1953 Quotes

“My idea of Heaven has nothing to do with fluffy clouds or angels. In my Heaven there's butter pecan ice cream and swimming pools and baseball games. The Brooklyn Dodgers always win, and I have the best seat in the house, right behind the Dodger's dugout. That's the only advantage that I can see about being dead: You get the best seat in the house.”
― Jennifer Holm, Penny from Heaven

“Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.'

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down every town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“It is not from any desire to be contentious that we dissent with those who claim that “all of Masonry is in the Ritual.” We are thoroughly conversant with all the arguments advanced by that school of Masonic thought. But if they are correct, if it be true that “ALL OF MASONRY IS IN THE RITUAL,” what has Masonry to offer the initiate? In fact, why does it exist? To teach a few moral lessons which would seem to be more within the province of the Church, and which in actual practice are there given greater emphasis and, quite frankly, are better taught? To perpetuate an absurd allegory (if it have no meaning beyond the ritualistic explanation) which in itself contradicts the account found in the same Bible which Ritual proclaims to be the “Great Light of Freemasonry”?”
― George H. Steinmetz, The Lost Word Its Hidden Meaning: A Correlation of the Allegory and Symbolism of the Bible with That of Freemasonry and an Exposition of the Secret Doctrine

“The famous split window
Splits had the KDF dash until 1953, which had two glove compartments. Note rear “w” bonnet and small round taillights. There were no indicators like today’s cars – just pop-up indicators that work with an electric servo, called ‘trafficators’ or ‘semaphores’. 6v electrics. Small, flat front windscreen.”
― Christina Engela, Bugspray

“While Milke gingerly carried the packet of explosive across the lake, Paskell stood by the port watching. Milke surveyed the landscape with fine calculation, setting down the packet, moving it a few yards to the right, another few yards toward the defile. Finally satisfied, he looked back to Paskell for approval. Paskell signaled casually, and his hand fell against the detonation switch. He looked out toward Milke, hastily jumped into his [pressure] suit, let himself through the port, ran across the lake.
Milke asked, "What's the trouble?"
Paskell said, "That remote detonator doesn't work. I'd better take a look at it."
Milke stared at him truculently. "How do you know it doesn't work?"
Paskell made a vague gesture, knelt beside the packet, unfolded the wrapping.
"You couldn't have just sensed it," Milke insisted.
"Well, as a matter of fact, my hand accidentally hit the switch, and it didn't go off—so I though I'd better run out and see what was wrong."
Milke seemed to sink in his suit. For a moment there was silence. "Ah," said Paskell. "Nothing very serious; I neglected to clip down the battery leads . . . .now it's ready to go—"
"I'm going back to the ship," said Milke thickly.”
― Jack Vance, The Augmented Agent and Other Stories

“Mention 'God' before one hundred persons and one hundred gods that instant are created.”
― George H. Steinmetz, The Lost Word Its Hidden Meaning: A Correlation of the Allegory and Symbolism of the Bible with That of Freemasonry and an Exposition of the Secret Doctrine

“It should be said that all these years, in all the Special Camps, orthodox Soviet citizens, without even consulting each other, unanimously condemned the massacre of the stoolies, or any attempt by prisoners to fight for their rights. We need not put this down to sordid motives (though quite a few of the orthodox were compromised by their work for the godfather) since we can fully explain it by their theoretical views. They accepted all forms of repression and extermination, even wholesale, provided they came from above—as a manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even impulsive and uncoordinated actions of the same kind but from below were regarded as banditry, and what is more, in its "Banderist" form (among the loyalists you would never get one to admit the right of the Ukraine to secede, because to do so was bourgeois nationalism). The refusal of the katorzhane to be slave laborers, their indignation about window bars and shootings, depressed and frightened the docile camp Communists.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“If the present situation should continue much longer, the very word 'socialism' will turn into a curse, as did the slogan of 'equality' for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins.
—letter to Lenin, March 1920”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Russian Anarchists

“All right. Let him ask me, and I will be glad to answer. And I am not a dupe, or a dope, or a moe, or a schmoe, and everything I did - I was absolutely conscious of what I was doing, and I am not ashamed of everything I said in public or private...”
― Lionel Stander