“Unless we change the direction we are going, we are likely to get where we are going.”
“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
-Henry David Thoureau
The truth you speak of has no past and no future. It is... and that’s all it needs to be.
“He felt goose-pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all”
“I’m cold.
“There, there.”
-Catch 22
“The conversation had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic insanity, random events in a dying universe.”
-Junky
“Violence is the ultimate foundation of any political order”
The wise say a man is learned when his actions lack the constructs of desire, when his actions are burned by the fire of knowledge.
“To write simply is as difficult as being good.”
-Somerset Maugham
“Opinion and the just maintenance of it shall never be a crime in my view, nor bring injury on the individual. I will never by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance. I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own; a reserve on these subjects might have procured me more esteem from some people, but less from myself.”
-Thomas Jefferson
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady I swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death I think is no parenthesis
-e.e. cummings
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
-Santayana
There are two things in life that you must find; that which you are good at doing and that which you like to do... and if God is smiling upon you, they’ll both be the same thing.
Though losses and crosses be lessons right severe, there’s wit there, ye’ll get there, ye’ll get no other where.
Everything ends between philosophy and inane conversation.
“... the earth is mounting an immune response.”
-Ebola
Argue your limitations and sure enough they’re yours.
“Intricate adaptation, an exquisite match of form to function.”
-Carl Sagan
“Hope is generally a wrong guide, but it is very good company on the way.”
-Marquis of Halifax
In pleasant peace and security
How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die
He shall look up above the stalled oxen
Envying the cruel falcon,
And dig under the straw for a stone
To bruise himself on.
-Robinson Jeffers
Here’s a test to find out whether your mission on earth is finished: If your still alive, it isn’t.
Words signify a man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.
“True artists must be sacrificed to there art. Like the bees, they must put there lives into the sting they give.”
-Emerson
“Adversity introduces a man to himself”
-Anonymous
Life is an opposition to chaos.
Truth is not a transient metaphor.
“A pessimist is a man who is compelled to live with an optimist.”
-Elbert Hubbard
“The man who lives free from folly is not so wise as he thinks.”
-La Rochefoucauld
“All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.”
-Chesterson
“All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
-Marcel Proust
“Nothing is uglier to us than reason when it is not on our side.”
-George Marquis of Halifax
“No great man ever complains for want of opportunity.”
-Emerson
“A book is a mirror; if an ass peers in, you cannot expect an apostle to look out.”
-Georg Lichetenburg
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
-Socrates
“Progress celebrates pyrrhyic victories over nature.”
-Karl Kraus
“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”
-Peguy
“The way I see it, you go to heaven for the climate, but you go to hell for the society.”
-Mark Twain
Don’t turn away from certain futures until you are certain that you have nothing to learn from them.
The Quotations of Hi Shapiro
- Infinity is larger than we thought.
- Don’t tell me why you can’t, tell me how you can.
- Nature has all the answers.
- If it can be conceived, it will be achieved.
- Invest, Invest, Invest.
- If you want to understand yourself, understand those around you.
- For a while each day, let your imagination run free.
- A man’s two favorite things are his own name and his own voice.
- The luckiest man alive is the man with the most friends.
- Broaden your base.
- Better to be smart than lucky.
“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”
-Carl Sagan
The ancients, who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom. first order well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
The Mentor’s Last Words
“Damn kids... they’re all alike... you bet your ass we’re all alike... we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to say found us willing pupils, but those are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what would be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... an you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
