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“Don’t say wop,” the President shouted back. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t say wop or kike or any of those words anymore.” He spoke with some asperity, since he lived daily with the dread that someday the secret tapes he kept of all Oval Room transactions would be released to the public. He had long ago vowed that if that day ever came, the tapes would not be full of “(expletive deleted)” or “(characterization deleted).
“Freedom won’t come through Love, and it won’t come through Force. It will come through the Imagination.”
“Don’t whistle while you’re pissing, George, and don’t ask questions when you’re getting blowed.
Why shouldn’t people turn colors? All the trouble in world came from the fact that they usually stayed the same color.
the other students were disturbed. Hagbard began to understand: they are not here to learn, they are here to acquire a piece of paper that would make them eligible for certain jobs….
Ah yes. Dear old school days.
The most unrealistic aspect of Doyle’s stories is Watson’s admiration at these moments. I’m just irritated, because he makes me feel like a chump for not seeing it myself.
Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. San Francisco is proud of him. He lived in the last century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. When the Vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them just by standing in the street with his eyes closed
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The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner
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There came unto the High Chapperal one who had studied in the schools of the Purple Sage and of the Hung Mung Tong and of the Illuminati and of the many other schools; and this one had found no peace yet. Yea: of the Discordians and the teachers of Mummu and of the Nazarene and of the Buddha he had studied; and he had found no peace yet. And he spake to the High Chapperal and said: Give me a sign, that I may believe. And the High Chapperal said unto him: Leave my presence, and seek ye the horizon and the sign shall come unto you, and ye shall seek no more. And the man turned and sought of the
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“Conversion, as you understand it,” the aged figure told him placidly, “consists of pounding one’s own words into a man’s ears until they start coming out of his mouth.
Communication is possible only between equals.
In a second, he remembered: the Mu-Mon-Kan or “Gateless Gate” of Rinzai Zen contained a story about a monk who kept asking a Zen Master, “What is the Buddha?” Each time he asked, he got hit upside the head with the Master’s staff. Finally discouraged, he left and sought enlightenment with another Master, who asked him why he had left the previous teacher. When the poor gawk explained, the second Master gave him the ontological hotfoot: “Go back to your previous Master at once,” he cried, “and apologize for not showing enough appreciation of his grandmotherly kindness!”
Wielding the Stick of Grandmotherly Kindness.
As science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has commented, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Pretty soon, I was in her prose up to my ass and sinking rapidly. Fiction always does that to me: I buy it completely and my critical faculties come into action only after I’m finished.
Me too. Which makes this book pretty trippy.
