Doug Larson

"If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur." - Doug Larson

Sir Richard Steele

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." - Sir Richard Steele

Network (1976), film

"So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth!...Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us [Television Networks]…We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true!...You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion!" - Howard Beale, Sidney Lumet's Network (1976)

Complete quote as well as video, after the Jump.

Alan Dean Foster

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." - Alan Dean Foster

Spike Milligan

"Money can't buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy." - Spike Milligan

Arnold Toynbee

"America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair." - Arnold Toynbee

Network (1976), film

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today!


...There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. - Arthur Jensen, Sidney Lumet's Network (1976)

Complete quote as well as video, after the Jump.

Bill Hicks

"Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye." - Bill Hicks

Alan Corenk

"Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms." - Alan Corenk

Bill Hicks

"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' 'Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!' 'Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection. Watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you fucking morons.'" - Bill Hicks, Rant in E-Minor (1997)

TS Eliot

"As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing." - TS Eliot (American Poet)

Richard M. Nixon

"Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too." - Richard M. Nixon

Nicholas Chamfort

"In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are." - Nicholas Chamfort

Richard Gere

"I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe." - Richard Gere

François de La Rochefoucauld

"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires." - François de La Rochefoucauld

Bill Hicks

"Folks, it's time to evolve. That's why we're troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything's failing? It's because, um – they're no longer relevant. We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right? There's another 90 percent of our brains that we have to illuminate." - Bill Hicks, Filling Up the Hump (1993)

Sure we have Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but there's no question that the world is worse off for the absence of Bill Hicks. Then again, if the pancreatic cancer hadn't killed him todays politics sure would have.

Gao Xingjian

"When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence." - Gao Xingjian (French/Chinese Writer)

Nicholas Gurewitch

"…that laughter is a cough-like defense that occurs when a reader's cognitive facilities experience a sudden overflow of information -often in the form of a paradox, silly face, or boobie." - Nicholas Gurewitch

Check out his awesome, funny, ironic, vulgar, satirical, hysterical, just plain ingenious web comic: The Perry Bible Fellowship (you won't be sorry)

Robert Frost

"The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office." - Robert Frost

Plato

"No human thing is of serious importance." - Plato

Richard Bach

"The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work." - Richard Bach

Conversely and not so optimistically, but just as true as ever: The less we want to get something done, the more we call it work.

Jean Paul Richter

"A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward." - Jean Paul Richter

W. H. Auden

"We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know." - W. H. Auden

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), film

"Even great men have to pee." - Lt. Rico Patrone, Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Mahatma Gandhi

"If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly." - Mahatma Gandhi

Short. Simple. And powerful.