Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[WT Sharpe]

.....[T]he sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. . . . the only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
..........— John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English political economist, philosopher. On Liberty (1859), ch. 1.

[WT Sharpe]

.....It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
..........— W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907-1973), British-born poet and critic who migrated to the United States in 1939. The Dyer's Hand, (1963) Foreword.

[tubemonkey]

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

Ray Bradbury - The Long Rain (1950)

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

.....It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
..........— W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907-1973), British-born poet and critic who migrated to the United States in 1939. The Dyer's Hand, (1963) Foreword.

Is that ever true. Poets must support their habit by teaching or other means of earning a living .... unfortunately....about the same with many other arts - music, painting/visual art, fiction writing...

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Is that ever true. Poets must support their habit by teaching or other means of earning a living .... unfortunately....about the same with many other arts - music, painting/visual art, fiction writing...

I thought of you when I posted that. I thought you'd appreciate it. It is sad, but true. Many of the finest poets who ever lived died impoverished.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

Ray Bradbury - The Long Rain (1950)

Love that! Love that Story! Love Bradbury!

Thanks!

[WT Sharpe]

.....And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
..........— John Milton (1608-1674), English poet. Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (London: Cambridge University Press, 1907), page 45.

[WT Sharpe]

.....I got $25 from Reader's Digest last week for something I never said. I get credit all the time for things I never said.
..........— Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx (1890 – 1977), American comedian, television host, and film star. Interview by Roger Ebert in Esquire magazine, March 7, 1972.

[WT Sharpe]

.....The only vice that I know in the universe is avarice. All the others, whatever names they may be given, are only forms and degrees of that. It is the Proteus, the Mercury, the foundation, the vehicle of all the vices. Analyse vanity, fatuity, pride, ambition, villainy, hypocrisy, viciousness; decompose in the same way the greater part of our sophistic virtues; everything resolves itself into this subtle and pernicious element, the desire to possess.
..........— Morelly, Code of Nature (1755), pages 15-16. Quoted in The Social & Political Ideas of Some Great French Thinkers of the Age of Reason: A Series of Lectures Delivered at King's College, University of London, during the Session 1928-29, edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw M.A. LL.D. (George G. Harrap & Co. LTD., London, 1930), Chapter IX: "IX Morelly and Mably," by C. H. Driver, M.A., Assistant Lecturer in History at King's College, London, page 224.
.....Very little is known of Morelly's life, or even if the works attributed to him were the works of one author, or of a father and son. His Code of Nature was for many years falsely attributed to Diderot. He was probably born at Vitry-le-François, France, in the first part of the eighteenth century.

[gmw]

I may have learned something about psychology, but I've been Catholic all my life.

-- "In the name of Honor" (UK: "In the name of Honour") by Richard North Patterson. (The character Rose Gallagher speaking of her feelings of guilt.)

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by gmw

I may have learned something about psychology, but I've been Catholic all my life.

-- "In the name of Honor" (UK: "In the name of Honour") by Richard North Patterson. (The character Rose Gallagher speaking of her feelings of guilt.)

[WT Sharpe]

.....The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used—we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immorality. . . . [T]he time has now come for the nations of the world to submit to the just requisition of their conduct by international law.
..........— Linus Pauling (1901-1994), American scientist, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1954, Nobel Peace Prize 1962. No More War! (1958).

[gmw]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I am a little confused by the confuseds . Assuming they were a question: The quote stood out for me as I was reading because I thought it expressed very well the potential confusion between what we learn intellectually versus what we were brought up to be; and understanding why you have certain feelings (in this case guilt) is not the same as being able to control them.

[kennyc]

Sorry for the confusion. It's a great quote. Just expressing my "shaking head confusion" that someone would say/think/live that.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Sorry for the confusion. It's a great quote. Just expressing my "shaking head confusion" that someone would say/think/live that.

's okay ... I've avoided posting some quotes in the past because more context is required to make them understandable, and I was afraid that that should have been one of them. ... But since it wasn't that, here's another couple (also from "In the name of Honor" (UK: "In the name of Honour") by Richard North Patterson):

"his world was still a complex place, filled with tangled motives, too often barely understood by people who, at crucial moments, were neither bad nor good."

"no one should be judged by the worst moment of their life"