Entry 115

Let me give you the definition of ethics: it is good to maintain life and to further life. It is bad to damage and destroy life. And this ethic, profound and universal, has the significance of a religion. It is religion.
Albert Schweitzer

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.
Buddha

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
Marcus Aurelius

THIS QUOTE IS FOR George W. Bush:

The highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
T.S. Eliot

Entry 114

The quizzical expression of the monkey at the zoo comes from his wondering whether he is his brother's keeper, or his keeper's brother.
Evan Esar

Children, behold the Chimpanzee;
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.
I'm glad we sprang: had we held on,
We might, for aught that I can say,
Be horrid Chimpanzees to-day.
Oliver Herford


While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
Mark Twain

At any rate, modern gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today; they have no yesterday, unless one is able to find faint foreshadowings of it in the dryopithecids.
Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Lucy: the Beginnings of Humankind

Entry 113

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
John Steinbeck

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Anatole France

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

Remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our first great scholars.
John F. Kennedy

To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,
requires brains.
Mary Pettibone Poole

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
Mortimer Adler

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
John Steinbeck

Entry 112

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis


Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
William O. Douglas


Censorship is advertising paid by the government.
Federico Fellini, Italian film director

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
George Orwell

All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.
George Bernard Shaw

Entry 111

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.

Charles Dickens

Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.

Oscar Wilde

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb in a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
Thomas Jefferson

The Christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin: Both are derived from the worship of the Sun. The difference between their origin is, that the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.

Thomas Paine

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Nietzsche

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
Lord Byron

Entry 110

Frivolity is inborn, conceit acquired by education.

Cicero

Great is our admiration of the orator who speaks with fluency and discretion.

Cicero

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared.

Cicero

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

Cicero

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Cicero

Just as the soul fills the body, so God fills the world. Just as the soul bears the body, so God endures the world. Just as the soul sees but is not seen, so God sees but is not seen. Just as the soul feeds the body, so God gives food to the world.

Cicero

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

Cicero

No sane man will dance.

Cicero

Entry 109

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
Montaigne

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.
Montaigne

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
Montaigne

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.
Montaigne

The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things.
Montaigne

The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
Montaigne

Entry 108

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
James Joyce

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
James Joyce

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Gertrude Stein

Entry 107

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Nietzsche


After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's
blunders?
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The "kingdom of Heaven" is a condition of the heart - not something that comes "upon the earth" or "after death."
Friedrich Nietzsche

Entry 106

Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.
John Milton

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth.
John Keats

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

Entry 105

One short sleep past, we wake eternally;
And death shall be no more; death, thou
shall die.
Ben Jonson


Her paps are centres of delight,
Her breasts are orbs of heavenly frame.

Thomas Lodge

Thus we play the fools with the time,
and the spirits of the wise sit in
the clouds and mock us.
Shakespeare

Entry 104

A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.

David Letterman

President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either.

David Letterman

President Bush says he needs a month off to unwind. Unwind? When the hell does this guy wind?

David Letterman

Wherever we've travelled in this great land of ours, we've found that people everywhere are about 90% water.

David Letterman

Entry 103

If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend.
Doug Larson

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."
Barbara Ehrenreich

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill