Unusual Quote of the Day

[Warph]

"Hello?  Mr. Keynes?  Yes...Morgenthau here...
What are you, an idiot?"

Henry Morgenthau
–Long-time secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking in 1939

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we ever spent before and it does not work. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and enormous debt to boot."

[Warph]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
—from a letter to a friend, recalling a visit with Charles Dickens,
recounted in Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

               

He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. 'From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life."

"Only two people?," I asked.

[Warph]

Margaret Thatcher



"Power is like being a lady.
If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."


...uh... er... okay.

[Warph]

---"When you come back to Earth in a Soyuz capsule, you free fall, from space, at 500 mph, and the only thing that slows you down is a little parachute that pops out right before you crash into the ground. And the whole thing was designed by the same brilliant minds who were unable to capture Rocky and Bullwinkle."

—From "Launch Acceleration" episode of
The Big Bang Theory

[Warph]

          Ronald Reagan

         

---"One definition of an economist is somebody who sees something
happen in practice and wonders if it will work in theory."


         

[Warph]

            Douglas Wilson

       
         "Douglas Wilson is the minister of
          Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho"

"Keep it basic. Love your wife. Provide for the kids. Do your job well. Love your neighbor. Floss.

Do what God put in front of you to do. Stay at your post. Love your neighbor. John asks how we can love God, whom we have not seen, when we don't love our neighbor, whom we have seen (1 John 4:20). Let us take that form of argument—how can you love the future, which you have not seen, unless you love the present, which you have seen? The answer is plain—you cannot.

Faithfulness in your assigned duties is connected to the grand things. Attempted faithfulness in the grand scheme of things (as you conceive them to be) is the sure road to faithlessness in the present."

[Warph]

         George Orwell




In a generally deleted preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote: "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.  Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.  Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact."  

                       

When George Orwell was struggling to find a publisher for Animal Farm, he was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that the book would offend the Soviet Union.  One publisher wrote to Orwell that he had been dissuaded from publishing the book by an important official in the Ministry of Information (an agency that would become the Ministry of Truth in his novel, 1984) who had told him that publishing such a book would be ill-advised at this time.

The publisher went on to say that the book might be acceptable if it applied generally to dictators, but not specifically to the USSR.  Finally the publisher added, "It would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs.  I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are."  That official was, incidentally, a Soviet spy.

Our "1984" is about to happen if Obuma is re-elected!

[Warph]

Martin Luther




"If you ask further, whether they count it also a good work when they work at their trade, walk, stand, eat, drink, sleep, and do all kinds of works for the nourishment of the body or for the common welfare, and whether they believe that God takes pleasure in them because of such works, you will find that they say, "No"; and they define good works so narrowly that they are made to consist only of praying in church, fasting, and almsgiving. Other works they consider to be in vain, and think that God cares nothing for them. So through their damnable unbelief they curtail and lessen the service of God, Who is served by all things whatsoever that are done, spoken or thought in faith."

                                                                                                            —Treatise on Good Works, 1520