| 01.08.06 | "Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable -- that mankind is doomed -- that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. . We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings." . see full text of A Strategy of Peace . [John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address, American University, Washington, June 10, 1963] . . | 01.06.02 | "Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche." . [Robert A. Johnson] . . | 01.05.16 | "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." . "All I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present." . [Pablo Picasso, 1923] . . | 01.05.14 | "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." . [Theodore Roosevelt, Paris Sorbonne, 1910] . . | 01.03.25 | "We work jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man! No purpose or place; we have no Great War - no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives." . "We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars...but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." . [Tyler Durden, Fight Club] . . | 01.03.22 | "No human thing is of serious importance." . [Plato] . . | 01.03.13 | "He was a man who believed in nothing and had emotional involvements with no one, who was driven to find his identity in the mirror of the press, then came to believe that reality existed only in what was recorded, photographed, or transcribed." . [Ultra-Violet, on Andy Warhol] . . | 01.03.12 | "People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that shite, which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it." . [Renton, Trainspotting] . . | 01.02.05 | "There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them." . [Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451] . . | 01.03.12 | "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." . see full text of Chapter Seventeen . [Aldous Huxley, Brave New World] . . | 01.03.12 | "The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" . [Henry David Thoreau, Walden] . . back