Dubious Wisdom

"God is very angry, and He may just advance His apocalypse timetable... unless you keep donating to my hotline."
-- Reverend Pat Robertson

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."
-- Albert Einstein

"First get your facts; then you may distort them at your leisure."
-- Mark Twain

"You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity. I've fought it all my life. I'm very tired. There was a time when I looked at the tragic mess they've made of this earth, and I wanted to cry out, to beg them to listen- I could teach them to live so much better than they did- but there was nobody to hear me, they had nothing to hear me with. Intelligence? It's such a rare, precarious spark that flashes somewhere among men, and vanishes. One cannot tell its nature, or its future...or its death. At your age I had the same faith in the unlimited power of reason. The same brilliant vision of man as a rational being. I have seen so much, since. I have been disillusioned so often..."
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (Dr. Stadler to an unadmiring Dagny Taggart)

"These words belong to me, the characters to the Fox Corporation, their complexities to a far sharper mind. Genocide belongs to everybody."
-- Disclaimer on internet publication

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."
-- Samuel Beckett, Murphy

"Thus our great industrial civilisation is expected to run railroads, air lines, intercontinental missiles and H-bomb stockpiles by the guidance of philosophical doctrines created by and for barefoot savages who lived in mudholes, scratched the surface of the soil for a handful of grain and gave thanks to the statues of distorted animals whom they worshipped as superior to man."
-- Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

"He who fights monsters must see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
-- Freidrich Nietzsche

"It's me, yeah and I can't get myself to go away."
-- Matchbox 20, Long Day

"He was an embittered atheist ( the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him.)"
-- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

"I would never lie. I willfully participated in a campaign of disinformation."
-- Unknown

"News Anchor: What is the position of your organisation in regard to the seeming contradictions in your doctrine?
Animal Rights Activist: Think of the chickens, think of the poor, brutalised chickens.
News Anchor: You do have some form of centralised policy, don't you?
Animal Rights Activist: Think of the chickens. They have their beaks cut off, they have no place to roam, and be free. Think of the chickens. Think of the poor, brutalised chickens."
-- Fox News interview

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, fear-driven, regimented, directed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, and commanded by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be marked, registered, numbered, liscensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, and punished. It is, in the name of the governed's interest, to be kept in submission, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed, then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, villified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged and dishonored. That is government, that is justice, that is morality."
-- P.I Proudhom

"He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present, controls the future."
-- George Orwell, 1984

"The stars are not wanted now, put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the oceans and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good."
-- W.H Auden, Funeral Blues

"When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive."
-- George W. Bush, September 19th, 2001

"After decades of preaching that the hallmark of an intellectual consists of proclaiming the impotence of the intellect, these modern zombies are left aghast before the fact that they have succeeded- that they are impotent to ignite the lights of civilisation, which they have extinguished- that they are impotent to halt the triumphant advance of the primordial brute, whom they have released- that they have no answer to give those voices out of the Dark Ages who gloat that reason and freedom have had their chance and have failed, and that the future, like the long night of the past, belongs once more to faith and force."
-- Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

"War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength."
-- George Orwell, 1984

"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
-- Edward Fueller

"E pur si muove (still, it moves.)"
-- Galileo Galilei, refuting the Inquisition after being forced to recant his theory holding that the earth revolves around the sun

"I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."
-- Charles Schultz

"In cyberspace, nobody can hear you scream."
-- Unknown

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
-- T.S Eliot, The Wasteland

"I had no idea we had so many weapons... what do we need them for?"
-- George W. Bush, leader of the free world

"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
-- William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

"In God we trust. All others we monitor."
-- American National Security Agency mottto

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"
-- T.S Eliot, The Wasteland

"Freedom is absolute, but its interpretation is not."
-- David Chorlton

"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."
-- Winston Churchill upon formal declaration of war

"The only distinction between past, present and future, is a stubbornly persistant illusion."
-- Albert Einstein

"This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper."
-- T.S Eliot, The Hollow Men

"Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am.)"
-- Rene Descartes

"Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile and transitory? They are so, we are so, and they and we go very well together."
-- George Santayana

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it."
-- George W. Bush

"Oh well, whatever, nevermind."
-- Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit

"Where you see ideal things, I see human, all too human things."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The most costly of all fallacies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
-- H.L Mencken

"The clinching proof of my reasoning is that I shall cut anyone who disagrees further into dogmeat."
-- Geoffery de Tourneville

"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more war."
-- Abbie Hoffman

"And I swear that I don't have a gun."
-- Nirvana, Come as You Are

"When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile, his work to see?
Did he who make the lamb make thee?"
-- William Blake, The Tyger

"'Do they ever think?' she asked involuntarily, and stopped; the question was her one personal torture, and she did not want to think about it."
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"First, we would not accept a treaty that would not have been ratified, nor a treaty that I thought made sense for the country."
-- George W. Bush, on the Kyoto accord

"I am the resurrection and the life. He who believeth in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never truly die."
-- The Bible, delightfully and unapologetically desecrated by The X-Files

"Communism is a theory or system of social organisation in which all economic activity is conducted by a totalitarian state which, in turn, is dominated by a single self-perpetuating party."
-- The Dictionary

"Shouldn't you be on a windowledge somewhere?"
-- Jery Seinfeld

"You're mad"
" No I'm not. Youre just jealous 'cause the voices only speak to me"
-- Unknown

"The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under this Commonwealth."
-- Section 116 of the Australian Constitution

"Bartender: So what do you do?
Mulder: I'm the central figure in an ongoing government charade, the plot to conceal the truth about the existence of extraterrestrials. It's a global conspiracy actually, with key players in the highest levels of power, that reaches down into the lives of every man, woman and child on this planet so, of course, no one believes me. I'm an annoyance to my superiors, a joke to my peers. They call me Spooky. Spooky Mulder, whose sister was abducted by aliens when he was just a kid and who now chases after little green men with a badge and a gun, screaming to the heavens or anyone who will listen that the sky is falling and when it hits, it's gonna be the shit-storm of all time.
Bartender: I think that about does it, Spooky."
-- Fight the Future

"For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself upon us for not having died on a sofa."
-- E.M Cioran

"I've been around the world and found
That only stupid people are breeding.
The cretins cloning and feeding.
And I don't even own a TV.

They put me in the hospital for nerves
And then they had to commit me.
You told them all I was crazy.
They cut off my legs,
Now I'm an amputee, goddamn you!

Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's coming to get me.
Just say you never met me,
I'm going underground with the moles, digging holes.
Hear the voices in my head,
I swear to god it sounds like they're snoring,
But if you're bored then you're boring.
The agony and the irony, they're killing me."
-- Harvey Danger, The Flagpole Sitter

"Telstra apologises for your existence. We regret to inform you that your birth was an error. Please report to the nearest hospital to be put down. We apologise for any inconvenience caused."
-- Unknown

"The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots."
-- P. Ginsparg

"I am free of all predjudices. I hate everyone equally."
-- W.C Fields

The eyes are not here.
There are no eyes here.
In death's dream kingdom,
These do not appear.

Those who cross
With direct eyes to
Death's dream kingdom,
Remember us, if at all,
Not as lost, violent souls,
But as the hollow men,
The stuffed men.
-- T.S Eliot, The Hollow Men

"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
-- Unknown

"I dreamed that the world was crumbling down. We sat on my back porch and watched it."
-- Matchbox 20, Busted. Can't you almost see it?

"...a southern-accented brunette with a smile, Caroline told herself, that she could never match this side of a lobotomy."
-- Richard North Patterson, The Final Judgement

"L'enfer c'est les autres." (Hell is other people)
-- Jean-Paul Satre

"I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die."
-- P. Stewart

"The girls laugh like spider monkeys into their pocket phones. Hate them and you have to hate the world, Quasar. Very well, Quasar, let us hate the world."
-- David Mitchell, Ghostwritten (Such a beautiful stand, don't you think?)

"People don't live or die,
People just float."
-- Bob Dylan, The Man in the Long Black Coat

"It pleased him to think that all these people would soon be dead too."
-- Aldous Huxley, The Gioconda Smile

"Everybody stay calm. Don't panic. It's just the End of the World. It'll be alright, as long as we all KEEP CHANTING."
-- Kula Shaker, spoken interlude in Mystical Machine Gun