Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

Plaster thick, some will stick.

Proverb

There is no comfort in the growth zone, but there is no growth in the comfort zone.

BionicSix

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

W. Somerset Maugham

You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.

Christopher Hitchens

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The world's a better place since I chose music.

Henry Rollins

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

Booker T. Washington

Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.

Swami Vivekananda

In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.

Phil Ochs

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Helen Keller

We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.

Henry Fielding