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[FuzzyLush]

“You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.” --- Clive Barker

“The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion.” --- Leon Trotsky

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” ---Oscar Wilde

“In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.” ---Edgar Allan Poe



Buffy, Season Seven "Empty Places"

 Andrew: You sure you don't wanna stop and pick up some burgers or something, you know, road trip food?
Spike: It's not a road trip. It's a covert operation.
Andrew: Right. Right. Gotcha... I—I bet even covert operatives eat curly fries. They're really good.
Spike: Not as good as those onion blossom things.
Andrew: Ooh, I love those.
Spike: Yeah, me, too.
Andrew: It's an onion... and it's a flower. I—I don't understand how such a thing is possible.
Spike: See, the genius of it is, you soak it in ice water for an hour so it holds its shape. Then you deep-fry it root-side up for about 5 minutes.
Andrew: Masterful.
Spike: Yeah. Tell anyone we had this conversation, I'll bite you.
    Andrew: Right.

[Homunculus]

"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.
"I know," I said.
"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.
"I know," I said.

-Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

Paraphrasing this one because I can't find it in any searches:

"Hi ho, hi ho, it's down to Gath we go,
Who'll give to pins to get foreskins?
Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho."

-God Knows, Joseph Heller

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest -
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men -
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

- Julius Caesar, Shakespeare

[wanderarbeiter]

"The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country."
- Milton Friedman- 

"If the Constitution forces the government to allow people to march, speak and write in favor of peace, brotherhood and justice, then it must also allow them to advocate hatred, racism and even genocide."
-Laurence Tribe- 

[Jono]

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt, Kerwan's mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

-James Joyce, Ulysses

[clarkekentyboy]

    After a couple of minutes Crazy Earl says, "Grunts ain't animals.  We just do our job.  We're shot at and missed, shit on and hit.  The gooks are grunts, like us.  They fight, like us.  They got lifer poges running their country and we got lifer poges running ours.  But at least the gooks are grunts, like us.  Not the Viet Cong.  The VC are some dried-up old mamasans with rusty carbines.  The NVA, man, we are tight with the NVA.  We kill each other, no doubt about it, but we're tight.  We're hard."  Crazy Earl tosses an empty beer bottle to the deck and picks up his Red Ryder air rifle.  He fires the air rifle at the bottle and the BB ricochets off the bottle with a faint ping.  "I love the little commie bastards, man.  I really do.  Grunts understand grunts.  These are great days we are living, bros.  We are jolly green giants, walking with the earth with guns.  The people we wasted here today are the finest individuals we will ever know.  When we rotate back to the World we're gonna miss having somebody around who's worth shooting.  There ought to be a government for grunts.  Grunts could fix the world up.  I never met a grunt I didn't like, except Mother."

The Short Timers - Gustav Hasford.

[BiggieSmalls]

"She looked as though she had been poured into her clothes and forgotten to say when"
          - P.G. Wodehouse

"..., because it really pisses the shit out of me."
         - Buzz Bissinger, to Deadspin'sWill Leitch (Around 4:45)

Thank you, Thank you very much. Thank you.
That's the lowest I've ever seen Dick Vitale since the owner of the Detroit Pistons called him in
and told him he should go into broadcasting.
I can't tell you what an honor it is to even be mentioned in the same breath with Arthur Ashe.
This is something I certainly will treasure forever. But, as it was said on the tape, and I also
don't have one of those things going with the cue cards, so I'm going to speak longer than
anybody else has spoken tonight. That's the way it goes. Time is very precious to me. I don't
know how much I have left, and I have some things that I would like to say. Hopefully, at the
end, I'll have something that will be important to other people too.
But, I can't help it. Now, I'm fighting cancer, everybody knows that. People ask me all the
time about how you go through your life and how's your day, and nothing is changed for me.
As Dick said, I'm a very emotional, passionate man. I can't help it. That's being the son of
Rocco and Angelina Valvano. It comes with the territory. We hug, we kiss, we love. And when
people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it's the same thing. To me, there
are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number
one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time
in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be
happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day.
That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something
special.
And so, I can't help I rode on the plane up today with Mike Krzyzewski, my good friend and
a wonderful coach. People don't realize he's ten times a better person than he is a coach, and
we know he's a great coach. He's meant a lot to me in these last five or six months with my
battle. But when I look at Mike, I think, we competed against each other as players. I coached
against him for fifteen years, and I always have to think about what's important in life to me
are these three things. Where you started; where you are; and where you're gonna be. Those
are the three things that I try and do every day. And you know when I think about getting up
and giving a speech, I can't help it I have to remember the first speech I ever gave.
I was coaching at Rutgers University, that was my first job oh, that's wonderful [reaction to applause] and I was the freshman coach. That's when freshmen played on freshman teams.
And I was so fired up about my first job. I see Lou Holtz, Coach Holtz here. What was it like,
the very first job you had, right? The very first time you stood in the locker room to give a pep
talk. That's a special place, the locker room, for a coach to give a talk. So my idol as a coach
was Vince Lombardi, and I read this book called Commitment To Excellence by Vince
Lombardi. And in the book, Lombardi talked about the fist time he spoke before his Green Bay
Packer team in the locker room they were perennial losers. And I'm reading this and
Lombardi said he was thinking should it be a long talk? A short talk? But he wanted it to be
emotional, so it would be brief.
And here's what he did. Normally you get in the locker room, I don't know, twentyfive
minutes, a half hour before the team takes the field; you do your little X's and 0's, and then
you give the great Knute Rockne talk. We all do. Speech number eightfour. You pull them
right out, you get ready, get your squad ready. Well, this is the first one I ever gave. And I
read this thing Lombardi, what he said was he didn't go in. He waited. His team was
wondering: Where is he? Where is this great coach? He's not there. Ten minutes he's
still not there. Three minutes before they could take the field Lombardi comes in, bangs the door
open, and I think you all remember what great presence he had, alright, great presence. He
walked in and he just walked back and forth, like this, just walked, staring at the players. And
he said, "All eyes on me." And I'm reading this in this book. I'm getting this picture of
Lombardi before his first game and he said "Gentlemen, we will be successful this year, if you
can focus on three things, and three things only: Your family, your religion, and the Green
Bay Packers." And he...like that...And they knocked the walls down and the rest was history. I
said, that's beautiful. I'm going to do that. Your family, your religion, and Rutgers basketball.
That's it. I had it. Listen, I'm twentyone years old. The kids I'm coaching are nineteen,
alright? And I'm going to be the greatest coach in the world, the next Lombardi. And...I'm
practicing outside of the locker room and the managers tell me "you got to go in." "Not yet,
not yet"... family, religion, Rutgers Basketball. All eyes on me. I got it, I got it. Then finally he
said, "three minutes," and I said "fine." True story. I go to knock the doors open just like
Lombardi. Boom! They didn't open. I almost broke my arm. I was like...Now I was down, the
players were looking. Help the coach out, help him out. And now I did like Lombardi, I walked
back and forth, and I was going like that with my arm getting the feeling back in it. Finally I
said, "Gentlemen, all eyes on me." These kids wanted to play, they're nineteen. "Let's go," I
said. "Gentlemen, we'll be successful this year if you can focus on three things, and three
things only: Your family, your religion, and the Green Bay Packers," I told them. I did that. I
remember that. I remember...where I came from.
It's so important to know where you are. And I know where I am right now. How do you go
from where you are to where you wanna be? And I think you have to have an enthusiasm for
life. You have to have a dream, a goal. And you have to be willing to work for it.
I talked about my family, my family's so important. People think I have courage. The courage
in my family are my wife Pam, my three daughters, here, Nicole, Jamie, LeeAnn, my mom,
who's right here too. And...that screen is flashing up there thirty seconds like I care about
that screen right now, huh? I got tumors all over my body. I'm worried about some guy in the
back going thirty seconds, huh? You got a lot, hey va fa napoli, buddy. You got a lot.
I just got one last thing, I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments
you have. To spend each day with some laughter and some thought, to get you're emotions
going. To be enthusiastic every day and [as] Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Nothing great could
be accomplished without enthusiasm" to keep your dreams alive in spite of problems
whatever you have. The ability to be able to work hard for your dreams to come true, to
become a reality.
Now, I look at where I am now and I know what I wanna to do. What I would like to be able
to do is to spend whatever time I have left and to give, and maybe some hope to others.
Alright, Arthur Ashe Foundation is a wonderful thing, and AIDS, the amount of money pouring
in for AIDS is not enough, but it is significant. But if I told you it's ten times the amount that
goes in for cancer research. I'll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this
year of cancer. And I'll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease,
and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background. I want to bring it
back on the front table. We need your help. I need your help. We need money for research. It
may not save my life. It may save my children's life. It may save someone you love. And it's
very important.
And ESPN has been so kind to support me in this endeavor and allow me to announce tonight,
that with ESPN's support, which means what? Their money and their dollars and they're
helping me we are starting the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research. And its motto is
"Don't give up, don't ever give up." And that's what I'm going to try to do every minute that I
have left. I will thank God for the day and the moment I have. And if you see me, smile and
maybe give me a hug. That's important to me too. But try if you can to support, whether it's
AIDS or the cancer foundation, so that someone else might survive, might prosper, and might
actually be cured of this dreaded disease. I can't thank ESPN enough for allowing this to
happen. And I'm going to work as hard as I can...for cancer research and hopefully, maybe,
we'll have some cures and some breakthroughs. I'd like to think I'm going to fight my brains
out to be back here again next year for the Arthur Ashe recipient. I want to give it next year!
I know, I gotta go, I gotta go, and I got one last thing and I said it before, and I'm gonna say
it again: Cancer can take away all my physical ability. It cannot touch my mind; it cannot
touch my heart; and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on
forever.
I thank you and God bless you all.

           - Jim Valvano, 1993 ESPY's (video)

[clarkekentyboy]

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?


It's SHITE being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONIZED by wankers. Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We're ruled by effete assholes. It's a SHITE state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and ALL the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference!

Both from Trainspotting.


Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this bird for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish. Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. This shark, swallow you whole. No shakin', no tenderizin', down you go. And we gotta do it quick, that'll bring back your tourists, put all your businesses on a payin' basis. But it's not gonna be pleasant. I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief. I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no mates, there's too many captains on this island. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.


Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte... just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin', so we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know, it was kinda like old squares in the battle like you see in the calendar named "The Battle of Waterloo" and the idea was: shark comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a shark... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand. I know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up, down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon, the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He swung in low and he saw us... he was a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and he come in low and three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and starts to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened... waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

Both from Jaws


 Ya know, I read a lot. Especially about things... about history. I find that shit fascinating. Here's a fact I don't know whether you know or not. Sicilians were spawned by niggers. It's a fact. Yeah. You see, uh, Sicilians have, uh, black blood pumpin' through their hearts. Hey, no, if eh, if eh, if you don't believe me, uh, you can look it up. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, uh, you see, uh, the Moors conquered Sicily. And the Moors are niggers. So you see, way back then, uh, Sicilians were like, uh, wops from Northern Italy. Ah, they all had blonde hair and blue eyes, but, uh, well, then the Moors moved in there, and uh, well, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin' with Sicilian women, huh? That they changed the whole bloodline forever. That's why blonde hair and blue eyes became black hair and dark skin. You know, it's absolutely amazing to me to think that to this day, hundreds of years later, that, uh, that Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. Now this...No, I'm, no, I'm quoting... history. It's written. It's a fact, it's written. Your ancestors are niggers. Uh-huh. Hey. Yeah. And, and your great-great-great-great grandmother fucked a nigger, ho, ho, yeah, and she had a half-nigger kid... now, if that's a fact, tell me, am I lying? 'Cause you, you're part eggplant.


True Romance

Hello, little man. Boy, I sure heard a bunch about you. See, I was a good friend of your dad's. We were in that Hanoi pit of hell together over five years. Hopefully...you'll never have to experience this yourself, but when two men are in a situation like me and your Dad were, for as long as we were, you take on certain responsibilities of the other. If it had been me who had not made it, Major Coolidge would be talkin' right now to my son Jim. But the way it turned out is I'm talkin' to you, Butch. I got somethin' for you.
This watch I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather during the first World War. It was bought in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee. Made by the first company to ever make wrist watches. Up till then people just carried pocket watches. It was bought by private Doughboy Erine Coolidge on the day he set sail for Paris. It was your great-grandfather's war watch and he wore it everyday he was in that war. When he had done his duty, he went home to your great-grandmother, took the watch off, put it an old coffee can, and in that can it stayed 'til your granddad Dane Coolidge was called upon by his country to go overseas and fight the Germans once again. This time they called it World War II. Your great-grandfather gave this watch to your granddad for good luck. Unfortunately, Dane's luck wasn't as good as his old man's. Dane was a Marine and he was killed -- along with the other Marines at the battle of Wake Island. Your granddad was facing death, he knew it. None of those boys had any illusions about ever leavin' that island alive. So three days before the Japanese took the island, your granddad asked a gunner on an Air Force transport name of Winocki, a man he had never met before in his life, to deliver to his infant son, who he'd never seen in the flesh, his gold watch. Three days later, your granddad was dead. But Winocki kept his word. After the war was over, he paid a visit to your grandmother, delivering to your infant father, his Dad's gold watch. This watch.  This watch was on your Daddy's wrist when he was shot down over Hanoi. He was captured, put in a Vietnamese prison camp. He knew if the gooks ever saw the watch it'd be confiscated, taken away. The way your Dad looked at it, that watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any slopes were gonna put their greasy yella hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something. His ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. Then he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you.

Pulp Fiction

[drman321]

I don't think the text of this monologue will fit in just one post so i will just post the link to it

This is John Galt Speaking

[Jono]

The main street was a grim hill, disheveled, and strewn with rubbish. The shops were for the most part concrete and dingy, and because Zaire is an ex-Belgian colony, every other shop is a pharmacie, just like in Belgium and France, except that none of them, as it happened, sold toothpaste, which bewildered me.

Most of the other shops were in fact impossible to identify. When a shop appeared to sell a mixture of ghetto blasters, socks, soap, and chickens, it didn't seem unreasonable to go in and ask if they had any toothpaste or paper stuck away on one of their shelves as well, but they looked at me as if I was completely mad. Couldn't I see that this was a ghetto blaster, socks, soap, and chicken shop?

Eventually, after trailing up and down the street for half a mile in either direction, I found both of them at a tiny street stall which also turned out to sell ballpoint pens, airmail envelopes, and cigarette lighters, and in fact seemed to be so peculiarly attuned to my needs that I was tempted to ask if they had a copy of New Scientist as well.

I then realized that most of the essentials of life were available out on the street. Photocopying, for example. Here and there along the street were rickety trestle tables with big old photocopiers on them, and once or twice I was hailed by a street hustler and asked if I wanted to have something photocopied or sleep with his sister. I returned to the hotel, wrote some notes on the writing paper, which for some reason was pink, and slept as if I were dead.

-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

[MtnBkr1]

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." Ronald Reagan

"The men in Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right. Faith that they fought for all humanity. Faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beach head or the next. It was the deep knowledge, and pray God we have not lost it, that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest." Ronald Reagan

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." Sir Stephen Henry Roberts

I said to my children, 'I'm going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don't ever want you to forget that there are millions of God's children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don't want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be.' Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Stop worrying about me. I joined the parachutists to fight. I intend to fight. If necessary I shall die fighting, but don't worry about this because no war can be won without young men dying. Those things that are precious are saved only by sacrifice." Private David Webster – Easy Co- in a letter to his mother before D-Day

[Raconteur]

Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?

Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?

Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Hunter S. Thompson

[Croooow!]

"Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius!" Slay them all, God will know his own!

Arnold Amuary in 1209,shouting orders to his men as they charged into Beziers to slaughter heretics in Christs name.

[Necromagus]

"I’ve thought before that the most fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is not over issues of individual freedom vs. authority or progress vs. traditional values, but imagination. Conservatives don’t have any. The status quo seems only inevitable and right to them, the natural order of things, and anyone who protests it is an impractical dreamer who should get a job or a malcontent who needs to be medicated. They're incapable of seeing their own historical moment as in any way anomalous or provisional; as Montag's colleagues assure him in Farenheit 451, "Believe me, houses have always been fireproof. Firemen have always burned books." They believe that they deserve their own lives; they can't imagine having been born as someone else. (Empathy, and by extension compassion, is a function of imagination.) They can't imagine what it would be like to be poor, or black, or gay, because, well, they're not, and they suspect that these unfortunate conditions are those people's own faults, a consequence of some moral failing or dereliction. Likewise people living in other cultures with different beliefs and customs; they're simply ignorant, deprived of the advantages of Jesus and Wal-Mart." - Tim Kreider, The Pain

[wophugus]

"For if once a man indulges in a murder, very soon he comes to think nothing of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.  Once begin upon the downward path, you never know where you are to stop.  Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or another that perhaps he thought little of at the time."

From Thomas De Quincey's On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.  You can find On Murder here, that text is from the second paper.

[Somaut]

"It is an empty road to triumph, if you don't sow the seeds of catastrophe along the way"

- Tim Jones (Scarygoround - John Allison)

[plustax]

It turns out that chemical signaling is ubiquitous. In fact, I’ve stopped thinking of air as air; I think of it as a carrier of messages. When I see a meadow filled with insects and other animals browsing on the vegetation, I think of the perfumes that attract pollinators to the flowers as well as the repellent chemicals that plants produce that discourage a butterfly from laying her eggs or a caterpillar from feeding on leaves. These repellent chemicals are a defensive strategy for the plant; the attractive floral scents are a reproductive strategy. Meanwhile, the insects are fighting with each other. The ants are repelled by substances produced by beetles. The beetles produce many of these chemicals because they’ve got a problem: They can’t take to flight right away like a fly does; they have to unfold their wings first. They buy safety during that period with chemical weapons. Another insect, a moth, procures defensive substances from the plants it eats as a caterpillar; later, as an adult, it bestows the chemicals on its own offspring. And these and many other insects use chemicals to attract mates. It’s all chemical!


- Thomas Eisner.

[jryan]

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
- Rudyard Kipling



AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.

[plustax]

Damned human race.

[Shoomi]

William Shakespeare - King Lear telling Cordelia just what he thinks of her

Let it be so; thy truth, then, be thy dower:
For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist, and cease to be;
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reviled,
As thou my sometime daughter.

Also - "Better thou hadst not been born than not t'have pleased me better"

[Fitzgerald]

Let Hercules himself do what he may,   
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.
-Hamlet, V.i