Small Towns

The Small White Churches of Small White Towns

The twangy, off-key hymns of the poor,

Not musical, but somehow beautiful.

And the paper fans in motion, like little wings. –Donald Justice

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t be. --Alexander Woolcott

As for future generations and whether they will have roots, I'm sure they will. Urbanization doesn't change that. People don't tolerate loneliness very well, and when they leave home and family, they form new families ---- they fasten onto people in their line of work, or neighbors, or people at church, and weave whole new complicated networks. We can't be too sentimental about small towns ----- they're only as good as the people who live in them, and they certainly have been the source of considerable cruelty and bigotry and also boredom. And boredom is the only explanation for the high incidence of alcoholism and drug addiction in rural America. –Garrison Keillor

Tony Hillerman grew up in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, a place where “life was not complicated by any possibility of getting rich.”

I knew it was going to be a docile town because I seen a dog chasin’ a cat, and they were both walking. –Jerry Sloan, Hanston, KS

Bobby told Lucy, “The world ain’t round.

It drops off sharp at the edge of town.

Lucy, you know, the world is flat.

People leave town, they never come back.” –Hal Ketchum, “Small Town Saturday Night”

(the motto of Lake Wobegon High School) Summus Quod Summus: We are what we are. –Garrison Keillor

These men [the founders of Benzonia] were intensely logical. They believed in the perfectibility of human society, and a man who held that belief must of course do what he could to bring perfection about. It was not enough to exhort people to lead a better life; you had to lead a better life yourself, and do it in such a way that all men would see it. If society was to lift itself by its bootstraps, your place to begin was with your own bootstraps. Life in a community dedicated to this belief is apt to be rather special, and it was so in our town. Growing up in Benzonia was just a bit like growing up with the Twelve Apostles for next-door neighbors. You never could forget what you were here for. –Bruce Catton

Being a poet in the United States has meant for me years of confusion, blundering, and self-doubt. The confusion lies in not knowing whether I am writing in the American language or the English or, more exactly, how much of the musical power of Chaucer,
Marvell, and Keats can be kept in free verse. Not knowing how to live, or even how to make a living, results in blunders. And the self-doubt comes from living in small towns. –Robert Bly

Freeport, New York, where her ancestors settled in the years after the Revolutionary War, is the kind of place Garrison Keillor deadpans about, but whose complexities Thornton Wilder truly understood. –Sridhar Pappu

The main business of Bailey Building and Loan was financing the first new suburban subdivisions of the automobile age. In one of the movie's major set pieces, George Bailey opens Bailey Park, a tract of car-dependent cookie-cutter bungalows, and turns over the keys to the first house to the Italian immigrant Martini family. Had the story continued beyond 1946 into, say, the 1980s, (with George Bailey now a doddering Florida golfer), we would have seen the American landscape ravaged by suburban development, and the main street towns like Bedford Falls gutted and left for dead. That was the perverse outcome of George Bailey's good intentions. –James Howard Kunstler

When I wake up at night and can’t sleep, I think of Grand Rapids. –Pres. Gerald R. Ford (in the last year of his life)

[Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1969] You’d just go out on your front steps and holler when it was dinnertime. You’d have no idea where they were. There wasn’t much traffic. The kids were like a flock of pigeons that flew back and forth from one lawn to another. –Pat Churchland

Smoking

As anyone who has ever been one or known one can attest, a smoker is simply a person who would like to quite smoking.

Sociology

The New York Times, which probably is quite sincerely bewildered by the widespread belief that it has a liberal tilt, recently ran this headline: CRIME KEEPS FALLING, BUT PRISONS KEEP ON FILLING. The “but” is a telltale sign of the mentality that produced this version of the Good Samaritan story for sociologists: “A man was attacked and left bleeding in a ditch. Two sociologists passed by and one said to the other, ‘We must find the man who did this—he needs help.’”

In 1974, a Harvard sociologist made a seemingly unremarkable discovery. It is, in fact, who you know. His study asked several hundred white-collar workers how they’d landed their jobs. More than half credited a “personal connection.” Duh. But then it got interesting: The researcher, Mark Granovetter, dug deeper and discovered that four-fifths of these backdoor hires barely knew their benefactors. As it turns out, close friends are great for road trips, intimate dinners, and the occasional interest-free loan, but they suck for job leads and blind dates—they know the same people you do. In other words, it’s not so much who you know, but who you vaguely know. Granovetter called the phenomenon “the strength of weak ties.” He had discovered the human node. –Jeff Howe

The most important person you know is someone you haven’t met. –Clay Shirky

The Socratic Method

The Socratic method is the reason that law school is the only place where you learn to hate your own name. –James D. Gordon, III

The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him. –Thomas Babington Macaulay, on Socrates

If it’s the Socratic method, why is Socrates doing all the talking?

Carneades represented the Academy, the same argumentative open-air institution where three centuries before, Socrates drove his interlocutors to murder him just to get some respite from his arguments. –Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

Socrates spent his days asking people [for their “personal philosophies”] and then poking holes in what he heard. Most of the time, in Plato’s telling, his interlocutors reacted by walking away, changing the subject or sticking their fingers in their proverbial ears. Eventually, though, he angered enough people with his incessant questioning that they killed him for it, even though the formal charge read a little differently. –Brian M. Carney

Songwriting

Here are a few lessons from modern American music. First, he not busy being born is busy dying. (Bob Dylan) Second, you can’t hang a man for killing a woman who is trying to steal his horse. (Willie Nelson) And, third, you come to see what you want to see; you come to see, but you never come to know. (Kinky Friedman) --Dan Helpern

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn’t, then you’re doing it wrong. –Jimmy Webb

Did you ever stop and think that with any question in life, you could respond with a line or a name of a Beatles’ song? --Rusty Goldman

He who lives by the song, dies by the road. –Roger Miller

(when asked, “How come most of your songs are sad songs?”) Well, you know, I don’t think they’re all that sad. I have a few that are just—that aren’t sad. They’re hopeless. –Townes Van Zandt

Old songs are more than tunes. They are little houses in which our hearts once lived. –Ben Hecht

As I walked out of the studio that night, I said to myself, “If that’s not a hit, I don’t know my butt from a biscuit.” --Dolly Parton

Southerners

Conversation in New York is hurled stones. In the South, it’s moonshine passed slowly to all who care to lift the bottle. –Roy Reed

Southern women hold you up to this thing, which, you know, is your basic male standard. Which is, you gotta be willing to die for things. … Southern women understand male pride. Unlike Yankee women, they want you to have some. –Henry Allen

Remember, there have been only two perfect men in history. One died on the cross for us 2000 years ago, and the other surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April, 1865.

It’s dangerous to practice ordinary courtesy on a Yankee—he’ll think you’re hot for him and follow you home. –Florence King

While it is probably true that a Southern woman will take more bullcrap from her man than other women it’s my impression (based on actual Southern women I know) that she will finally reach a breaking point, and when she does it will be more spectacular than the breaking point of other women. She will bean her man with a frying pan, shoot him point-blank with a pearl-handled revolver, or wait for him in her car, motor running, so that when she catches sight of him backing out of his girlfriend’s driveway she can roar down the street and broadside him at full speed. I consider this breaking-point violence to be a positive trait. Southern women give their men plenty of slack, but it is the fear of that awful breaking point that keeps some of their menfolk in line, some of the time. –John Berendt

As a Southern woman I was taught two things. Never call attention to yourself, and never make anybody uncomfortable. That was the Southern credo. –Sue Grafton

(sayings) Some people, you couldn’t please ‘em if you hung ‘em with new rope.

Yesterday won’t be over till Tomorrow and Tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. –William Faulkner (He also wrote, “[T]he past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”)

I have some theories about southern culture -- I'm entitled to have them, and even express them, whether you like it or not. This is a region that was miserably poor until very recently. All the material progress, the new wealth of the Sunbelt, has been acquired rapidly over the last thirty years or so, and it has been delivered in the form of corporate products: tilt-up buildings, hamburgers, Ford pickup trucks, manufactured "homes," and cornucopia chain stores overflowing with plastic goodies. Building all this stuff and hitching employment rides with these ventures has dragged the cracker class out of the extremest poverty. Nearly universal air conditioning has also changed the picture, giving folks a reason to make an effort to do anything after the sun rises above the windowsills.
The reason their authentic down-home eateries are so bad is because for two hundred years they had a miserable diet of cornmeal, sugar, and pork fat, and a miserable concept of cuisine for presenting it. The reason the decor is so bad is because until fairly recently they lined the walls of their houses with newspapers and sat on benches. Electricity from the TVA also arrived relatively late in the game, and the finer points of interior illumination have not yet developed there. A restaurant dining room in Georgia is lighted the same way as a used car lot. –James Howard Kunstleer

Dear hearts, gathered here to rejoice in the glorious Southland. Joy to the world! The South has always been the South. And I believe the only reason that folks live in the north is because they have jobs up there. –Brother Dave Gardner

A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later.
They can’t achieve escape velocity. –Charles Portis

The South, like the United Kingdom, produces more history than can be consumed locally.

A woman checking IDs at the airport saw me coming the other day and said, "Good morning, sunshine." She didn't know me from Adam. She glanced at my driver's license and said, "Have a good flight, darling." This was in the South, of course -- in Austin, Texas, to be exact. Northern women would no sooner address a strange man as Sunshine than they would ask if you wanted to see their underwear. But that woman's Sunshine shone on me for the rest of the day, and a week later I still remember it. --Garrison Keillor

The South has suffered from excessive criticism from the outside and from insufficient criticism from the inside. –William C. Harvard

I heard people at gospel concerts call eyeglasses “helpers” and a gravel road “a dirty road,” and I heard an infant called a “lap baby,” and a gun called “a persuader,” and dying called “making it over,” and an embarrassed person described as “wanting to swallow his teeth,” and a dead person described as someone who was “having his mail delivered to him by groundhogs.”

The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. –David Cohn

Don’t ever trust a man with a southern accent unless he’s black. –Ernest Hemingway

The only doctor in a town of 2,300, Campbell treats patients in one part of his office and arranges burials in another, taking pains not to mix the two. "This is the South," he joked. "We used to have a place here that sold tombstones and fireworks." --Steve Chawkins

… the folk theater of the Southern Courtroom. –Dunne, “Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution”

North Carolina is a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit (Virginia and South Carolina). –Will Blythe

You get off the tracks when the Southern Express comes through. –Flannery O’Connor (warning writers to avoid Southernesque Faulknerisms)

He has the Southern accent that my ex-wife called, I didn’t screw the goat but I thought about it. Almost everybody in North Georgia talks like that … --Melanie Sumner

Speeches

They gave him twenty minutes, but all he took was ten.

Now there’s a master speaker and a leader among men.

His diction wasn’t perfect, he hemmed and hawed a bit.

But what he had to say made sense, and when he was done, he quit.

At first we sat dumbfounded, then cheered and cheered again.

For you see, they gave him twenty minutes, but all he took was ten.

I want to thank Mike for that wonderful, if overstated, introduction. I am reminded of what my old boss, Dale Bumpers, once said after listening to an equally fulsome introduction. He said, “I could have listened to that all night. And for a while I thought I was going to.” –Judge Richard Arnold

I really want to end with something positive, but I can’t think of anything positive to say. Would you settle for two negatives? --Woody Allen

When friends told Cicero that he was the greatest of orators, he replied, “Not so, for when I give an oration in the Forum people say, ‘How well he speaks!’ but when Demosthenes addressed the people they rose and shouted, ‘Come, let us up and fight the Macedonians!’” --Henry Weihofen

Dean Sullivan telephoned me a while ago and asked me whether I believe in free speech. That is like asking someone whether he believes in democracy, or apple pie. I responded, “Of course I believe in free speech.” “Good,” he replied. “We want you to come and give one.” He also told me, “Keep it short. Don’t try to be funny; don’t try to be witty; don’t try to be engaging. Just be yourself.” --James D. Gordon, III

Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Dorothy Parker said, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” I say, brevity is the soul of an after-dinner meeting and I hereby declare this meeting at an end. –Daniel R. White

As he rose to address the group, Justice Scalia said he felt “like the man who comes home drunk and tries to sneak into the house, but loudly falls face down on the carpet.” Confronted by an angry wife demanding an explanation, the man says, “I have no prepared remarks, but will entertain questions from the floor.”

The mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working the minute you’re born and never stops working until you get up to speak in public. –Roscoe Drummond

I’m reminded of the fellow wrongly accused of rustling cattle. Just before the mob strung him up, he was asked: “Do you have anything to say?” It was clear that they were going to hang him in any event. So he responded, “I’m here to be hanged, not to give a speech.” --Conrad Teitell

Some people have a way with words and others … have not way. –Steve Martin

I was President Carter’s speechwriter, a job that my predecessor, James Fallows, once likened to being F.D.R.’s tap-dancing teacher.

A tip if you give speeches: Never start out with a canned joke. Or a joke of any kind, unless you are dead certain you’ve read the room perfectly. A better way to start any speech is with a question. Asking a question does three things, all good. One, it makes the speech about the audience, not the speaker. Two, it helps the speaker get a “read” on the audience. Three, it is a wonderfully calming way to start a speech. It kills the fear that one will stumble out of the gate. That used to be my own biggest speech fear until I learned the trick of starting with a question. –Rich Karlgaard

I’m good for five minutes of superficial charm, after which I can see the pity forming in men’s eyes. –Kinky Friedman

Vice president Dick Cheney gives speeches that are so barren of any effort to charm or persuade that the delivery alone seems to reflect contempt for democracy. –L.A. Times

Speed

Accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in a few seconds slams the body backward with powerful sensations, but going 60 for hours on the interstate causes so little feeling of speed that we fight to stay awake. Thrills have less to do with speed than [with] changes in speed. –Prof. Ronald Dahl

My car is just all ate up with motor. –Darrell Waltrip

The race is not always to the swift, but that’s where to look. –Damon Runyon

Spelling

And don’t even start with me about spelling it “doughnut” with all of those unnecessary letters. We must band together to make “donut” the common usage. Otherwise life is meaningless. –Scott Adams

Sports

There are only three sports. Bullfighting, mountain climbing and car racing. All the rest are just games. –Bill France, Jr., allegedly quoting Hemingway

Win if you can, lose if you must, but ALWAYS cheat. –Jesse Ventura, Pro Wrestler

Andrews got the idea for substituting freely while on a recruiting trip for Clemson some 20 years ago. He met Wright Bazemore, who won 14 state championships at Valdosta (Ga.) High. “I asked him, ‘If you could point to one thing, what would be the greatest reason you have been successful?’ He said, ‘Son, I coached next year’s team this year.’”

Defeat is worth than death because you have to live with defeat. –Bill Musselman

There is no 2^nd place. Second place was invented to make losers feel better. –T-shirt

The guy’s amazing. He has the pain threshold of a dead animal. –Steve Staios, said of fellow hockey player Jason Smith

As for the athletes themselves, I was probably more impressed when I started out: After all, they could do what I could not. Then watching players off the court, seeing that their strengths in their sport are rarely matched by strengths in other areas, has given me a sense of their interior emotional limits, and the frailty that on occasions belies the power of their bodies. In addition, my colleague Roger Angell helped at the start: They are, he said in an answer to one of my questions about a particular player years ago, what they do. –David Halberstam

The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare. –Juma Ikanga, marathoner

He was, as near as a batting man may be, the flawless engine. Poetry and murder lived in him together. He would slice the bowler to ribbons, then dance without pity on the corpse. –R. C. Robertson-Glascow, on Australian cricket legend, Sir Donald Bradman

There is a plaque at Rugby school in England commemorating the origin of the rugby game in 1823, when a student named William Webb Ellis, during an informal football (soccer) game, had suddenly picked up the ball and run with it, “with a fine disregard for the rules of football.”

Rugby—a thug’s sport played by gentlemen.

Hard work will only get you so far. If all I wanted was hard work, I’d hire 12 plumbers. You need talent. –Kevin McHale

Among franchises in the four major professional sports, the Clippers are the most inept ever …. There’s got to be meaning to a failure of such immensity. So, consider this: The Clippers must lose so we can be reminded that there isn’t always a light at the end of the tunnel, there isn’t necessarily redemption and there might not be a next year. –Sports Illustrated, April 17, 2000

Doctors bury their mistakes. We still have ours on scholarship. –Abe Lemons

Jordan so badly juked a 24-year old guard named Milan Tomic that the burn victim stood grinning after Jordan scored, which in turn caused a grin to crease Jordan’s face, too. The young man had simply learned a lesson taught sooner or later to all people who encounter Jordan in the flesh. They learn that “it’s not television,” as Jordan puts it. “They can’t change the channel.”

(to a player who scored only one point) You did just great, John. You scored one more point than a dead man. –Abe Lemons

Kid, there are only two plays: South Pacific and put the ball in the basket. –Charley Eckman, basketball referee and coach

(said of Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson) Both of them will carve your heart out and leave it beating on the sidewalk. –Pat Williams

Tom Lehrer gave up writing comic songs when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, on the ground that he could never top that. For much the same reason, I gave up arguing for the abolition of boxing when Mike Tyson became the biggest thing the sport has to offer. –Simon Barnes

Race fans, I had inferred from my one visit to the Indianapolis 500, fell into one of two categories: tattooed, shirtless, sewer-mouthed drunks; and their husbands. –Steve Rushin

Exact figures for the care and feeding of a Formula One race team are impossible to find. This is in part because F/1is the most habitually secretive professional sporting circuit anywhere, so, as a matter of principle, no team is going to open its ledgers. But the simple truth may be that even the teams themselves don’t know. After all, if you’re winning, you don’t care what you spent, and if you’re losing, nobody else cares what you spent, so who bothers to keep track?

I just want to beat one cat in the race. The one that’s second. –Richard Petty

Water polo is basketball played in water according to football rules. –Howard A. White

Show me a baseball fan’s favorite team, and I’ll show you the sixth grade. –Alan Schwarz

There ain’t much to being a ballplayer if you’re a ballplayer. –Honus Wagner

The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You're grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality. –Garrison Keillor

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. –Henry David Thoreau

A man’s fitness for fishing is determined in large part by his ability to stave off boredom. In this regard, Valentin was very fit. “If you get pissed off real quick, fishing’s not your game,” he said. –Nick Paumgarten

He’s really improved his backhand, he’s got that big forehand and he runs like the police are after him. –Nick Bollettieri, said of James Blake

[Roger] Federer is almost too perfect to be dramatic. I compare him to Manolete, the bullfighter who achieved such perfection that the Spanish found him dull. –Christopher Plummer

The whole tournament is about the right to lose to Federer. –Lloyd Carroll

Bass fishing is a little like playing a video game: It’s interesting to do but boring to watch. –Chris Ballard

I have avoided competitive situations because I am not a baboon. –Ivor Cutler

The natural state of the football [soccer] fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. –Nick Hornby

Statistics

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts … for support rather than illumination. –Andrew Lang

(when asked in the 1960s why the nation was so much better off in the days of Queen Victoria, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said:) Ah, back then, we didn’t have any statistics.

Arguments derived from probabilities are idle. –Plato

His focus on cancer clusters is called the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy” by statisticians: You empty your revolver into the side of a barn, then walk over and draw a bull’s-eye around each hole. Anecdotal evidence surrounds us—in newspaper headlines, in gossip among neighbors, in the courtroom. It doesn’t carry much weight with statisticians—if you’re going to argue from statistics, they will tell you, you must use all the statistics.

Once you’ve got the anecdote, you can throw away the data. –Dr. Richard Nisbett

The study compiled lots of data. “Data” is a Latin word meaning “the plural of anecdote.” --James D. Gordon, III

A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. –Joseph Stalin

On my first visit to Professor [Milton] Friedman’s office, I was lamenting the fact that Cathy was so far away and that I could never possibly find a girl I loved as much in a small town like New York. “Benjy,” Professor Friedman said, “I can tell you as a statistician that if there were only one right woman for every man, they would never find each other. Go out and find someone else.” It was a flashing insight …. –Ben Stein

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up. –Rex Stout

Whenever you can, count. –Francis Galton

The favourite object of my life is the collecting of useful information. –Sir John Sinclair (who revolutionized farming in Scotland in the 18^th Century by compiling his famous Statistical Account of Scotland—a detailed survey of every farm and croft in the land. It took seven years, from 1790 to 1797, to complete and came in a bound volume, as valuable and comprehensive a work as England’s Domesday Book.

Numbers are kind of like a bikini—they show a lot, but not everything. –Marty Turco

Anything that can be measured can be improved. –Steve Bennett

Stubborness

I’m as stubborn as one of those garbage bags that time will not decay. –Leonard Cohen

It was impossible, so it took a little longer to accomplish. –Wally Byam

In Greek mythology, Icarus plunged into the sea when he flew too close to the sun. It’s supposed to be a lesson in the sin of hubris. I think the bastard just gave up too soon. –Garth Drabinsky

It’s an impossible situation, but it has possibilities. –Samuel Goldwyn

I can’t go on, I’ll go on. –Samuel Beckett

In the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof. –John Kenneth Galbraith

Stupidity

The word “dumb” is spelled with a silent “b.” I don’t think that’s fair to dumb people. –Brett Leake

Dennis Miller, invited to criticize some famous person’s stupid response to a past tragedy, said he applied a 48 hour grace period after a tragedy and didn’t hold anyone to the things they’d said. People get rattled and say things that are extreme. –Peggy Noonan

Success

Success is never final. --Winston Churchill

I'll tell you what's like to be Number One. I compare it to climbing Mt. Everest. It's very difficult. Lives are lost along the way. You struggle and struggle and finally you get up
there. And guess what there is once you get up there? Snow and ice. –David Merrick

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone. –Bill Cosby

[R]isk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probablility. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance. --Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The central maxim of submarining is “Keep the number of surfacings equal to the number of dives.”

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. –Winston Churchill

Confidence doesn’t come from winning. Winning comes from confidence. And that confidence comes from hard work. –Tom Callahan (writing of Vijay Singh)

If misery loves company, then triumph demands an audience. –Brian Moore

[upon winning the Nobel Prize] The child in me is delighted. The adult in me is skeptical. --Saul Bellow

Men can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long. –George Bernard Shaw

The best single piece of advice from Peter Drucker: Stop thinking about what you can achieve; think about what you can contribute (to your company, your customers, your marriage, your community). –Rich Karlgaard

There’s a common viewpoint, frequently stated, that if you want something enough, and work at it hard enough, you will get it. News flash: This is a lie, propagated by successful people who don’t want to admit that their success is more to do with luck and circumstance. –The Golf Guru, Golf Digest

I didn’t know I would succeed, but I did know I had a fear of failure. –Gordon Parks

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. –John Maynard Keynes

Business success is mostly about waiting for something lucky to happen and then taking credit. –Scott Adams

He thought of himself as a successful man, even though he’d never been a success at anything. –Sherwood Anderson, “Winesburg, Ohio”

There’s an old Chinese proverb: The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you succeed. –Bob Parsons

The most successful people are those who are good at plan B. –James Yorke

Suffering

I can understand the world as the result of muddle and accident, but if it is the result of a plan, it has to be the plan of a fiend. –Bertrand Russell

Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair and all the terrible things that happen to us happen because we really deserve them? --J. M. Straczynski

God is subtle, but he is not malicious. –Albert Einstein

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. --Alfred North Whitehead

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? --Woody Allen

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments. –Joseph Addison

It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made. –Franz Kafka

Suicide

Don’t commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later. –Art Buchwald

Summer

If summer falls on a weekend, let’s have a picnic.

Henry James probably had it right when he said that the two most beautiful words in the English language are “summer afternoon.” --Phillip Hamburger

(reverse SAD, summer depression) Summer weddings, holidays, visitors staying, summer clothes, school sports, picnics—all I want is less light, a little comforting cold weather and to stay indoors, pretending it’s winter. Maybe others will not appreciate that some of us really do like to keep the overcoat on in the house, that salads lack passion, that cold has its comforts, that morning rain is bliss. Afraid of sunlight, scared of blue skies, dreading long evenings; but once the clock goes back, the fear begins to ebb and darkness brings such relief. –Rev. Fr. A. J. Butler

Tall People

The superior confidence which people repose in the tall man is well merited. Being tall, he is more visible than other men and being more visible, he is much more closely watched. In consequence, his behavior is far better than that of smaller men. –John Kenneth Galbraith (6’8”)

Tattoos

Tattoos are a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling. –Jimmy Buffett

Taxes

Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is quite as satisfying as an income tax refund. –F. J. Raymond

Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind the tree. –Earl Long

Property taxes resemble a structure designed by a mad architect, erected on a shaky foundation by an incompetent builder, and made worse by the well-intentioned repair work of hordes of amateur tinkerers. –Frederick C. Stocker

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing. –Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance to Louis XIV

To state the provisions of the Alice Tax simply, which is the only way Alice allows them to be stated, it calls for this: after a certain level of income, the government would simply take everything. When Alice says confiscatory, she means confiscatory. –Calvin Trillin

If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough. –Milton Friedman

If 10% is Good Enough for Jesus, It Oughta be Enough for Uncle Sam. –a Ray Stevens song title

Teachers

It is said sometimes that the great teachers and mentors, the rabbis and gurus, achieve their ends by inducting the disciple into a kind of secret circle of knowledge and belief, make of their charisma a kind of gift. The more I think about it, though, the more I suspect that the best teachers—and, for that matter, the truly long-term winning coaches, the Walshes and Woodens and Weavers—do something else. They don’t mystify the work and offer themselves as a model of rabbinical authority, a practice that nearly always lapses into a history of acolytes and excommunications. The real teachers and coaches may offer a charismatic model—they probably have to—but then they insist that all the magic they have to offer is a commitment to repetition and perseverance. The great oracles may enthrall, but the really great teachers demystify. They make particle physics into a series of diagrams that anyone can follow, football into a series of steps that anyone can master, and art into a series of slides that anyone can see. A guru gives us himself and then his system; a teacher gives us his subject, and then ourselves. –Adam Gopnik

One night Dr. Richard Coop, the great sport psychologist, came to hear me speak, and when I got done I asked him how I did. He told me that I needed first to remember that the audience hears only 10 percent of what you say. So from that point on I’ve always made sure that I repeat my main points at least 10 times to guarantee that my students get 100 percent of what I have to say. –Hank Haney

Good teachers make teaching look easy. Bad ones approach it like they’re haphazardly dissecting a cat. They address every movement, and by the time they’re done, they’ve taken apart the entire cat. There’s blood and guts everywhere, but where is the cat? --Jackie Burke, Jr.

Dad [Claude Harmon] didn’t believe in complicating the uncomplicated. He couild always find the one thing in a swing that would correct 10 problems, not 10 things the student needed to do to correct one problem. Dad believed that his job as an instructor was to teach, and the student’s job was to learn. If you wanted head nodding and hand licking, you should buy a dog. –Butch Harmon

Technology

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. –Melvin Kranzberg

I long for time. Technology doesn’t give time. It takes time away. So, technologically, I’m not a Luddite, but from a lifestyle standpoint I would like to turn the clock back—to a past that never existed, of course. –Andy Grove

(when Samuel Morse invented the telegraph) Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. –Henry David Thoreau

Bill Gates says that in technology, things that are supposed to happen in less than five years usually take longer than expected, while things that are supposed to happen in more than 10 years usually come sooner than expected. –Michael Kinsley

(on the cost of technology) I have a rule: I don’t want to be flabbergasted more than three times by the same thing. –Dr. Albert Carnesale

(cargo cults) In the eighteenth century, Europeans first appeared in [the South Pacific], bringing all sorts of wondrous cargo with them in awesome great sailing ships—telescopes, cannons, felt hats, pocketknives, metal cookpots, you name it—and astounding the natives. When the Europeans sailed away, as they periodically did for long periods of time, the islanders would build effigies of the ships out of whatever plant materials they had at hand in an attempt to lure back the great ships and all the fabulous stuff they had brought with them. This behavior was seen again after World War II. The Pacific campaign had drawn huge numbers of men and materials to the South Sea Islands, often in airplanes. When the war ended, the bereft islanders placed rattan effigies of B-28s on mountaintops, hoping to lure back the airplanes and all the wonders they’d brought. The Islanders would lay out pretend runways, light fires along the sides, make a wooden hut for a man to sit in with wooden headphones on and palm fronds sticking out like antennas, and they’d wait for the airplanes to land. “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land,” said physicist Richard Feynman. –James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (2005)

Life was simple before WWII, after that we had systems. –Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

The Eagle eventually shipped, and when it did, the people who toiled in the basement of Data General looked up and realized they needed something to fill in the void. An engineer’s essential desire, after all, is to design and build a machine and see it through to completion, but completion itself is therefore not the ultimate reward. In the Eagle days, West called this paradox “pinball.” In pinball, he reasoned, the prize for winning is getting to play again.

Venture capitalists make lemmings look like rugged individualists. –Mr. Radcliffe

Arthur C. Clarke once said that we underestimate the effect of technology in the long term, but overestimate it in the short term.

Rockets are systems that almost don’t work.

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. –Freeman Dyson

Look, the world is a rather dumb place. There’s nothing special about it. It’s accidental. The world was terrible before people came along and changed it. So we don’t have much to lose by technology. The future of technology is about shifting to what people like to do, and that’s entertainment. Eventually, robots will make everything. The trend is over time. When Henry Ford was around, a large percentage of the population was involved in manufacturing. Now it’s much smaller. I’m telling you: all the money and the energy in this country will eventually be devoted to doing things with your mind and your time. –Marvin Minsky

(why PARC didn’t benefit from the desktop interface) I call it the Silicon Paradox. The only companies that can afford to do research are those with a huge share of a multi-billion-dollar market—A.T.&T., I.B.M., Xerox, DuPont. But the paradox is that the very circumstances that let you do research keep you from taking advantage of it. Meaning that if you already have a big, profitable business it probably makes more sense to focus on feeding that bulldog instead of going into the new businesses your research points to.” --Mr. Liddle

[T]echnology serves merely as a starting point in long distance business relationships. To do the hard stuff—closing deals, putting out fires, brainstorming, securing financing, kicking butt—you have to materialize on the spot. So the Net actually has put more people in the air, a phenomenon that might be called Saffo’s Law: If you talk to someone electronically, it will inevitably lead to a face-to-face meeting. Saffo’s Corollary: If you hate flying, kill your computer. –Paul Saffo

(fighting piracy) When you build a better mousetrap, what you often get is better-educated mice. –David Leibowitz

Technology is impossible to predict, but stupidity is a known constant. –Scott Adams

We may say that we’re more technologically able that earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it’s potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we’re not only more technologically able; we’re more technologically able destructively as well. I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen. I guess—thought I won’t be around to see it—I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed. –David Rind (2005)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. –Arthur C. Clarke

Mark Twain once sent a dozen friends a telegram saying, “FLEE AT ONCE—ALL IS DISCOVERED”, and they all left town immediately. And the moral of this story? It’s that nobody sends telegrams anymore and Mark Twain would today have had to text them instead, saying, “Fl once. All Dscvrd”, to which his friends would have immediately responded by saying: “What?” --Joe Joseph

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible. –Frank Moore Colby

They were talking about this tiny instrument that tells you exactly where you are anywhere on earth, longitude and latitude, within a couple of meters. It’s called a Global Positioning System. Apparently, there are these satellites in the sky that figure out all the math and then tell you where you are. I don’t know how this would help a person, exactly: I already know where I am, and I’m not in Hawaii. –Marci Vogel

Teenagers

Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart’s getting crushed or exalted, even when you’re absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come those moments when you’re aware that what’s happening is not the real story. Unless you die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You’re miserable and ashamed if you don’t believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you’re stupid if you do. … But, when does the real story start? At forty-three, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I’ve become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who’s still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink Martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can’t belong, I sneak cigarettes on the roof, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I’m never going to die.

The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die. … --Jonathan Franzen

I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem like slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. A teenager may work at being popular every waking hours, 365 days a year. –Paul Graham

I tried to obliterate my teen-age years in movie theatres because my teen-age years both embarrassed and saddened me. Between double features of French films, between putting down one book and picking up the next, I’d glance at my wristwatch to see if I was in my twenties yet. –Jonathan Lethem

Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today? --“Kids,” Bye Bye Birdie, Lee Adams

We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana seat bikes and mini-bikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. “We will never be that way,” we said, “we will never say those things.” --Jill McCorkle

Raising teenagers is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. –Leo McCarron

In a teenage brain, impulse control is still under construction. The job of the parent is to act as the surrogate prefrontal cortex. –David Walsh

Teeth

The mouth is the death of the teeth. It’s not a safe haven your palate offers them, but a torture chamber, a battlefield, a hellhole, a death trap. Your teeth are continuously besieged by the rabble that cohabit with plaque. A teeming metropolis, that’s what your mouth is, full of slums and alleyways becoming more decrepit by the minute. Like befuddled pub-crawlers at the foot of old cathedrals, streptococci urinate against the crowns of your teeth, with a corrosive acid that no cement can withstand. Large cavities develop so quickly that before long the revelers fit into them perfectly. Every day chemical warfare with toothpaste claims countless victims among the slum dwellers, … , but in no time unbridled procreation restores the metropolis to third-world proportions. Tooth after tooth goes to seed, molar after molar succumbs to the jostling of microbial orgies, until only a single molar rises up out of the battlefield. …

The best thing for a tooth is if its mouth dies young. Free of sugar loving streptococci, teeth last much longer in a corpse than in a live body. Long after the tongue has been eaten away and the uvula has rotted, your teeth will still rattle around, alive and well, at the bottom of the coffin. –Midas Dekkers

Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond. --Cervantes

Television

So the remote control would combine the American male’s two greatest passions: firearms and driving around aimlessly without ever asking for directions. For what is channel surfing but the blind hope that you will, without consulting a guide, somehow stumble upon your destination? --Steve Rushin

For the first time, the barnyard epithet of Nixon White House fame would be heard on a network show. In the “Philly” episode, a scrappy defense attorney who has been put in jail for a few hours is told by a fellow-prisoner that one of her clients killed a man. “Bullshit!” she says. “Bullshit?” the prisoner replies. “I saw it happen.” Whereupon the network would cut to a commercial and boils would break out on man and beast; and, after the boils, there would be thunder and hail, and after the hail, swarms of locusts.

That was the plan, anyway.

I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air … and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. –Newton Minnow, 1961

There are three rules for creating a hit television show. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

The real challenge is to have something to say. Do you ever find yourself saying, “the problem with television is that it needs four hundred and twenty-two more horizontal scanning lines?” No. The problem with TV has to do with story. Most stories really suck. People talk about interactive storytelling. Fine. But the reason you pay Steven Spielberg ten million dollars is that he’s better at telling stories than you are. You want him to tell you stories for the same reason you don’t go out and buy a vise grip and do do-it-yourself bypass surgery. –Bran Ferren

TV is a crapshoot masquerading as a business masquerading as an art form.

James Kaplan, puzzling in a recent New York over why his generation is less adulterous than his parents’, came to the arresting conclusion that, raised on television and able to rent videos at will, he and his peers are so fully entertained that it is just too much effort to get to know their neighbors well enough to sleep with them.

In a J.F.K., Jr., George interview of Billy Graham, John asked what Dr. Graham would do differently, if he could do it all over. Graham replied, “I’d watch less tv.”

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. –Rod Serling

When it comes to mass media, it’s useless to ask people what they want until they have it. –Chuck Klosterman

Do the show you want to do because in the end, they're going to cancel you anyway. –Writer and producer Ed Weinberger

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too. –Peter De Vries

Tennessee

I just got back for Gatlinburg, where the town motto should be, “If you think this is tacky, wait ‘till you get to Pigeon Forge.”

How many Tennesseeans does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to change the light bulb and one to talk about how good that old light bulb was.

Terrorism

Terrorism is an autoimmune disease; its purpose is to cause harm by provoking an overreaction. –Adam Gopnik

When the terrorists arrived, they arrived unexpectedly--as expected--… --Tim Nolan, "The Lost Work"

Yet another “third highest ranking al-Qaida leader” has been killed, this time by a rocket attack from an unmanned drone. There are a lot of jobs that I wouldn’t want, and “third highest ranking al-Qaida leader” is right at the top. But I can tell you for sure that if I ever got that job, the first thing I’d do is narc out one of the top two guys so I could move up a notch. Apparently one of the perks of being in the top two is having a really, really good hiding place. The number 3 through 10 leadership guys are pretty much scurrying between mud huts and looking at the sky a lot. –Scott Adams

It is a fact that our brain tends to go for superficial clues when it comes to risk and probability, these clues being largely determined by what emotions they elicit or the ease with which they come to mind. In addition to such problems with the perception of risk, it is also a scientific fact, and a shocking one, that both risk detection and risk avoidance are not mediated in the “thinking” part of the brain but largely in the emotional one (the “risk as feelings” theory). The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one’s actions by fitting some logic to them. --Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Radical fundamentalism is like cancer. It can strike anyplace, anytime, and you can’t predict it, and, by the time you discover it, it has usually spread too far to be contained. –Dr. Shukri Ghanem, former Libyan Prime Minister

[Robespierre represents] the ascent of the mass-murdering nerd—a man who, having read a book, resolves to kill all the people who don’t like it as much as he does. There is a case to be made that the real singularity of the Terror [the massacre of aristocrats and clerics in Paris in September, 1792] was the first appearance on the stage of history of this particular psychological type: not the tight-lipped inquisitor, alight with religious rage, but the small, fastidious intellectual, the man with an idea, the prototype of Lenin listening to his Beethoven as the Cheka begins its purges. In normal times, such men become college professors, or book reviewers or bloggers. It takes special historical circumstances for them to become killers: the removal of a ruling class without its replacement by a credible new one. In the confusion, their ethereal certainties look like the only solid thing to build on. –Adam Gopnik

Terrorism is a technology problem disguised as a political problem. –Scott Adams

It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Admiral Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an alien term, like Fatherland or Deutschland or Tomorrowland. Irving Berlin didn't write "God Bless Our Homeland." You never heard John Wayne say, "Men, we're going over that hill and we're going to kick those krauts out of there. And we're going to raise the flag of the homeland."
"Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland - ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old U.S.A. –Garrison Keillor

You know who I feel bad for? Arab-Americans who truly want to get into crop-dusting. –Brian Regan

[responding to those who think civil liberties should be restricted in the War on Terror] We could easily trim the cumbersome, nearly 500-word document down to a more manageable couple of dozen words: “…The right of the people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers and effects … shall … be ... delegated to the United States.” Much simpler. Much easier. Now back to Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. –Bob Barr (2007)

Texas

If you want to see Atlanta, go to Dallas—if you want to see Texas, come to Fort Worth. –Dan Jenkins

It’s a relatively young place and nobody here inherited any money. It’s in their blood to gamble, whether it’s guessing where an oil well is or planting cotton or playing golf. In Texas, it’s not a question of gambling, it’s a question of what time are we gambling. –Jack Burke, Jr.

One riot, one Ranger. –motto of the Texas Rangers.

I am aboard a cruise ship gliding slowly between snow-capped mountains that remind me of the art my parents hung on our living room wall back in Minnesota in the Fifties. It was a large translucent picture of snow-capped mountains, lit by an electric bulb behind it, and when guests came we made sure to turn it on. We were all quite proud of it, and I guess it was considered inspirational, in the sense of "How can you look at this and say there is no God?" It occupied a place of prominence over the couch. Of course, to base one's faith on beautiful scenery is to leave oneself open to grave doubt if you should see Texas. Texas would make any man an atheist, unless he understood that God means to challenge us. –Garrison Keillor

To buy a doll for a boy from Texas you might as well just send him to New York and be done with it. –Jay Johnson

[women’s fashion in Texas] If you can walk in your shoes, the heel is not high enough. –Patricia Marx

Theater

The question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is: Don't we all
anyway? Might as well get paid for it. –Richard Sheridan

I guess it hadn't occurred to me that to be a playwright you had to write plays--I thought you could be a playwright and sulk. --Terrence McNally

Time

Once you reach a certain age, every 15 minutes is breakfast.

Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. –graffiti in the men’s room at McCabe’s in Santa Monica; also attributed to Albert Einstein

Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time. –Stephen Swid

“Three to five years” has become a fixed entry on the psychological timeline, the progression from “just a second” to “two minutes” to “next week” and so on. It’s what you might call a cognitive reference point, a shorthand expression representing a perception of time rather than a literal quantification of it. The progression is logarithmic, because we recognize fewer distinctions—three to five years, a decade, a generation, a lifetime—as time extends beyond the present. –Ben McGrath

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. –Steven Wright

The social psychologist Robert Levine, who has devoted decades to studying people’s ideas about time, suggests that cultures can be divided into those which live on “event time,” where events are allowed to dictate people’s schedules, and those which live on “clock time,” where people’s schedules dictate events. Unsurprisingly, countries that live on clock time are more successful economically—if perhaps less fun at night—than those which do not. –James Surowiecki

Time is a kindly god. –Sophocles

I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time. –Marilyn Monroe

Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas. –Groucho Marx

Time is finite, and as any serious endeavor is going to require a great deal of effort and application, you really ought to knuckle down now and do some work. –Michael Berkeley

For time is time, and runs away. –T.S. Eliot

I am convinced that we are not made for clear-cut, well-delineated schedules. We are made to live like firemen, with downtime for lounging and meditating between calls, under the protection of protective uncertainty. … As I am writing these lines I am on a slow train in the Alps, comfortably shielded from traveling businesspersons. People around me are either students or retired persons, or those who do not have “important appointments,” hence are not afraid of what they call wasted time. To go from Munich to Milan, I picked the seven-and-a-half hour train instead of the plane, which no self-respecting businessperson would do on a weekday, and am enjoying an air unpolluted by persons squeezed by life. … [Y]ou can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave. –Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

Geological time is not money. –Mark Twain

Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn. --Delmore Schwartz

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. –Hector Berlioz

You can't live in the present any more than you can live in the border between Kent and Sussex. –Michael Frayn

Trademarks

I still recall with affection the graduate of five years ago who reduced Sassoon v. Lindsay, Bendix & Co. to one sentence worthy of Macaulay: “A nation which is proud to insist that clothes do not make the man clings nevertheless to the belief that it is the label which makes the liquor.” --William L. Prosser

Traditions

Tradition has been defined by some critics as “allowing dead men to vote.” …, I have come to see that the dead from Guadalcanal and every other naval action in history earned and deserve a vote. Honoring our traditions is not about looking back at the wake—it is about not forgetting. –John Hagan

Translations

Translation is like a mistress. If she is beautiful, she is not faithful. If she is faithful, she is not beautiful. –old French saying

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change. –Miguel de Unamuno

Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light, that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we ma ylook into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water. –Miles Smith, Preface to the King James Version, 1611

Travel

If you look like your passport photo, you’re too ill to travel. –Will Kommen

Most of Hugh’s and my travel arguments have to do with pace. I’m a fast walker, but he has longer legs, and likes to maintain a good twenty-foot lead. To the casual observer, he would appear to be running from me, darting around corners, intentionally trying to lose himself. When asked about my latest vacation, the answer is always the same. In Bangkok, in Ljubljana, in Budapest, and Bonn: What did I see? Hugh’s back, just briefly, as he disappeared into a crowd. … The only [travel] book I’ll ever need is “Where’s Waldo?” All my energy goes into tracking Hugh, and as result I don’t get to enjoy anything. –David Sedaris

The very rich seem to move around too much, for reasons of both business and pleasure. ... Travel is exhausting. Travel can also be dangerous. The rich should remember that nobody every risked his neck by staying in one place. If you're rich enough, let them come to you. --Paul Johnson

I have traveled widely in Concord. –Henry David Thoreau

Buy the things your gut tells you to because you won’t regret buying it, but you will regret not buying it. … Be prepared to spend more money than you planned. The world is designed to separate you from your money, and there are always surprises. –Janet Eastman

Sometimes the low road can take you places that the high road can’t. –Jake Pearson, played by Willie Nelson on a classic episode of Miami Vice

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost. –J. R. R. Tolkien

Truth

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. –Gloria Steinem

The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it, but there it is. –Winston Churchill

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and to tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and live with the truth. That’s what we’ll do. –Richard M. Nixon

All great truths begin as blasphemies. –George Bernard Shaw

[Pham Xuan] An was the Quiet Vietnamese, the representative figure who was at once a lifelong revolutionary and an ardent admirer of the United States. He says he never lied to anyone, that he gave the same political analyses to Time that he gave to Ho Chi Minh. He was a divided man of utter integrity, someone who lived a lie and told the truth. –Thomas A. Bass

Always be aggressive with the truth. –Walter J. Karabian

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. –Sir Francis Bacon

Truth May Be Blamed, but Cannot Be Shamed --embroidered sampler

Put your witnesses’ task into perspective. Tell them that if you boil it all down, testifying is about only one thing: answering questions in a way that satisfies jurors that the witnesses are telling the truth. That is different from simply telling the truth—which, by itself, is insufficient in a trial. A witness can be honest, but a talented cross-examiner can still make him look like a liar. Or a witness may be honest but unconvincing. To be effective, the witnesses must accept that there is more than one way to tell the truth—and that the two of you will find the most credible way to tell it. –David Berg

(from a law school application) The truth dawned on me like the worst hangover of all time.

Say what you will about Charles Barkley—when he tells you he’s going to do something, he’ll either do it, or he won’t do it. –Karl Malone

I will be as harsh as truth. –William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator (1831-1865)

Truth springs from arguments among friends. –David Hume

Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won’t let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. –Jim Holt

Truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions. –Nietzsche

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied. –Claud Cockburn

It’s difficult hanging on to the truth while admitting error. –Ezra Pound

If we have free speech truth will look after itself. –Milton

Truth is not a valid defense when trying to correct Wikipedia. –Eric Newton, 2007