Q: How can our words be a chant and incense unto the people?
The answer . . . Go down deeper than all sounds, to the very heart of the earth and there you shall be alone with Him who walks upon the Milky Way. KHALIL GIBRAN. “The Garden of the Prophet”
THE LONGER I LIVE the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
MUSIC gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything. PLATO
I’VE LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. MARTHA WASHINGTON
H. L. MENCKEN 1880-1956. “American Language”.
GOVERNMENT is a broker in pillage and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.
THE MEN the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
THE URGE to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
ON some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
THE WHOLE AIM of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
IT IS THE classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
PEOPLE do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing and if need be, murdering those who resist?
THE DEMAGOGUE is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN to any government is the man who is able to think things out . . . without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.
EVERY NORMAL man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
MORALITY is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
THE PLAIN FACT is that education is itself a form of propaganda — a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
DEMOCRACY is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
THE STATE doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
WHEN somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
DEMOCRACY is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
AFTER all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
A PROFESSIONAL POLITICIAN is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.