Entry 201

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

Albert Camus

In sum, just as Justice White ultimately based his conclusion in Furman on his extensive exposure to countless cases for which death is the authorized penalty, I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”
Justice John Paul Stevens in his concurrence in Baze et al. v. Rees on 16 April 2008

When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery. If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue.
Justice Thurgood Marshall

You believe an eye for an eye until you're put in that situation. If they kill those guys, it really doesn't mean much to me. My father is gone.
Michael Jordan on the murderers of his father James

Entry 200

The future starts today, not tomorrow.
Pope John Paul II

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
Pope John Paul II

War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future.
Pope John Paul II

Entry 199

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Henry David Thoreau

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

Marshall McLuhan

Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.

Cree Indian Proverb

There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.

Brooke Medicine Eagle

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

Native American Proverb

Entry 198

The sun was set; the night came on apace,
And falling dews bewet around the place;
The bat takes airy rounds on leathern wings,
And the hoarse owl his woeful dirges sings.
John Gay


Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?
Lewis Carroll

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.
John Berryman


The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
Claude Debussey


Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight.
Francis Bacon

On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
William Shakespeare

Entry 197

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da Vinci

Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.
James Dean

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
Unknown

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

Entry 196

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.
Pope John Paul II

Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore...prove ultimately futile.

Pope John Paul II

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.

Pope John Paul II

Entry 195

I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast.

Ronald Reagan

Faith is an island in the setting sun, but proof is the bottom line for everyone.

Paul Simon

Mango is like a drug. You must have more and more and more of the Mango until there is no Mango left. Not even for Mango!

Mango

Can you know the mighty ocean? Can you lasso a star from the sky? Can you say to a rainbow... 'Hey, stop being a rainbow for a second'? No! such is Mango!

Mango

Entry 194

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Iris Murdoch

The further off from England, the nearer is to France---
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Lewis Carroll

The whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school.
William Shakespeare

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.
Charles H. Spurgeon

Entry 193

Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.
Andre Gide

The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.
George Carlin

The only time my wife and I had a simultaneous orgasm was when the judge signed the divorce papers.

Woody Allen

Entry 192

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams.

Danzae Pace

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
Enrique Jardiel Poncela

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

W. Somerset Maugham

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Francis Bacon

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

Lord Byron

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Ray Bradbury

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E.L. Doctorow

Entry 191

The South American Monito del Monte ... related to the oldest known Australian marsupial.

A marsupial is a plantigrade vertebrate whose specialty is its pocket.
Mark Twain

A primitive, mouse-sized animal that lived 55 million years ago in southern Queensland could have been the ancestor of all of Australia's unique marsupials, including koalas, kangaroos and possums, a new study shows.
Deborah Smith

On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: "An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work".
Charles Darwin

Australian scientists are trying to give kangaroo-style stomachs to cattle and sheep in a bid to cut the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, researchers say.

Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas.
www.theage.com.au/news/climate-watch