Maryscott OConnor > Maryscott's Quotes

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The French have a new president, the British will soon have a new P.M., and we envy them as we endure the endless wait for this small dim man to go back to Texas and resume his life.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery.
The politician will be only too happy to abdicate
in favor of his image, because the image will
be much more powerful than he could ever be.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery.
The politician will be only too happy to abdicate
in favor of his image, because the image will
be much more powerful than he could ever be.”
― Bella Abzug

“When I go around and speak on campuses,
I still don't get young men standing up and saying,
How can I combine career and family?”
― Gertrude Stein

“Television is democracy at its ugliest.”
― Paddy Chayefsky

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”
― James Baldwin

“George W. Bush is the worst President
in all of American history.”
― Helen Thomas

“America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“You can be up to your boobies in
white satin, with gardenias in your hair
and no sugar cane for miles, but you
can still be working on a plantation.”
― Billie Holiday

“Why worry about minor little details like clean air, clean water, safe ports and the safety net when Jesus is going to give the world an "Extreme Makeover: Planet Edition" right after he finishes putting Satan in his place once and for all?”
― Arianna Huffington

“I hope I never get so old I get religious. ”
― Ingmar Bergman, Talking With Ingmar Bergman

“He who allows oppression shares the crime.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“All the problems we face in
the United States today can be traced to
an unenlightened immigration policy
on the part of the American Indian.”
― Pat Paulson

“I'm completely in favor of the
separation of Church and State.
... These two institutions screw us up enough
on their own, so both of them together is
certain death.”
― George Carlin

“Whoever controls the media, the
images, controls the culture.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.”
― Harlan Ellison

“If you're not ready to die for it, take the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.”
― Malcolm X

“Only we, the public, can force our representatives
to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the
Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress.”
― Daniel Ellsberg

“I'm not a paranoid deranged millionaire.
Goddamit, I'm a billionaire.”
― Howard Hughes

“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult...Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
― Erich Fromm

“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated
on being obedient and taking orders is
a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way
reduces to a minimum one's need to think.”
― Adolf Eichmann

“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
― James Madison

“Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry
out a death sentence properly reached.”
― Antonin Scalia

“The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense,
else what shall save us from a second slavery?”
― W.E.B. Du Bois

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

[Adams submitted and signed the Treaty of Tripoli, 1797]”
― John Adams, Thoughts on government applicable to the present state of the American colonies.: Philadelphia, Printed by John Dunlap, M,DCC,LXXXVI.

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
― Frederick Douglass