Entry 218

If I ever had an out-of-body experience, I'd try to come back to a different one.
Tom Wilson


Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.
Calvin and Hobbes

Entry 217

He lives in fame that died in virtue's cause.
William Shakespeare

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau

Fame and riches are fleeting. Stupidity is eternal.
Don Williams

Entry 216

The one thing I never want to see again is a military parade.
Ulysses S. Grant

Entry 215

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
Aldous Huxley

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
Lewis Thomas

The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.
Isaac Asimov

Even minor tampering with nature is apt to bring serious consequences, as did the introduction of a single chemical (DDT). Genetic engineering is tampering on a monumental scale, and nature will surely exact a heavy toll for this trespass.
Eva Novotny

Gene Technology is driven by a mindset that
recognises no moral values, is contrary to scientific
evidence, doesn't work the way it claims and is oblivious of
the grave dangers posed by the technology. It is bad science
working hand in hand with big business corporations under
the banner of free trade and free choice. It will
effectively take control of every aspect of our lives from
food production to reproduction. In the process it may ruin
our food supply, destroy biodiversity and unleash pandemics
of drug and antibiotic resistant infectious diseases.

Mae-Wen Ho

Entry 214

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice Doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
Tony Benn


A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Martin Luther King

Entry 213

Even if you gods, and all the goddesses too, should be looking on, yet would I be glad to sleep with golden Aphrodite.
Homer

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Computers are from hell.

Anonymous

Entry 212

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

Eric Hoffer

The point to remember is that a giant leap into space can be a giant leap toward peace down below.

Willy Ley

This is the goal: To make available for life every place where life is possible. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all life purposeful.

Hermann Oberth

Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go--and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.

Wernher von Braun

I wish outer space guys would conquer Earth and make people their pets, because I’d like to have one of those little beds with my name on it.

Jack Handy

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say “I want to see the manager.”

William S. Burroughs

The eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.... I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

John F. Kennedy

The prospective colonization of space responds, not to the particular problems of the American nation, or of any other nation, but to those of mankind as a whole... In an ideal view, such an undertaking by mankind as a whole would tend to divert it from its present preoccupation with international conflict would tend to channel its energies into the pursuit of a great common purpose.

Louis J. Halle

Every civilization [in the universe] must go through this [a nuclear crisis]. Those that don't make it destroy themselves. Those that do make it end up cavorting all over the universe.

Ted Taylor

The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilization, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.

Arthur C. Clarke

War and space exploration are alternative uses of the assertive, exploratory energies that are so characteristic of human beings. They may also be mutually exclusive because if one occurs on a massive scale, the other probably will not.

Frank White

I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.

Stephen Hawking

Let me end with an explanation of why I believe the move into space to be a human imperative. It seems to me obvious in too many ways to need listing that we cannot much longer depend upon our planet's relatively fragile ecosystem to handle the realities of the human tomorrow. Unless we turn human growth and energy toward the challenges and promises of space, our only other choice may be the awful risk, currently demonstrable, of stumbling into a cycle of fratricide and regression which could end all chances of our evolving further or of even surviving.

Gene Roddenberry

There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years?

Isaac Asimov

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!

Larry Niven

There are three reasons why, quite apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first reason is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second reason is to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third reason is our spiritual need for an open frontier.

Freeman Dyson

A new space race has begun, and most Americans are not even aware of it. This race is not [about] political prestige or military power. This new race involves the whole human species in a contest against time. All of the people of the Earth are in a desperate race against disaster... To save the Earth we must look beyond it, to interplanetary space. To present the collapse of civilization and the end of the world as we know it, we must understand that our planet does not exist in isolation.

Ben Bova

As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking [on the moon and Jupiter]... Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse.

Johannes Kepler

In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle which it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York.

Jules Verne

Entry 211

We are not a warlike nation. We are a soldierly one, which means it does not want a war, but does not fear it. It loves peace but also loves its honor and freedom.
Adolph Hitler

It's going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush Administration's fear mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by HItler and Goebbels on the German people and their Weimar Republic are not at all out of line.
Dave Lindorff

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
Adolph Hitler

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
Joseph Goebbels


You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
George W. Bush

Entry 210

It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.
Mark Twain

Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
William Wordsworth

The difference in golf and government is that in golf you can't improve your lie.
George Deukmejian

Entry 209

Each candidate behaved well in hope of being judged worthy of election. However, this system was disastrous when the city had become corrupt. For then it was not the most virtuous but the most powerful who stood for election, and the weak, even if virtuous, were too frightened to run for office.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Democrats think Republicans are stealing elections. The Republicans think Democrats are stealing elections. And those of us independent of the two old parties know they are both right.

Kevin Zeese

Entry 208

The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
Herman Melville

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that lightning ain't distributed right.
Mark Twain


And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
Luke 10:18

Electricity is really just organized lightning.
George Carlin

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work.
Mark Twain

The dice of Zeus always fall luckily.
Sophocles

Open your mouth and shut your eyes and see what Zeus will send you.
Aristophanes

ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog.
Ambrose Bierce

Entry 207

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up.
Barbara Bush

The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.
Heinrich Heine

Better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall.

David Chambless

Getting married for sex is like buying a 747 for the free peanuts.
Jeff Foxworthy

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
Groucho Marx

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.

-Mae West

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Oscar Wilde

Entry 206

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

Benjamin Disraeli

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.

Bob Edwards


Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.
Woodrow Wilson

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
Henry Louis Mencken

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana

A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.
Georges Pompidou

Entry 205

Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato


Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Charles Simic


Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray


Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T.S. Eliot

Entry 204

Do you think God gets stoned? I think so...look at the platypus.
Robin Williams

Entry 203

The war against terrorism is terrorism.
Woody Harrelson

The war in Iraq has not prevented the growth of terrorism. We are learning now that it has actually enhanced the growth of terrorism.
Alcee Hastings

Entry 202

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
Henry James



We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
Stephen Hawking


Guns don't kill people, people kill people, and monkeys do too (if they have a gun).
Eddie Izzard


Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't.
Lord Raglan