Entry 190

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Albert Einstein

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

C.S. Lewis

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Tennessee Williams

We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.

Woody Allan

In contrast to people, computers double their ability every 18 months. There therefore exists the possibility that machines will develop intelligence and dominate the world.

Stephen Hawking

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

--- electrons deify one razorblade

into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish

returns on its unself.

                          A world of made

is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this

fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell

of a good universe next door; let's go

e.e. cummings

Entry 189

Strange is our Situation Here Upon Earth.
Albert Einstein

Truth is always strange.
Lord Byron

A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
William Wordsworth

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, do.
Alan Alda

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
Stephen King

Entry 188

We are seeking to incite the Islamic nation to rise up to liberate its land and to conduct jihad (holy war) for the sake of God.
Osama Bin Laden

For the American forces to expect anything from me personally reflects a very narrow perception. Thousands of millions of Muslims are angry. The Americans should expect reactions from the Muslim world that are proportionate to the injustice they inflict.
Osama Bin Laden

And he moved the tyranny and suppression of freedom to his own country, and they called it the Patriot Act under the disguise of fighting terrorism.
Osama Bin Laden


I heard about the bombings the same way everyone else heard about them, from the television or radio. I did not order them but was very glad for what happened to the Americans there.
Osama Bin Laden


We know that the majority of your people want this war to end and opinion polls show the Americans do not want to fight the Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land. Bush tried to ignore the polls that demanded that he end the war in Iraq.
Osama Bin Laden

Entry 187

'Twas Easter-Sunday. The full-blossomed trees Filled all the air with fragrance and with joy.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Christ has not only spoken to us by his life but has also spoken for us by his death.
Soren Kierkegaard

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
Victor Hugo

Entry 186

It's spring fever.... You don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
Mark Twain


Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.
Sara Ban Breathnach

Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus

One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day.
Aristotle

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
Zen Proverb


If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
Anne Bradstreet


Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.
Doug Larson

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
Dorothy Parker

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Entry 185

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

Charles Darwin

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
Winston Churchill

Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.
Adlai E. Stevenson

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
Wendell Berry

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.
Robert Ardrey

All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
Erich Fromm

Entry 184

I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.
Martin Luther

Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again. I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The last great delusion is soon to open before us. Antichrist is to perform his marvelous works in our sight.
So closely will the counterfeit resemble the true that it will be impossible to distinguish between them except by the Holy Scriptures.
Ellen G. White

Entry 183

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Richard Bach

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

Roger Zelazny

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

G. K. Chesterton

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.

Thomas Carlyle

Entry 182

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
Plato

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mohandas Gandhi

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Niels Bohr

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it a dictatorship would be a heck of lot easier.
George W. Bush

Entry 181

Language is memory and metaphor.
Storm Jameson

People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.
Jack Nicholson

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Orson Scott Card

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
M. H. Abrams

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Diane Ackerman

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Entry 180

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

P.J. O'Rourke

To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
EMMA GOLDMAN

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
ANGELA CARTER

Marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

If nobody wants to sell sex, it is a crime to force anyone to do so. But when men or women do want to sell their bodies, they should have that full right without encountering punishment or discrimination. If the client behaves decently, the relationship between the sex buyer and the sex seller must be considered a purely private transaction.
NILS JOHAN RINGDAL

It is a silly question to ask a prostitute why she doews it. These are the highest-paid "professional" women in America.

Gail Sheehy

I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
D. H. Lawrence

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick

Actually, if my business was legitimate, I would deduct a substantial percentage for depreciation of my body.
Xaviera Hollander

Entry 179

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Victor Hugo

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.

Marsha Norma

Dreaming men are haunted men.

Stephen Vincent Benet

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

D.H. Lawrence

Entry 178

When a man uses profanity to support an argument, it indicates that either the man or the argument is weak - probably both.
Horace G. Hutchinson

In TV today, you can say I pricked my finger, but you can't say it the other way around.
George Carlin

Take away the right to say "f**k" and you take away the right to say "f**k the government!".
Lenny Bruce

When you swear, swear seriously and solemnly, but at the same time with a smile, for a smile is the twin sister of seriousness.
Plato

For it comes to pass oft that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent sharply twanged off, gives manhood more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned him.
William Shakespeare

[NOTE: This is not always true. Last week a colleague said to me: "Stick it up your *ss". My esteem for this former gentleman vanished; and I don't even know what "it" was.]

A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?
Jonathan Swift

Take not God’s name in vain; select
A time when it will have effect.
Ambrose Bierce

Entry 177

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as a tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.
Song of Solomon 7:4

Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
Unknown

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
Michelangelo

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
Rabindranath Tagore

Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroack would miss us most.
Joseph Wood Krutch