Category: quotes

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., giving a sermon titled “But if Not” at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia in November, 1967, lifted from Democracy Now! [democracynow.org] via Boing Boing [boingboing.net].

“Americans used to go to the circus to see the bearded woman and be amazed and stupefied. Now we have the blockbuster movie release.”

Richard J. Geib, from Rich Geib’s Wonderblog [rjgeib.com]

Brilliant observation, people still want something to gap at, to laugh at or to see violence done. Bread and circuses. Hollywood is good at spectacle and most of the movies from America—even the brain dead teen flicks are in the top tier of global movies in terms of quality. Many great movies are non-American but they only make up a tiny fraction of the global movie output, most of which makes me want to eat my dirty underwear.

“Calculus is wonderful… Geometry fantastic, you know, quantum mechanics—these are wonderful things but they don’t save marriages and they don’t raise children.

Ian Dunbar, in “Dog friendly dog training from EG 2007 Conference, available as a TED talk here [ted.com]

“The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.”

Robert A. Heinlein

I wish I could describe Singlish as well as solios described Pittsburghese:

That’s Pittsburghese for you, though – this town will stop loving football long before it embraces the hard consonant. A lot of the locals, when they speak… sentences do not emerge. What comes out is a pile of loosely related vowels, punctuated with the occasional grunt and the glimmer of realization in their eyes that they’re not getting through to you. It’s not for a lack of trying – the inhabitants of the region all seem to have evolved some sort of highly specialized section of larynx – a post-larynx, perhaps – a section that belt-sands all of the hard pointy bits of words clean off, leaving only the most basic impression of phonetic intent.

solios, in this post [deadcityradio.org] on Dead City Radio