If you live together, you can love together.
Kevin Hart
First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent.
Bertrand Russell
_______________________________________________
The following are all copied from Peter’s Quotations – Ideas for our Time by Laurence J. Peter
Self
Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.
Walter Kaufmann
I think somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Agnostics
The agnostic’s prayer: “O God, if there is a god, save my soul, if I have a soul.”
Ernest Renan (1823 – 1890)
Bible
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Bores
No one really listens to anyone else, and, if you try it for a while you’ll see why.
Mignon McLaughlin
The average man who does not know what to do with his life wants another one which will last forever.
Anatole France
Canada
When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles.
Chief Dan George
Change
The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the thing, however, is to change it
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Civilization
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reactions to challenge.
Erich Fromm
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.
David Russell
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark
Civilization is built of sublimation.
Sigmund Freud (as I remember, not in Peter’s book)
Courage
Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.
Franklin P. Jones
Criticism
He is forced to be literate about the illiterate, witty about the witless, and coherent about the incoherent.
John Crosby
To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
Never answer a critic, unless he’s right.
Bernard M. Baruch
Fascism
Revolutionary concepts plus revolutionary emotion result in Fascist mentality.
Wilhelm Reich
The next step [in a fascist movement] is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
Bertrand Russell
Fools
Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you.
Joey Adams
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France
Genius
In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson ((1803-1882)
In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
Robert G. Ingersol (1833-1899)
Good
The word good has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but necessarily a good man.
G.K. Chesterton
Government
The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The middle of the road is where the white line is – and that’s the worst place to drive.
Robert Frost
Heroes
Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Laws
For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.
Richard Clopton
Life
Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal./Dust thou art, to dust returneth./Was not spoken of the soul.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Lies
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
H.L. Mencken
Man
The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.
Carl Becker
Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man.
Saint Augustine (353-430) [not a humanist]
Marriage
Marriage – a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves – making in all two.
Ambrose Bierce
When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.
Helen Rowland
Love, the quest, marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.
Helen Rowland
Military
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial [-congressional complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (omitted word from first draft of his speech included)
Money
Money often costs too much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nationalism
I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
Albert Camus
The U.S. is having the same trouble as Rome in its search for ‘defensible frontiers.”
Lord Curzon
Nature
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
In nature there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
Robert B. Ingersol
Old Age
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo (1821-1881)
To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.
Albert Camus
Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Opinion
Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850)
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
Thomas Carlyle
No man is a failure who is enjoying life.
William Feather
Parapsychology
You can make a better living in the world as a soothsayer than as a truthsayer.
G.C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
Patriotism
True patriotism doesn’t exclude an understanding of the patriotism of others.
Queen Elizabeth II
I should like to be able to love my country and to love justice.
Albert Camus
As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, What does it matter to me” the state may be given up as lost.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788)
Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.
Gordon W. Allport
People
People have one thing in common: they are all different.
Robert Zend
Philosophy
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
H.L. Mencken
Poetry
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom
Robert Frost
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer … He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E.B. White
Power
Power does not corrupt men, but fools, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
George Bernard Shaw
Prejudice
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.
Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
If we believe in absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Presidency
Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The case of human life and happiness . . . . is the first and only legitimate object of good government.
Thomas Jefferson
No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
Thomas Jefferson
Psychiatry
A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
Joey Adams
Quotations
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
G.K. Chesterton
Reason
Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage to reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Religion
Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
A Puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
G.K. Chesterton
Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
Paul Tillich, theologian
I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Science
Art is I; science is we.
Claude Bernard
Science is the best we know so far.
Byron Bradley Carrier
Society
The mutual and universal dependence of individuals who remain indifferent to one another constitutes the social network that binds them together.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
The idea that egotism is the basis of the general welfare is the principle on which competitive society has been [badly] built.
Erich Fromm (the inserted word is mine)
Space
That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.
Neil A. Armstrong (the inserted crucial word “a” was in his intended sentence.)
Success
Success has made failures of many men.
Cindy Adams
How can they say my life isn’t a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Logan Pearsall Smith
Superstition
A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
George Iles
Superstition ain’t the way.
Stevie Wonder
Tact
Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.
Howard W. Newton
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
Taxes
The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don’t know when it’s through if you are a crook or a martyr.
Will Rogers
People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.
Will Rogers
Thought
Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Truth
If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.
Hans Reichenbach
Violence
A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after.
Adolf Hitler
Violence is fine against simple folk ten thousand miles away and shocking against injustice in our own land.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Wealth
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Wit
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
Somerset Maugham
Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
Mae West
It’s not the men in your life who matter, it’s the life in your men.
Mae West (West quotes not in Peter’s book)
Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorthy Parker (not in Peter’s book)
What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they’ll see things seriously.
William K. Zinsser
It is the uncensored sense of humor which is the ultimate therapy for man in society.
Evan Esar
The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.
Avicenna (not in Peter’s book)
In the tens of thousands of pages about him, in the thousands of pages he wrote, vast humorlessness stretches as far as the eye can see.
James O’Donnell in his biography on Augustine, Christian theologian (354-430) (not in Peter’s book)
Women
I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can be a woman in it.
Marilyn Monroe
To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
Bible, Genesis 3:16 (the blame, shame, and pain founded on eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, forsaking the natural goods of Genesis One.
Work
It is not enough to be busy . . . the question is: what are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Writing
Unprovided in original thinking, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
X-Rated
Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country choose a second-rate President.
Richard Nixon (Trump could say this unironically)
(This ends selections from Peter’s Quotations)
___________________________________________________________
Here are quotes taken from “The Portable Curmudgeon” by Jon Winokur
Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H.L. Mencken
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H.L. Mencken
Bible
It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Dorothy Parker
Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Ambrose Bierce
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.
Alex Comfort
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
Aldous Huxley
Christians, n. One who follows the teachings of Christ, insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
Ambrose Bierce
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
Jules Feiffer
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.
G.K. Chesterton
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
Mark Twain
Conscience: The inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
H. L. Mencken
Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Ambrose Bierce
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
Ambrose Bierce
The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
Andrew A. Rooney
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
Michel De Montaigne
The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
James Agate
Grub first, then ethics.
Bertolt Brecht
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce
I did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved it.
Mark Twain
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Nietzsche
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not all the time.
George Orwell
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
History, n. An account, mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
“Hope against all hope” is a more hopeful way for the hopeless to hope.
?
A husband is what’s left of the lover once the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland
Lady Astor: If you were my husband, Winston, I’d put poison in your tea.
Winston Churchill: If I were your husband, Nancy, I’d drink it.
?
The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.
Karl Kraus
Psychoanalysis is the occupation of the lascivious rationalists who reduce everything in the world to sexual causes, with the exception of their occupation.
Karl Kraus
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
H.L. Mencken
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Oscar Wilde
Killing
Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God.
Jean Rostand
Law
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Liberal
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his side in a quarrel.
Robert Frost
Life
The meaning of life is that it stops.
Franz Kafka
Life can little else supply
But a few good fucks and then we die.
John Wilkes
Los Angeles
Isn’t it nice that the people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?
Herb Carn
Love
A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Stephen Leacock
By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying – One of you is lying.
Dorothy Parker
It is possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
Charles Bukowski
Love is what happens to a man and a woman who don’t know each other.
W. Somerset Maugham
The only true love is at first sight; second sight dispels it.
Israel Zangwill
Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.
John Ciardi
Marriage
Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaved, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce
The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it – sometimes three.
Alexandre Dumas
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
Martyrdom
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde
There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.
Anatole France
Money
To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
G.K., Chesterton
Morality
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists – that is why they invented hell.
Bertrand Russell
Oakland, California
The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn’t any there there.
Gertrude Stein
The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, it’s there.
Herb Caen
Obscenity
Obscenity is whatever gives a judge an erection.
Anonymous
OK
I’m not OK, you’re not OK, and that’s OK
William Sloane Coffin
Optimist
The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Patience
Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Bierce
The reward for patience is patience.
?
Patriotism
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Oscar Wilde
Pessimist
A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
George Bernard Shaw
Philosophy
Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Ambrose Bierce
I think I think: therefore, I think I am.
Ambrose Bierce
Politician
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he.
Karl Kraus
Politics
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
George Jean Natha
All politics is based on the indifference of the majority.
James Reston
You can fool too many people too much of the time.
James Thurber
Prayer
Pray, n. To ask the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce
Procrastination
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Mark Twain
Puritanism … helps us enjoy our misery while we are inflicting it on others.
Marcel Ophuls
Religion
Religion consists in a set of things, which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.
Mark Twain
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar Wilde
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James
The Rich
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Saint
Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce
Sex
Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t.
George Bernard Shaw
Thinking
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do so.
Oscar Wilde
Western Civilization
It would be a good idea.
Mohandas Gandhi
Wife: a former sweetheart.
H.L. Mencken
Women
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.
Charlotte Whitton
Women should be obscene and not heard.
Groucho Marx
This ends the selections from The Portable Curmudgeon
____________________________________________________
Dear reader, I hope you got some wit or wisdom from these posts.
Please feel free to add more or comment.
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