TS Eliot, poetry & theatre

Excerpt of TS Eliot's poem "Choruses" from The Rock, a pageant play:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

- TS Eliot (American Poet), "Choruses"

Complete poem, after the Jump:

Max Beerbohm

"You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men." - Max Beerbohm

Norman Mailer

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you." - Norman Mailer

Albert Einstein

"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me." - Albert Einstein

Giacomo Cassanova

"By recollecting the pleasures formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel." - Giacomo Cassanova (Venetian Writer)

Alfred Korzybski

"There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." - Alfred Korzybski

Edward Abbey

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Blaise Cendrars

"Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everyting, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes." - Blaise Cendrars (Swiss/French)

Hồ Xuân Hương, poem

Excerpt of a poem:

In the dead of night, nightwatcher's drums resound
I awake and find myself lonely in the vast world
After many an inebriating farewell cup, I come to my senses
The slanting moon on the wax is shaped like a crescent

- Hồ Xuân Hương (Vietnamese Poet), untitled

Complete poem, after the Jump

Network (1976), film

"…At the bottom of all our terrified souls we know that democracy is a dying giant; a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept riding in it's final pain. I don't mean that the United States is finished as a world power… What is finished, is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourish of every individual in it; it's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished; it's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals, it's a nation of two-hundred some-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods." - Howard Beale, Sidney Lumet's Network (1976)

Complete quote as well as video, after the Jump.

Janet Long

"Part of being sane, is being a little bit crazy." - Janet Long

Hmmm, so conversely does that mean part of being crazy, is being a little bit sane?

Harlan Ellison

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." - Harlan Ellison

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