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[KeithHernandez]

So this board has been kind of dead for a while, so I am trying to get a easy thread going.  This is inspired by Little Falls Mets signature (or whatever the thing at the bottom is called) that reads "history is short, the sun a minor star".  Where is that from?  Is that your own?



Anyways, list your top ten quotes if you would like to play along:

"to live outside the law you must be honest"-Dylan

"Censorship is telling a man that he can't have a steak, because a baby can't chew it." -Mark Twain

"Any venture requiring a new suit is best avoided"-HD Thoreau

"Only the shallow know themselves."
-Oscar Wilde

"From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity" -Edvard Munch.

'i dont know what world war 3 will be fought with, but i know this, world war 4 will be fought with sticks and stones' - einstein

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell.

"only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned and the last giraffe has been caught we will realise that we cannot eat money." - native american saying

"I am not a... leader. I don't want you to follow me or anything else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the... wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out." Eugene Debs

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

the last three are all Kurt vonnegut, but I think they count as one as they are all by the same guy.

[robot_god]

Top ten?  This thread is not as easy as you led me to believe.

[KeithHernandez]

It was going to be five, but then I looked at like this huge list of quotes I have and could not cut it down that much.  Put however many you want.  I don't think that part is important (I put 12).

[littlefallsmets]

It's a Roger Waters line... off the "Amused to Death" album. There's a certain something about the... coming-of-the-apocalypse despair of that guy's solo work that just draws me in. The guy takes the part of him that is deeply politically astute and the part of him that is this meloncholy visionary and it just... melds beautifully.

That, I will lay out there, is the kind of darkness and depression that rock n' roll is supposed to encompass... not the manufactured ennui of suburban teenagers gathering in Hot Topics and comparing fingernail-clipper-made scars... but the tragic fumblings of old men who've climbed the mountain, got fame and got fortune along the way and from the very top, finally see all humanity as one... and as hopelessly hopelessly fucked.

That's the good stuff.

As for favourite quotes, lesse...

"After all, I'm only sand, to irritate the oyster and wait for the pearl" - Adrian Belew

"Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." - Mark Twain

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." - Kurt Vonnegut

"We're all in this together, kid." - Brazil

"If you no help me hit curveball? Well, then fuck you, Joboo, I do it myself." - Major League

...that's about all I can think of, right now. Really, just about any Roger Waters lyric or Elliot Smith lyric will probably do in a pinch so I won't transcribe them all here and bore you.

[wombat]

This is a nice idea. Sadly though I am apparently no longer the kind of person who has favorite quotes. I can't think of a single thing off the top of my head.

[KeithHernandez]

I have to write everything down, and I am very disorganized, so sometimes my room will just be filled with random post it notes of qoutes and were they are from.  Just the other day I found this funny song that Pat Brown used in his campaign against Ronald Reagan, making fun of the John Birtch Society.  I can paraphrase the funny line as, roughly, "join the jon birch society/ to fill the ranks/ we're going to need lots of tools and cranks".  Anyhow, I have to write everything down because "I lost my memory but I found ink" (Mitch Hedberg).  Anyhow, I was at a job interview like a month ago for an on campus call center (where I currently call alumni) and they asked for our favorite quote (it is supposed to be like a "fun" place) but the only relevant quote I could think of was "I ain't a commie, but I've been in the red my whole life" by Woody Guthrie ("Will Rogers is the most famous Oklahoman in American, Woody Guthrie is the most famous Oklahoman in the world"-somebody?).  Anyways, I ended up just using "Who are the Gideons?" -Bill Hicks, and now everybody like ask me what that means and I have to explain Bill Hicks, and why it is funny, etc., but it is not worth it.  I should have put, "There is no growing in knowing where you're going" by Olivia Tremor Control.

Anyhow, maybe I should quit trying to add extra quotes.  All of these where of the top of my head, and may not be exactly correct.

[wombat]

Well, there are no Post-it Notes with quotes on them here but now that you mention it there are a LOT of cartoons stuck to the wall.  A selection of the quotable:

"Reality is a pie of which I do not require another slice."  (Scary Go Round)

"Just because the problem was imaginary did not mean it was not real." (Lynda Barry)

"Do you dwell on the wasted years behind you or the terrifying years ahead?"  (From the New Yorker, author's name indeciperhable.)

And a magnet with a wonderful picture of a French bulldog lying on a pig statue and the following text:

"Whoever caused things to be this way, I hope they catch him." Ashleigh Brilliant b. 1933.

[CortJstr]

I was deeply into collecting quotes in HS. I even created a web page in classic 1996-O-Vision at cortjstr.com. I haven't updated in basically forever.

[KeithHernandez]

Sorry, but being a Communist from Oklahoma, I just need to add one more quote:

Was a big high wall there, that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property.
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing—
That side was made for you and me.

Omitted lyrics from "This Land Was Made for You and Me".

[FlipConstantine]

Submitted without comment, except for one, but I mean, come on...

"Atheism is the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs"  --Sam Harris

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."

"A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more."

--Philip K. Dick

"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

"I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

"The true scientist... sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers."

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."

--Isaac Asimov (wasn't originally going to use this many from him, but uh, who cares?  It's Isaac freakin Asimov)

"If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection – ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein. Because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: The world of purposeless, meaningless matter-in-motion, on the one side, and the world of meaning, and purpose, and design on the other. He understood that what he was proposing was a truly revolutionary idea."

--Daniel Dennet

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful?  Do you really have to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it?" --Douglas Adams

[theinevitable]

I hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend.
-Cobain

Don't take life too seriously; you'll never get out alive.
--Elbert Hubbard

"I know rock and roll. I mean... I KNOW it. ANd I know the secret:rock and roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages, be they 15, 25, or 35. It all boils down to whether they've got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit."
-Calvin Johnson
   
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh".
- George Bernard Shaw

also, my friend said something the other day to the effect of "Daniel... you like things that are broken better than things that work." And I think that sums me up pretty well.

I don't know if those are my favorites, but, you know.

[AugustWest]

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

-- Raoul Duke

[robot_god]

"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun.  So once, when I was six, I did."  -Darren Arenofsky



"[A bunch of shit about trying to find shit in the Library of Babel].  My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope."  -Jorge Luis Borges



"[Some Narcissistic shit about how Zarathustra loves life and is the best].  I myself have put on this crown!"  -Nietzsche (Hah hah, that's in the spell check?)



"Cardboard spider."  -A Perfect phrase that I uttered with lips of God while hallucinating.



And why not the shirt that I am currently wearing:

[robot_god]

Also, there was a signature of Judy's that my brain phagocytized and I probably won't forget for awhile.  "A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous."  Hah hah, man. . . it sure is.

[theinevitable]

Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?

mostly because I can understand the meaning two different ways, and both are great.

(roughly: "are there such great angers/upsettednesses in the minds of the gods?" Which either means "damn, why do the gods fuck with us so much. are they mad?" or "do even the gods have problems like this? (answer: yes.)")