A man with a surplus can control circumstances, but a man without a surplus is controlled by them, and often has no opportunity to exercise judgment.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Noam Chomsky

Most centrist Democrats... try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy.

Tom Hayden

Now that I'm a client, I understand what a jerk I was.

Jay Chiat

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived

Oscar Wilde

Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language -- language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only.Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even attack the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people have such a strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as much as or more than is good for them: there is no need of encouraging reason. With unreason the case is different. She is the natural complement of reason, without whose existence reason itself were non- existent.If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason, surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must be also? Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the interests of reason herself. The Professors of Unreason deny that they undervalue reason: none can be more convinced than they are, that if the double currency cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human reason, the double currency should cease forthwith; but they say that it must be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive that admirable faculty of the one-half of its own existence. Unreason is a part of reason; it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/butler.html

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (first pu

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.

Laura Miller

The first and most difficult obstruction to the fulfillment of the law of God is that fact that our society's existing laws are completely opposed to this law.

Leo Tolstoy

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Cynthia Ozick

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

Milton Friedman

Beauty is now defined by your bones sticking out of your decolletage. For that to be the standard is really perilous for women.

Alanis Morissette

The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.

Paul Davies

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Johann von Goethe