Archive for the 'Quotes' Category

Via Mustang:

“We Americans were gettin’ damn tired of the rest of the world thinkin’ we’re dumb.

So in November, we went to the polls and removed all doubt.”

- The Drifter

All it means is that we won’t see what hit us…

Today’s quote:

“I’ve been a hardcore Republican my whole life,” he told the Herald. “My mother and father drilled into me from the very start that if you work hard and be positive, you’ll get what you’re working for. I guess I’m living proof of that.”

See who said it.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

-H. L. Mencken

Marxist quote of the day:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Marx, German Ideology (1845)

Good advice:

So learn the lyrics. Then you must sing them. In the car. On the beach. At the mall. Wherever teenagers gather. Then dance. Learn that “lady hump” song and dance like it’s 1952. Get out your best opera voice and warble “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me,” and dance, dance, dance.

-Monique Doyle Spencer in an op/ed from today’s Boston Globe.

Today’s top story is the eagerly-awaited announcement of the winner of The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.

The winner, by a large voting margin, was a self-help book by the title:

As Joel Rickett, Deputy Editor of The Bookseller, observed, “[This book] makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes. So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself.”

Indeed, after reading this title, is there really any reason for another self-help book about getting out of relationships?

In my mind, the only comparable book title I can think of comes from these lines by Tom Lehrer

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can’t communicate, children who can’t communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate.

I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up!

…which, if there were any justice in this world, should have inspired the following book to end all self-help books about communications:

enough said…

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-John Updike (from Telephone Poles and Other Poems)

COMMENTARY: I originally posted this poem last Easter but am reposting this again because I still think that John Updike here captures the scandal of the Cross in a way that few modern authors have.

Updike’s “in the guts” reflection on Easter centering on the physicality of the Resurrection starkly refutes both ancient pagan celebrations of the cycle of the seasons and modern fairy-tale interpretations of Easter as simply a hope of “spiritual” renewal.

Happy Easter to all!

I’ve learned these words to be true:

The friendship that can cease has never been real.

Saint Jerome (374 AD – 419 AD)

Words of wisdom can hurt sometimes. We have to live and learn. And move on.

• GO PATRIOTS!
• 15 buildings burn in Lawrence MA. I wonder how this happened? It started in an abandoned night club…
• An avalanche on Mt. Washington kills a hiker. Damn…to think I was supposed to be up there right about now.
• This election cycle is getting hot…Obama tells Billybop to back off? Good for him!
• How humans vote. Er…why we vote for who we do.
• WHY I BOYCOTT MARRIOTT…and you should as well.
• Now this is cool, and different. Wounded Marines training for careers in the film industry. Not what you expect.
• Free speech and hard core porn…excellent article.